As I’ve pointed out before, I’ve been a PC guy most of my life and have only been using Macs for the last two years. The biggest takeaway for me has been that Microsoft and Apple are really pretty even: they both pose as poster children for anti-competitive practices, generally favor proprietary code over open source, and make very questionable ethics calls.

Microsoft has been living with the reputation of a big bad corporation for over a decade now. But in the last year or so, there has been a subtle but significant shift in the public opinion, for the better. I can actually pin-point exactly when: it’s since Bill Gates has stepped down. Although Slashdot still illustrates all Microsoft news with the now famous Borg avatar of Bill, the tech media seems to have softened its perception of him. People speak of him with some nostalgia now, and he’s often portrayed as some sort of wise elder spokesman for technology. A lot of that may be due to Ballmer being very unpopular and Gates therefore shining by contrast, but I think that there is something deeper going on here.

As Google is starting to increasingly resemble a traditional, bloated corporation with billboard ads and multiple competing product lines, and as Apple is being increasingly criticized for its lack of openness, Microsoft all the sudden doesn’t seem quite so bad. Remember all of the heat that it took for bundling IE with Windows? Well Apple is merrily doing the same with Safari on OSX (including the iPhone) and Google will do the same with Chrome OS (although they’ll spin it in reverse as “we’re bundling the Browser with the OS”). Microsoft’s anti-trust issues? We now have Intel with microchips and Google with search.

Windows 7 final builds have started going out to manufacturers and the press is giving it very, very good reviews so far. A lot of that is probably because the OS is actually very good. It’s beautiful, lean, responsive, and plays nice with more modest hardware like netbooks. But I think that the tech media is also compensating on some level for the excessive criticism of Vista, which most people nowadays would agree was a little over the top. It’s almost as if everyone feels bad for giving Microsoft such a hard time and this is their way of making a truce.

Microsoft is moving in all of the right directions with their other products, too: Office free in the cloud, an increasingly open XBox Live platform (love the Netflix integration & community games), retail stores, a very sleek looking Zune HD… sure they’re not innovating much compared to the other big players, but they don’t really need to at this point. They just need to keep up with the trends and not piss off their user base too much.

I often ask myself nowadays: what would it take to make me switch back to Windows as my primary OS? I think the answer is simple: it would need to become a Unix-compliant system like OSX is. This is because as a web developer it really makes my life easier to have access to a native shell. Now I’m aware that this will almost certainly never happen, but it doesn’t really need to for me to benefit from the presence of a better Windows: the biggest benefit to me is that it keeps Google, Apple and the other contenders that I actually use in check. As long as Microsoft doesn’t screw up too badly (and it looks like it learned its lesson with Vista), it will remain a force to be reckoned with and promote competition.

Wait… Microsoft’s existence promotes competition? now there’s something I wouldn’t have been able to say ten years ago.
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