The Microsoft mouse worked very well, in my opinion, and was magnitudes more comfortable than those that came before it. I’ve got one somewhere, but see no reason to find it 
. Though I used Logitech mice as well, I upgraded from Microsoft mouse to Microsoft mouse for my home computer, at least until they stopped making them better.
Nasty things, ball mice. The ball needed to be clean, but the primary problem for me was that the axles “automatically” cleaned (collected) most of the dirt from the ball. Once a week or whenever it began acting badly, I would turn over the mouse, remove the ball, and use a cloth or tissue to clean the gunk and unwind the hair from the axles. Since the mouse rolled over a surface rubbed by your fingers and arm, I figured that the gunk was dirt mixed with dead skin cells. It was dry, though, so it wasn’t terribly disgusting and people those days were accustomed to it .
One reason I chuckle at gaming mice that require a special, wired mouse pad is that old ball mice also performed best on “special” mouse pads. I went through at least a couple of 3M mouse pads in the late 90’s (before buying the original MS Intellimouse Optical) as they had tiny little bumps on them which helped to roll the ball more reliably. The 3M “surfaces” were really just a thin layer with one side textured, so I glued these to normal mouse pads and trimmed the underlying pad to match the 3M shape. I obviously liked the result, as…
Though the grippy texture wore off to some degree (and was no longer needed), I kept using one of those 3M pads with my Intellimouse Optical, as the pad had a highly detailed pattern that helped the optical mouse track well. Those early optical mice did not track at all on low-contrast or glossy surfaces. I wound up using one particular 3M-pasted-to-generic pad for about 15 years.
