I can't say anything about their phone support, since I've never had the necessity to use it and hope I never will. Their web site, on the other hand, simply defies description: it is so complex that you get inevitably lost - which is intended as a compliment.
User Report - Pros
One of the most complete, competent and professional websites I've ever stumbled upon. Huge, rich, tightly packed with information and free downloads. A little self-centered, but nevertheless the acme of Microsoft's achievements, outshining anything else Microsoft have to show, especially their software products. A minor highlight are the free web-based mail accounts at hotmail.com (this is really a msn.com, not a microsoft.com service) which enable you to quickly and comfortably manage your mail with Outlook Express (and probably with other MS mail clients, I reckon), without having to log on the mail site each time you want to read or send mail - which is the main drawback of other web-based mail accounts.
User Report - Cons
The thing that irritates me the most is Microsoft's habit to constantly change the URLs of the individual web pages, which is especially true of their MKB articles. Thus if you link to an interesting article, your link may get outdated in a matter of weeks, if not minutes. I've not yet found a link to a MKB article that worked (here I mean links on third-party web sites, newsletters, Windows-fans' (????) sites etc.).
There's only one thing that's even more annoying than that: apparently, the MKB articles are generated on-the-fly, with a script that prevents them from being read offline, i.e. from your browser cache. Not even Webcelerator could help me with that - and it almost never lets me down. This may get terribly time-consuming if you think that MKB-type of information is exactly the type of information you would need offline, since it is often related to problem- and bug-solving, editing the Registry, reinstalling software and/or drivers etc. So you may find yourself in a situation where to solve a certain problem you must, say, edit a Registry setting, reset the computer for the changes to take effect, then, if the problem persists (as they always do), re-connect to MKB, find the article again, re-read it, mess with the Registry again, reset Windows, re-connect to MKB... ad infinitum. Of course, now that I think of it, you could always print or simply save the article;)
An insistent thought is pounding in my head ever so loudly: given that the MKB (Microsoft Knowledge Base) is the most immense and inexhaustible resource on the Microsoft website, probably filling far more Terabytes of hard disks than all Microsoft software taken together, and given that it is almost exclusively dedicated to Microsoft bugs, "issues", and problems, does that necessarily imply that, so far, Microsoft have produced far more bugs than they have produced software?
