People are saying that Microsoft is now more innovative than Apple

On Wednesday, Microsoft held an event in which it showed off a whole bunch of 3D software baked into Windows 10, a new Surface PC that competes with the iMac and an interesting new device for the Surface line of PCs called the SurfaceDial.

This is a dial device that you use in addition to a mouse, a digital pen and a touchscreen. It lets you manipulate the images on your screen, so you can do things like bring up new color palettes, adjust volume and screen brightness, or even scroll through a big document.

Now add in Microsoft HoloLens, its augmented reality device that will cost about $300, and all the cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) services Microsoft is offering developers, and you've got a company that is truly impressing people with a new wave of innovation.

Contrast this with the company previously known as the monarch of innovation: Apple. Apple is the company that brought us the iPod, the iPhone, the tablet, the first verbal digital assistant, Siri. On Tuesday, after reporting its first decline in revenue since 2001, with shrinking shipments across all products, an analyst asked Tim Cook the unthinkable question: Was the company now just a follower of other's innovations? (Cook was none too pleased with the question, or the implication.)

None of this was lost on people watching Microsoft's event. One thing people tweeted over and over again during the event: Microsoft is now officially more innovative than Apple. 

 

 

 

 

And, just for kicks, here are the tweets from two former Microsoft outsiders that Microsoft bought to help spur innovation, Javier Soltero, the co-founder and CEO of Acompli now running the Outlook team.

And Nat Friedman, the co-founder of app-development platform Xamarin, now owned by Microsoft.

Here's Microsoft's 90-second recap of the event and all the stuff it showed off.

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