This was always a running joke for the .NET devs I've worked with. If you need a fresh install of Visual Studio, SQL Server, or anything from Microsoft then you

This was always a running joke for the .NET devs I've worked with. If you need a fresh install of Visual Studio, SQL Server, or anything from Microsoft then you'll be waiting a while, so go make the dev team a round of tea/coffee. Every other bit of nontrivial software installed in less than half the time of an official Microsoft product. With that being said, Visual Studio 2017 was incredibly quick to install on a fresh system (no VS installed previously), to the point where I assumed that I'd done something wrong or missed something during the install. I remember hearing Scott Hanselman discuss this on a podcast (.NET Rocks, maybe?), and he said that one of the selling points of the latest versions of Visual Studio was how they were planning on splitting individual components out, making them easier to install, easier to port (a nod to .NET Core), and making the IDE experience faster. It may be that the reason why Microsoft tools take so long is because you're installing one large chunk, whereas the more they modularise the software the quicker it is to set things up.