To be fair, it had its moments. Windows 95 was a pretty big step forwards and the alternative was OS/2 Warp, which has some nice features but was from IBM, who were still dreaming of replacing the PC with a vertically-integrated home computer again.
Windows 2000 (or XP starting with SP2) was also solid. 7 was alright. None of those had too much bullshit bundled with them.
Everything since Windows 8 has been some flavor of shitty, though.