I don't know. It wasn't all good. We also had MFC (remember that?), tcl/tk, and everything had to be written in C. It was like pulling teeth to get people to use C++, and if you succeeded, you might regret it. The C++ people were still having flame wars on all the ways to do exception handling. The world revolved around Microsoft more and more, and Linux wasn't an alternative yet.
I think of the naughts as that idyllic time (for a software engineer). Microsoft was being overthrown, Apple hadn't gone full-minimalist yet, and the Linux Desktop was actually a pretty fun place to hack. Gnome and KDE weren't yet trying to copy everything Apple was doing (also, we had WindowMaker and enlightenment if you wanted to actually go minimalistic). The internets made all that sharing and open source possible, and it was like the world was all new and shiny.
> The world revolved around Microsoft more and more, and Linux wasn't an alternative yet.
There were a lot of unix alternatives to microsoft, just not as many on x86 hardware (which was still mostly bsd variants like Jolix.) SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, AUX, OpenVMS, etc. In this period the x86 platform was not dominant and if you wanted real power you were using things like an Alpha or PowerPC CPU, with the Pentium Pro being mostly a server chip and the Pentium getting a bit long in the tooth through the mid-90s before the PII was released. The 90s were a pretty interesting time to be doing server development or sysadmin work.
I think of the naughts as that idyllic time (for a software engineer). Microsoft was being overthrown, Apple hadn't gone full-minimalist yet, and the Linux Desktop was actually a pretty fun place to hack. Gnome and KDE weren't yet trying to copy everything Apple was doing (also, we had WindowMaker and enlightenment if you wanted to actually go minimalistic). The internets made all that sharing and open source possible, and it was like the world was all new and shiny.