You are comparing consumer space to consumer space. But you do realize that Microsoft’s bread and better is not the consumer space, right? Its Enterprise. That is where the money is.

In the consumer space MS is less interesting than Apple/Google, but only because if you look at the new offerings, you’ll see they are existing offerings from MS. You may not like the packaging, and it may be extra steps, but MS was already there. Where MS fails is follow through. They’ll make a great product for the geeks, but not continue to hammer away and simplify it. Wheras Apple comes from the other end of the spectrum, they bring out a weak polished product, and over time we may see the full beast at play. IMHO, the iPhone, 5 years later, is still just barely a beta product.

I’m not anti apple, but iOS4 and the iPhone 4 are pushing me to drop all my apple products. they’re build quality, design and QC are out the window – unless they have a dot release on the horizon to fix a lot of issues, Android and Windows is solid and may be where I need to be in a year.