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Office
Introduced 1989 (on Mac), 1990 (on PC)
Word, Excel and PowerPoint certainly did well enough on their own, but when Microsoft combined 'em into the tidy (and pricey) package that is Office -- first on the Mac in 1989, interestingly -- it had a selling point that would prove irresistible to many a productivity-obsessed middle manager even today. The addition of Outlook and its support for the (for some) nigh-indispensable Exchange only further solidified its foothold in the corporate computing world, and that's where Bill knew the real money was. That's certainly not to say that it hasn't been without its share of problems and annoyances, though -- we're looking at you, Clippy.


Peripherals
Introduced 1982
Microsoft has always been a software company first, but it's been cranking out high-quality peripherals for over 25 years -- long before the Xbox and Zune were even a twinkle in Bill's eye. Not only that, but it's been a reliable innovator in the field, with a string of devices that were first, early, or just simply popularized technologies like the wheel mouse, force-feedback joysticks and controllers, the modern optical mouse, and the ergo-keyboard. The division has gone through some bumpy times -- the SideWinder line was killed off for a while there, and there've been some questionable designs along the way -- but it's been riding high as of late, and it doesn't show any signs of slowing down soon.



Windows 3.1 / NT 3.5
Introduced 1992 and 1994
It took a few versions to come into its own, but by the time Windows hit 3.1, Microsoft finally had a product that was able to pull PC users away from the command line (for some of the time, at least) and give them a real taste of things to come. Windows NT may not have had quite the same appeal with the average consumer, but it did bring the operating system into the 32-bit world and pave the way for enterprise desktop computing as we know it today. (Plus, it had the NT file system (NTFS), which to this day continues to carry on the legacy in its own little way.) We really wish they'd made a sequel to the Pirates of Silicon Valley, because we'd love to have seen the dramatization of Bill overseeing the first popularized verions of Windows -- especially '95, which came out just a couple of years later.


Windows 2000 and XP
Introduced 2000


When thinking of Microsoft and the new millennium, few people are able to keep the crinkles out of their nose. Thankfully, Windows ME wasn't the only thing that arrived in late Y2K, as Windows 2000 rushed in to rock the socks off of suits everywhere. The whole Win2K thing went over so well that Gates and company decided to base its next consumer OS, XP, off of it. Some may argue that the resulting product still stands as the last great OS to ship out of Redmond.