Wonder if you could elaborate more on this for someone not a hardcore techie

Cakez0r · on June 26, 2014

Sure. The things I've noticed since Nadella took over from Ballmer:

* They're obviously putting a lot of effort into listening to their customers and implementing their feedback (see windows 8.2 changes, start bar is coming back, metro apps will now be windowed) (also see this article by Gabe at Penny arcade about how Microsoft implemented his feedback for the Surface Pro 3 http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/16/surface-pro...).

* They realise the cloud is the future and they're making great strides towards making sure Azure is the best cloud platform available. I've used Amazon's AWS, Rackspace and Azure. Azure is hands down the best. Nadella was formerly in charge of Azure, so it's no surprise that Azure is coming to the forefront of Microsoft. The interface for their new cloud control panel is excellent (http://portal.azure.com https://i.imgur.com/SxdPZjf.png).

* Developers, developers, developers is back in season! They're open sourcing everything. ASP.NET, MVC, their new C# compiler are all now open source. The UI library they used to make the website above is open source (WinJS https://github.com/winjs/winjs). They are making obvious efforts to engage the developer community.

* Whilst everybody else is scrambling to create walled gardens and closed platforms, Microsoft is going in the opposite direction. All of their recent open source releases have been on Github, not Codeplex. You can provision linux virtual machines, mysql database, redis caches on azure - as well as the Microsoft equivalents. They just announced they're making an Android handset after acquiring Nokia, as well as Windows Phone. They've announced that they will start supporting officially supporting Mono (open source version of their .NET clr) with new releases of ASP.NET, allowing ASP.NET applications to run on open source platforms.

* Their share price is the highest it's been in 15 years

EDIT:

* And as much as I hate to admit it (I haven't personally switched browsers or search providers yet...) but they're actually fixing the problems with Bing and Internet Explorer, and seem to be rapidly catching up with the pack. The new developer tools for IE actually look pretty good (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ie/bg182326.aspx) and Bing is not looking too shabby either.