I left Microsoft just over a year ago. Looking back, three things in particular strike me.

• There are good substitutes for much of the Microsoft software I use. Other Microsoft products, however, I find indispensable. I wrote about this in a series of posts a few months ago.
• Microsoft has missed opportunities that were right in their hands, which I’ll discuss in a future post.
• Microsoft does or has done a lot of things right that they get little credit for.

The last item is the subject of this post and tomorrow’s post. As background, I was there 17 years and rose to a fairly senior leadership position. I managed groups/departments in IT, in product groups, in Legal operations, and in Services (Consulting and Support).

Here are ten things that Microsoft has done right. Some of these are major, industry- or world-changing items. Others are smaller but overlooked contributions that deserve to be recognized. All of it is my opinion; there’s no scientific method in play.

I’ve divided the list into two separate posts because of length.

1. Driving down the cost of computer systems.

In 1986, I bought a new computer, a “386″ so-called desktop that would fit only under my desk. I added a 5 MB (that’s megabyte!) external hard drive, external 1200-baud modem (think slowwwwww!), and a monochrome monitor. It cost me around $3000, which is about $6K in today’s dollars — and I was able to get that price by buying mail-order from a small system builder in the midwest. It would have cost me $4K locally.

Contrast that to my current laptop, bought a year ago for $400, with 2GB memory, a 16GB hard drive, DVD burner built-in. Add $159 for the big HP external monitor I sometimes use with it, plus a few bucks for an external mouse and keyboard, and I have a system incomprehensibly more powerful for less than one-tenth the cost in constant dollars.

20 years ago, every manufacturer was trying to do something different, something to stand out. In addition, there was little computer penetration into mainstream markets, so there was no commodity price pressure to drive costs down.

Windows 3.0 changed everything.

I’ve written before about that day at PC-Expo where every hardware manufacturer wanted something colorful on their monitors and wound up running Windows Solitaire. (I don’t recall if Apple had a booth, but they clearly would have been the one computer equipment maker not running Windows!) From that muggy June day forward, commoditization became the name of the game.

And with commoditization came standardization (see the next two items) and huge downward price pressure.

Would we have $400 laptops without Microsoft? Perhaps… but I don’t see Apple making $400 laptops.

History isn’t about what might have happened, but what did happen. And what did happen was that Microsoft made computing power available to a billion people by forcing standardization. Sure, they made a ton of money doing so, but the value returned to the overall US and world economy is stupendous compared to their take for doing so.

2. Standardization.

I moved to Seattle in 1988 to become Development Manager of Quicksoft, which made the then-#3 word processor PC-Write. The woman in the next office spent virtually all her time writing printer drivers, so that we could print something other than plain text on them. We had an entire room filled with printers, including one monster from IBM it took two strong people to lift. Every one of those printers required a separate driver, with different methods for printing bold text, justifying (right-aligning) margins, and so on.

We must have had 100 different printer drivers, all of which had to be maintained and tested.

And every time a new printer came on the market, the woman next door had to scramble to get a new driver together and make it available to customers.

No more. Now printing in Windows is trivial. You make it work once, and you know that it will print properly no matter what kind of printer the customer has. It’s not just printers, either. Mice and keyboards. Monitors. External drives. Internal hard drives. Standardization is why the PC ecosystem is so rich with choices. I’ve got a Dell desktop with an HP big monitor plus a no-name 17″ monitor, a Microsoft keyboard, a Logitech mouse, a Maxtor external Firewire drive, a who-knows-what DVD writer, an external USB 2.0 portable drive, M-Audio speakers, and so on. Everything just worked when I plugged it in (see below). We take it for granted today, but 20 years ago, it was a dream.

There’s one part of this item Microsoft can’t take credit for. I married the woman in the next office!

3. Universal Plug and Play.

Universal Plug and Play, UPnP or just PnP these days, is the feature that allows you to take pretty much any piece of computer hardware made in the past six years, plug it into your computer, and have the computer recognize it and start using it.

Microsoft was the driving force between what has now become an industry standard, used by Apple, Linux, and other systems as well as Windows.

Sure, those of us there at the beginning remember when it was derided as Plug and Pray. There’s no doubt it didn’t work all that well at first. There were just too many systems that didn’t implement the protocols of UPnP, or got them slightly wrong. But persistence won out, and persistence has always been one of Microsoft’s strengths (and occasional weakness, with Office touting Mr. Clippy long past his sell-by date).

In the last week, I’ve plugged the following for the first time into my laptop, and everything has just worked: Three different flash drives to exchange information; two different travel mice; two cameras; a remote device for advancing PowerPoint slides. Nowadays, we’re surprised and put out when UPnP doesn’t work.

4. The feature-rich stability of the Office suite.

I wrote a 364-page book, with over 150 embedded graphics, in Word without a single crash or corruption of data. For grins, I tried to load it in Open Office and Google Docs. Both were able to read it, but neither could handle the complexity properly.

The core apps of the Office Suite — Word, PowerPoint, and Excel — are robust, powerful, feature-rich, and stable. Microsoft simply doesn’t get enough credit here.

Now not everyone needs every feature of these apps… though I daresay I’ve used pretty much every feature in Word and PowerPoint in the past year, including the ray-tracing (object “lighting effects”) in PowerPoint and Word’s regrettably overlooked Document Map.

But back when I was sitting in on meetings with Legal-world CIOs (in 2004-ish) talking about what features they wanted in what became Word 2007, I was struck by how often the following exchange took place:

CIO #1: Feature X takes up space. No one ever uses it.

CIO #2: Wait a minute. We use it all the time.

Few people use every feature, but every feature has a core group of users who rely on it. Your “too complicated” is someone else’s “I need that.”

The amazing thing to me is not just the vast feature universe but the stability of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint no matter what people try to do to it. They’re not completely bulletproof, but unless you go out of your way to create a malformed document, it’s pretty hard for most people to feed them anything that upsets their stomachs.

And if you need one of those three apps to do something, chances are it can do it.

Observant readers will note that I have omitted one app that’s often part of the Office Suite: Outlook. I didn’t claim the suite was perfect….

5. Microsoft’s mission through the late 1990s.

Microsoft had a long-time mission to change the world through technology. Indeed, was there ever a mission statement with the clarity of “A computer on every desk and every office, running Microsoft software”?

That wasn’t a sales mission, either, though it certainly served that purpose. There were tens of thousands of people at Microsoft who saw that as a change-the-world mission, to bring affordable, feature-rich computing to everyone around the world — while making money, of course. They didn’t fully succeed, especially in third-world rural communities, but they tried hard and made incredible inroads. In the first and most of the second world, we now take computers for granted as an affordable and omnipresent if occasionally frustrating appliance.

I do feel that about eight to ten years ago, the mission changed. I’m not talking about the mission statement, though that changed to. In some ways, the mission statement was even more pointed toward the common good — “helping people and businesses throughout the world reach their full potential.” (I’ve quoted both of these from memory, so they may be off by a word or two — but it’s a reminder of how clear they were to employees.) But while the mission statement was good, I don’t think the focus remained the same. People at Microsoft — and this was an ongoing internal conversation — debated the causes, which I don’t want to take up here, but I know I was not alone in feeling that change.

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Tomorrow, the other five reasons.