Microsoft has a couple of massive advantages that most hacker's tend to dismiss. 1. A massive workforce of MS developers. Not the ones employed by MS themselve

Microsoft has a couple of massive advantages that most hacker's tend to dismiss. 1. A massive workforce of MS developers. Not the ones employed by MS themselves but the huge number of dot net developers out there. Apple has a decent amount of developers now but MS and Java dev numbers still dwarf Obj-C devs. MS also has developers at every level of the stack. Low level C++ to the web with ASP.NET MVC and Javascript. 2. Microsoft has proven that it can produce quality software at every single level of the consumer technology stack. OS, B2B, B2C (office, Visual Studio), Mobile OS/APPS (One note on iOS is a really well done app and windows 8 mobile has not sold well at all but it's still very well designed and developed) and xBox proves that they can establish themselves in new markets, and Massive scale services (Azure). None of the other major players have this. Apple - I love apple products and software but never have I seen so many failures at services as Apple has put out. iCloud is a great example. Google - Great services in the SaaS sense but so far has done a pretty poor job on the PaaS area. Google App Engine is pretty far behind Azure and AWS. Plus they completely ignore desktop computing as a whole. Amazon - The clear leader in the PaaS field with AWS. Azure is a great service but AWS has had massive success. The kindle fire is still a pretty weak offering compared to the others on the mobile device side. Microsoft - Windows 8 mobile is a good OS but it lacks the great apps/well designed hardware to drive adoption. Windows 8 on desktop has been a flop sure but windows 7 was a pretty good success and I'm willing to bet windows 8.1 will do alot better than windows 8. That's their pattern since Windows Me. Flop-Success-Flop-Success. Azure is a great platform as a service. Reliable, fast, and good pricing with a lot of great features that even AWS doesn't completely match, though AWS still has some features that Azure needs to catch up on. So MS has proven ability on all levels and a huge group of experienced developers to help drive adoption. Where they have fallen down so far IMO is that mobile has always been a sideshow. Not the main focus. So they create subpar devices and fail to drive developers to great the great apps that are needed. The big question is if they can truly design a great piece of hardware. If they do then they are in position to control huge pieces of the industry again. All that said the latest previews of the next X-Box don't leave me feeling good about their future.