If you happen to be a part of any coding community, then you know the word “Microsoft” never goes down well with the majority of coders. On first thought, “Microsoft” comes down as something terribly stupid that oozes out sap of hatred — you just can’t breathe the air in which that word was spoken. I used to be one of those guys until recently.

Despite Microsoft being a cardinal part of the personal computing revolution, the hatred that it receives from coders is due to it’s closed source Windows operating system, its reluctance to delve into open source software, failed experiment with Windows Phone, Windows Vista and Steve Balmer running like a monkey on the stage. Sure, these were some of the major bad decisions that the company made in the last decade (Steve Balmer ran in circles on his own discretion by the way), but after Satya Nadella took the charge things have changed considerably.

Microsoft’s Azure is the major cloud service platform and it does provide a lot of handy functionalities that platforms like AWS lack or are difficult to integrate with. Nadella shifted the crosshair of Microsoft from operating systems to cloud services and since then the stock price of Microsoft has been on a steady rise and now its almost equal to that of Apple’s.

When it comes to mobile platform, Bill Gates accepted that Windows Phone was a disaster and they are trying to move on completely from mobile operating systems as of now.

Talking about open source, Microsoft acquired GitHub and since then they have been integrating some cool features on the website. Sure it’s quite early to predict the results of the acquisition but it doesn’t seem like Microsoft is going to ruin GitHub big time. Also, when it comes to open source IDE, Visual Studio Code is the most popular among coders. It packs cool handy features and the stability that it provides beats other IDEs like Atom and SublimeText. Also, add software like Microsoft Office Suite and Halo..and Age of Empires. I will always have a sweet spot for Microsoft just because of Age of Empires. I spent a major part of my childhood playing that game and I always feel nostalgic when I think about it, about how much I love it and how much it made me love history.

Apple has been stagnant in innovation. They haven’t launched any completely new industry changing product lately. Microsoft, on the other hand, has done quite well. The Surface Book, Surface Pro, Surface Hub, Xbox Adaptive Controller — they all are completely new game-changing products.

And then there is this Super Bowl 2019 Commercial. Enough said.