After thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that the most interesting tech company of 2018 was … Microsoft? My formative experiences with computers came in the 1990s, and even though the first computer my family had was a Windows PC, I imbibed anti-Microsoft sentiment in my youth. That attitude only hardened once I came to do much of my work in a way that requires a *nix system. My new-found appreciation for the company comes as a surprise, but let me make my case.

• Xbox. I went about fifteen years without playing video games, skipping every console from the Super NES to Xbox One, only recently returning to playing on the Xbox platform. Whatever problems Microsoft may have had with this generation of consoles, they obviously righted the ship in 2018. From the Xbox One X, which is a phenomenal piece of hardware, to the studio acquisitions, to the backwards compatibility program which shows an appreciation for their history and which allows latecomers like me to catch up, Microsoft has been more interesting than any other gaming company, though the Nintendo Switch follows close behind. Since my employer provides me with one of Apple’s frightfully expensive computers, I likely spend more of my own money on Microsoft than on any other tech company.
• Visual Studio Code. In 2018, Visual Studio Code became my primary text editor instead of Vim. Vim will always have a place in my heart and my work, and I can’t imagine using any text editor that doesn’t have Vim keybindings. But Code’s IDE-like features work much better than even a highly customized Vim. I have flirted with other modern text editors like Sublime Text and Atom, but Visual Studio Code’s performance and features are much better.
• Windows Subsystem for Linux. Maybe Windows 10 is good; maybe it’s a mess. I don’t know and I don’t care. But the Windows Subsystem for Linux has made my life better even though I don’t use it. Almost all of my digital history work requires a *nix system. But students show up in class with Windows machines and it is hard to support them. Windows Subsystem for Linux has helped a great deal by giving them a bona fide Linux terminal that they can use with only some fuss.
• GitHub. Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 and they haven’t screwed it up. As far as I can tell, the only substantial change is that GitHub users now get free private repositories. That was probably a bad move since people will be more likely to keep their software private instead of making it public. But honestly, I intend to make a lot of my half-baked repositories private when I get a chance, so it’s hard to find fault.
• Programming languages. Microsoft has been doing interesting things with R for a while now. I don’t use most of it, except for a few packages here and there, but they do make the ecosystem stronger. If I had to do anything with R in the cloud, I would probably try Azure. It also helps with teaching that R’s support for Windows is strong, though that is more a virtue of the R core team than of Windows. Recently I have been getting back into JavaScript, but via TypeScript, a Microsoft-created superset of JavaScript. I like it so far, since it addresses much of what is ugly about JavaScript. Microsoft also seems to be a strong supporter of Go, a Google-created language that I have been dabbling with.
• Microsoft Word. After years of avoiding all things Word (including a few tense moments with the publisher of my book), I finally broke down and installed it on my work computer. You know what? As long as you aren’t writing in Word and are just commenting on other people’s documents, it’s not that bad.

That’s an entirely personal case, of course. But in terms of where I spend my money and what I use to do my work, Microsoft made more of a play in 2018 than any of the other tech giants.