I think we just had a different set of ideals back then. I feel like maybe we got tired of fighting the same battles. Or maybe Microsoft was being judged more harshly on moral grounds because their software was also widely criticized for being crashy.

I mean, at the tail end of that period even South Park was lampooning the reliability of Windows. A lot of Google’s products work very well and dependably (well, provided they don’t murder the product), which maybe isolates them from that synergistic hate.