That's about it actually. Quality has declined. Not that there was any to start with but as a Windows user for about 24 years now it hasn't got any better. This increases friction and therefore drives up cost and removes hair, which I'm getting short of now. I like hair. It keeps my head warm in winter which is rapidly approaching.
As a 50/50 Linux/Windows guy, the friction is horrible on the windows side of things compared to Linux. Typical example of today's friction: Microsoft's download site is shitting a veritable brick every 5 minutes. So in this case, I've got to deploy build host machines via Ansible from Linux onto Windows. So we use Chocolatey which is a poorly conceived and implemented copy of a Linux package manager to bridge that awful gap in windows, because everything else is Linux. Don't even mention Powershell DSC which is a joke. To install the Windows 7.1 SDK, we tell ansible to tell windows to install it. This navigates an http based protocol (WinRM) to talk to the target windows machine, which fires up a CLR VM with powershell in it, which runs a whole stack of crap that fetches a file from microsoft download site, checksums it and runs an exe with some command line parameters. This in turn pukes out a few hundred MSI files on disk and proceeds to install them. An MSI file is a database with some files in it. Each of these fires up a windows service and talks to it via COM and proceeds to tell that to do things in a privileged execution mode. Eventually it dumps about 100,000 files on disk and screws the registry up for a bit. That is if the following conditions are satisfied: a) the person who maintains the chocolatey definition actually cares any more, b) they haven't issued an update which has screwed up WinRM again, c) microsoft haven't reorganised their download site again, d) various random problems caused by the sheer complexity of the above, e) it hasn't been rebooted since an automatic update we didn't ask for and has been turned off, f) if it errors, someone actually bothers to handle it as every single package installer does something different and surprising.
But alas, no, not today. We're greeted with a checksum failure because Microsoft's download site is just chopping off connections left right and center. This is fed back through the stack of the above as the following: "Error installing windows-sdk-7.1" which is returned as successful because every layer has different error handling semantics.
So off our software goes and builds on this fresh stack of poo and throws because it can't find the SDK dependencies.
So after deciphering logs galore, I hit the download site with firefox and the problem is apparent:
4.5 hours elapsed so far. Each attempt takes around 1 hour to complete when it does work. This is money down the pan. Lots of it. I'm quite expensive as is AWS kit that is sitting there doing diddly squat.
Compared to CentOS "yum groupinstall 'development tools'" and wait 2-3 minutes that works every time, thousands of times over, because of mirroring, engineering and sensible design.
And that's where the quality problems are.
The completely offensive bit is they spend so much money on marketing and being loud to try and drown out the house of cards their products exist on top of and people keep buying that because Ballmer has gone and Satya is the second coming so it's the new Microsoft. Nope. Same turd, different glitter.
I think the general end user, even power users aren't subject to the experience of having these sorts of friction problems being amplified many times over as well by having lots of windows infrastructure to look after. The complexity is O(n!)