A minor point, but this is wrong in several ways. InstallShield was never acquired by Microsoft, and was never actually very good. You can think of it as being

A minor point, but this is wrong in several ways. InstallShield was never acquired by Microsoft, and was never actually very good. You can think of it as being a leaky abstraction over the underlying horror of Windows Installer, allowing just enough to poke through that it was unreliable. There has never been a really sane way to install windows apps, and there still isn't - the closest approximation today is WiX. Possibly the manifest-based Windows 8 application packages provide a better story, I'm not familiar enough to say.