I have a lot of strong opinions about Microsoft, but at least during the Vista era, I once called their support without a support contract because someone's machine was very weirdly fucked after trying to upgrade to Vista, and I spoke to someone who spent an hour on the phone digging through weird registry crap and known issues to figure out how to successfully get the machine upgraded and working again. I was pleasantly surprised, having expected crappy support.

So I can confirm they did at least at one point have good support, and more broadly, I think it's not unfair to describe them as having had a great handle on what people wanted in user experiences and support, with how much they bent over backwards to fix compatibility issues for many years. I've also been told their support if you had a support contract was great, but I never was in a position to explore that firsthand.

Those days are, of course, gone, but they were known for that for a while.