noogie60

For me,
I switched from Windows to Mac when it became clear that Vista was a dog.
It’ll say coincided with a change in my life from monetarily poor student to time poor professional. When I was a student, I really tinkered and modded my PC. I built Machines from scratch, flirted with overclocking as well as modded the hell out of windows.
In the end, the “it just works” philosophy did it for me. I no longer have the time nor inclination to tinker like I used to.
For me, OSX gets out-of-the-way between me, my content and the work I have to do with it. The UI feels more unified and there are less annoying quirks between programs.
In built touches such as time machine is nice (It has saved my bacon in the past).
I still need to use Windows 7 in a virtual machine (Dragon for Mac unfortunately is still an abomination) and I find that it feels less elegant and more fiddly – simply, I feel less productive.
Also, MS office for Mac still fortunately lets you turn off the ribbon. I really find the ribbon annoying to use.

Personally, I think what should have happened was that Microsoft was broken up into several " baby Bill" companies after the anti-trust trial like Standard Oil was.
This would have been better for the industry, as we would not have had the stagnation that happened in the 2000s – in mobile (where Pocket PC and Windows Mobile were rubbish for far too long ) as well as stagnation in the browser and OS spheres.
Most of the baby Bills would have avoided the management mistakes that they have made as a single company under Steve Ballmer where they have been followers in a "me too" manner (for example Plays for Sure, Zune, Hotmail and Bing).

It may be like the descendants of Standard Oil today – where Exxon, Chevron etc are collectively worth much more than a unified Standard Oil would have been – that had already reached its peak and was on the decline.

Most importantly, the anti-trust trials seem to have made made the game old for Bill Gates. It seemed to take the fun out of it for him and thereafter he wanted to move to other things (I remember as a quote of him on TV where he says being sued is one of the worst things you can go through). This lost a major source source of their management hunger and focus.

Also, it might not have been the impetus for them to have done more with bringing their research and development to market. They have spent huge amounts on research and development but seem to have had dysfunctional culture in terms of being able to get it to market. There has been precious little to show to date of Microsoft’s research reaching their products (in fact I remember reading that they specifically exclude their research and development people from touching "production" products)

Also, if you read blogs like mini Microsoft, you will soon see that the divisions of the company seemed to be more interested in fighting each other then other companies. Again, splitting up the company would have reduced this infighting and better focus the management and employees’ attention on actually shipping and improving products, rather than on internal turf wars

I don’t think things will change, unless the mobile companies like Apple and Google start buying or creating content of their own.
They certainly have the cash to outbid the networks on must have content items like sporting rights ( they have the financial muscle to bid for the entire rights of not only things like the Super Bowl and Olympic Games but also entire leagues). They could then take the online rights for themselves and on sell the TV broadcast rights.
It doesn’t have to be necessarily profitable–they can look at the same way they do their venture capital arms (like Google ventures) where it is speculative but acts to support their core business in the long term.