Is Microsoft Suddenly Cool?
blogs.forbes.com
blogs.forbes.com
This is an idiotic puff piece, I assume triggered by a nice phone call from someone at Microsoft to someone at Forbes.
Cool generally requires standing apart from the norm. When you're the biggest company in your market by a huge margin, you're the norm.
In the next perhaps 20 years or so it's likely that more people will join the developed world than live in it today as countries like China, India, Chile, Indonesia, Poland, etc. become more developed (much like South Korea and Taiwan have done within the past 20-30 years). Developed economies create lots of office jobs, and office jobs use windows computers running office as a rule. There's a huge growing market for MS still.
That's not to say that I am 100% confident that MS will gain all this as a matter of course, or that competition won't arise (I suspect we're on the cusp of a general purpose OS paradigm shift that may disadvantage MS), but the growth potential is very substantial and very real.
Sure, but even some traditional companies now have more web apps than desktop apps.
These places still have huge piracy 'problems', but these will likely be resolved in the coming decade as these countries develop stronger intellectual property enforcement and will force all corporations to purchase legitimate licenses.
These don't run desktop OSs.
Microsoft still host some very cool projects and I think many programmers would be very happy to work on stuff such as Kinect, Bing and Seadragon to only name those.
However, if you're talking about general perception toward the company, then the answer is a big fat NO. I think too many people have been burnt with their tactics over the years and those stigmas take time to heal.
For all things that microsoft has contributed to the advancement of computing and its vulgarization, they are also responsible for stalling in many areas where they couldn't catchup fast enough, using their influence in oft-questionable ways. Lots of bad karma there and very uncool.
They managed to mess up the single most important application, the browser, and did nothing to fix it for years, just because they could. Web developers are only now coming out of this nightmare.
Today, I'm very reluctant to even use something like Bing, that admittedly works quite well, just because the thought of what microsoft could pull, once it gets back into a position of power in the search market, makes me shudder.
I know most people have a notorious short memory span when it comes to such things, but count on people like me, with the ability to hold a grudge, to remind them what hell felt like.
Microsoft isn't cool and it won't be for a while.