Microsoft is interesting again

Correction: that should have been "consumer version", whether free or paid.

some good details in your assessment but entirely missing a lot of great positives especially on the products you've hit out. Azure is growing, Surface is growing and is not only a solid product but one of those products that is what a lot of people have been dreaming about that other companies just aren't ballsy enough to do. Each iteration in a short time has improved quite a bit either in performance or device spec. That's a lot of fast good work.

Xbox one is quite amazing. Sales are good, games are ramping up. Every week some new games are out or announced. I can't wait to see what they do to improve that.

Buying of Minecraft was a fantastic decision, it's not like they didn't have any video game division and suddenly bought it. I'm hoping to see more work on it but you saw how they were using it as a platform in their VR announcements, which means that they plan to expand it further and it ideally will continue to be a platform that devs will create new ideas in and from.

From just using it and having been kind of annoyed by MS Office since the 2003 days, 365 seems snappier and better than it ever has been. Certain things after getting used to seeing them end up making sense and are attractive.

OneDrive is a very nice service, I like it way better than Google, for free and paid you get a lot of storage with it and it's super easy to use and looks classy, not cheap.

windows 10 could be insanely good. don't forget the free upgrade offerings too, which is new and much welcomed.

A 128GB/Core i5 Surface Pro 3 costs 899$ (and you usually can get the bundle for 50-100% less than that) that's the same price as the MB Air which it directly competes against. Yes there are cheaper laptops, but you won't find a decent "ultrabook"(giggles) at the price range.

OSX keeps eating market share especially amongst the more younger demographics thats true, but it has nothing to do with the OS, they could run an OS that shows a picture of a potato every 10min and freezes till you shake the laptop and it won't make a different.

Apple is cool and pretty, people buy it, they also market aggressively to students with financial assistance and student discounts. However i wonder how many students would actually use OSX if MSFT wouldn't have had Office for it. Even taking into account the fact that some uni's still require students to use TEX/LATEX for works most of them write it in word in a 2 or 3 column format and use a converter (I've done that 10 years ago).

So far from what I've seen MSFT made Windows cost almost nothing, made office very cheap for home users and almost free for students. Brought down the price of Visual Studio considerably, and releasing the new "Community Edition" which is considerably more feature rich than the Express edition of yesteryear.

And while many people found Windows 8 lackluster it still brought quite a bit of good changes, and as a free upgrade to Windows 7 for many users and at less than 50$ for all the rest.

There is very little reason for OS's to make huge jumps these days, the platforms they run don't double their RAM and CPU power every 3-4 years like they used too. For all intents and purposes the Core i5 machine you bought in 2009 would still run Windows 8 just as fine as a new one you bought today (that's not saying that the CPU's are the same or even come close to having a comparable raw processing power).

@ Main topic, i do love articles that state MSFT lost X to Y and Z to M over and over, if they would had control over search, social media and mobile you would both hate them much more, and we most likely would've been in a worse position as consumers.

Google is bad enough, i would go as far as saying that they are worse than MSFT ever was. They control how virtually every person finds and accesses data and they are expanding their reach from not only controlling how you do it over the internet but going as far as establishing them selves as an ISP, wanting to become a wireless carrier, and funding SAT based internet access.

However with all that, and the fact that their business model is heavily invested in having access to every peace of private and public information about you and everyone else no one gives them half the flak they gave MSFT when they tried to bundle internet explorer with Windows.

I wonder if in 15 years after some court cases and blunders we'll see articles about how Google is interesting again, sadly i doubt it will come to that.

As expected, there is nothing there to support your claims that "The free version of Win 10 requires mandatory updates from Microsoft, not just security updates but app updates." or that the it will have "a variety of user data tracking" included, your words.

Posting a lot of unrelated text as answer doesn't make you more correct.

Depending on what you dislike about the UI, you can probably make it more to your liking by using a different launcher (Nova is the one I use). It lets me make one or two minor changes to bring things more in line with my preferences but otherwise is just as fluid as the stock Google launcher.

Cyanogen is fine and has some nice features if they apply to your personal usage but the thing about games wanting to log into your Google account would likely be the same. It's the equivalent of Apple's game center or whatever it's called. It's basically a universal login for games so you can keep progress/settings saved across devices. I haven't found any yet that require it but typically it's an opt-in thing if you care about that functionality. I've only ever been asked to sign in on first run of a newly installed game so it's not nearly as obnoxious as the ones that constantly pester you to connect with Facebook or some other thing that's completely unrelated. On a Google phone I can understand using Google's games framework for your game profile but it's annoying to assume I want to use an unrelated service (Facebook) or even have an account with them.