>They have top engineering and research chops; just look at the new goggles and a lot of their labs projects. MSDN is a wealth of free knowledge.
A common comparison between MS and Apple is that MS pours a lot of money into R&D and makes a lot of forward-looking videos. Meanwhile Apple is laser-focused, spends way less on R&D, and ships.
Microsoft lost a decade, and you feel that MS is more substantial in computing? Are you sure they're not just tugging at your geeky heartstrings?
I feel like we're comparing a consumer electronics business to an enterprise software company though, so there are bound to be some stylistic differences.
And Microsoft ships more products than Apple does. I don't want to turn this into one of "those" posts because I'm sure you can find a list of products (and versions) that Microsoft has shipped over the past decade including the Surface line, which positively out-classes Apple's iPad.
How can you say that they "lost a decade"? Where you see "laser focus" I see lack of options. Where Microsoft has 3 products that cover a broad range of use cases that people actually need, I see Apple with 1 product that covers only the most common use cases. It's really nice for Apple's bottom line, but it's also the same reason that most businesses don't use Apple computers.
A common comparison between MS and Apple is that MS pours a lot of money into R&D and makes a lot of forward-looking videos. Meanwhile Apple is laser-focused, spends way less on R&D, and ships.
Microsoft lost a decade, and you feel that MS is more substantial in computing? Are you sure they're not just tugging at your geeky heartstrings?