Two points.<p>First, Microsoft's status as a "cool" or, at least, "not eyeball-gougingly awful" company is inversely proportional to the power they wield over customers. MS was universally loathed when they were <i>forcing</i> people to use their browser and when it wasn't possible to do any meaningful consumer computing without paying the Windows tax. Now that we don't <i>have</i> to use MS software, MS are having to make software that people might actually use by choice. It's very hard for a dominant company to avoid becoming evil (cf. Google), but the flip-side is that once the dominance fades away the company has to start competing on merit again.<p>Second, MS in 1997 were competing with Netscape (cool startup), Sun (hippies) and IBM (erm...). Now they're competing, and often successfully, with Facebook (evil), Apple (enormous) and Google (evil and enormous). Today's 20-year-old college student was <i>six years old</i> during the "browser wars" anti-trust trial and isn't going to hold grudges for it. Today's Microsoft is sort of like late 90s IBM - dull, slightly confused and often irrelevant, but it's not exactly <i>evil</i>; XBox/Kinect is a genuinely good product, and Windows Phone is actually <i>innovative</i> rather than an iPhone clone; Bill Gates has morphed from a dystopian monopolist plutocrat into your genial wealthy uncle who spends his time trying to cure malaria and tackle poverty, more famous for giving his money away than for the means by which he amassed it.<p>None of this means that Microsoft is now the hippest tech company around, but it does explain how they might become so and why that wouldn't be a bad thing.