I haven't been as excited about MS in a long time. I don't root for any one OS; I use what works for me. I have had, and still have them all: Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows 8 and 10.
MS has open-sourced some really cool stuff [1]. Microsoft Research [2] is amazing; just look at the front page (Z3 high-performance theorem prover for one, F# and dev tools, Typescript, Simon Peyton Jones (Haskell) F* which has dependent types and compiles to F# or OCaml). I cannot find a similar site for Apple. The Apple domain is just a big online store for me selling product. MS Research is a cool site to browse just to see what tech they are developing and open sourcing. I think Apple is stagnating with the evolution of iOS like Android. I like the tiles in MS Windows 8 and 10 with live updates vs. the Android, iOS widgets and icons.
I have owned Apple iPhones, Androids, but now I am looking at the MS Lumia 950XL when it becomes available. Android is not where I think it should be at by this iteration of the OS, and I am not locked in to any one eco-system, so the iPhone is not an option, although it still is a great design.
Apple was at the forefront after their revival. Google caught steam in the early 2Ks. Now they're both busy sustaining their model and Microsoft is eager for fresh love so their grabbing the ball. And that ball is half of the Apple style of product design and communication. That's the first time MS is so deep into aesthetics, glamour, engineering and talks. Before that it was a lot more nerd oriented.
Oddly enough, posted right after a Microsoft press conference where they announced a plethora of really nice devices that has many people on HN saying "wow" and proclaiming how they have reinvented themselves as a hardware company on par with Apple.
Quite the opposite, this is reposted precisely because they are going through the same renaissance that IBM went through in the late 90's where they are clearly reinventing themselves. In 2007 they were not even a blip on the radar. In 2015 they are clearly awake and innovating again. To what end remains to be seen.
There is very little value in you just dumping this here. So you think this wasn't valid in 2007, but is now. Why? I would be interested in why you feel that way. This would be a much stronger submission if you added value.
[1] https://github.com/Microsoft [2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/