Microsoft went around with a big, fat target on its forehead for a couple of decades. It was the tech giant we loved to hate. The company deserved the scorn; in the 1990s it crushed pipsqueaks Apple (AAPL), Netscape and Palm (PALM), and still found time to push around a few hapless PC makers who seemed to barely make a buck anyway. It got to the point where rooting for Microsoft (MSFT) was like rooting for the Yankees. Why bother?
But while they were running roughshod over rivals, the bad boys in Redmond got a little lazy. Let’s face it: aside from the Xbox console and incremental tweaks to business software, for a long time much of Microsoft's stuff just wasn’t that great.
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