John Gruber on Microsoft vs. Apple:

Microsoft spent the '90s growing from a successful software company into an industry-dominating titan. Apple spent much of the '90s fighting the perception that it was on the verge of going out of business.

So far in the '00s, however, things have swung the other way. Apple is firing on all cylinders -- the whole iPod/iTunes thing, Mac OS X, the so far very successful transition to Intel processors -- and Microsoft... well, what is the deal with Microsoft? They're certainly not doing poorly financially; they booked $3.89 billion in profit -- profit! -- in their most recent quarter. That's more than $1 billion in profit per month, and an 18-percent increase over their profit from the same quarter a year ago. But their stock price dipped on the news, because analysts expected even more. Their stock, in fact, has been mostly flat since 2002, and other than a spike at the tail end of the dot-com boom, hasn't moved much since 1998.

It seems almost beyond dispute that there's a deep malaise surrounding Windows Vista, Microsoft's biggest and most important upcoming product. Microsoft has been late with major new operating systems before -- in fact, to my memory, major new versions of Windows have always arrived a year or two later than they were originally promised. The biggest problem with Vista isn't that it's late, but that people don't really seem to care that it's late, because there doesn't seem to be much in Vista that Windows users are dying for. (Most of the cool features were cut during the development process.)

Nicholas Carr adds more commentary on what Gruber writes in Microsoft vs. Microsoft.