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People are saying that Microsoft is now more innovative than Apple

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Tim Cook
Apple CEO Tim Cook  Getty

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 costs about $3000 (with other new VR accessories starting at $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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Julie Bort was Business Insider's Editor at Large for the Tech team. She loves investigating stories and shedding light on the tech industry's most amazing people.Here's a small sample of some of Julie's work.Former Pinterest employees describe a traumatic workplace where managers humiliate employees until they cry, Black people feel alienated, and the toxic culture 'eats away at your soul'Sex, tequila, and a tiger: Employees inside Adam Neumann's WeWork talk about the nonstop party to attain a $100 billion dream and the messy reality that tanked itInsiders say WeWork's IT is a patchwork of cheap devices and Band-Aid fixes that will take millions to fixWeWork's toxic phone booths were created in-house by its Powered by We business70-hour weeks and 'WTF' emails: 42 employees reveal the frenzy of working at Tesla under the 'cult' of Elon MuskElon Musk works so many hours at Tesla, employees are constantly finding him asleep under tables and desksHow this woman went from a Pizza Hut employee to a founder of a $4 billion startupAn Oracle insider explains how some salespeople gamed the system to sell more cloudTHE TAKEDOWN OF TRAVIS KALANICK: The untold story of Uber's infighting, backstabbing, and multimillion-dollar exit packagesMicrosoft is in talks to buy GitHub, a startup at the center of the software world last valued at $2 billionThe alarming inside story of a failed Google acquisition, and an employee who was hospitalizedInside Facebook's plan to eat another $350 billion IT marketHow a registered sex offender wound up living in an Airbnb hosting unsuspecting guestsA controversial ex-banker is the person who really runs Twitter — and he's gambling the company's future on one risky betSecret passages and skipped meals: Oracle's CEO gave us a rare peek at what it really takes to run a $37 billion companyHP told some employees to choose between becoming contractors with no benefits or being fired without severance'I felt like we were being extorted': Customer says Oracle tried to strong-arm him into a cloud saleHow the queen of Silicon Valley is helping Google go after Amazon's most profitable businessAirbnb host: A guest is squatting in my condo and I can't get him to leaveLIES, BOOZE, AND BILLIONS: How one of the fastest-growing startups in Silicon Valley history raised $580 million then spiraled out of controlGitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart — and we have the full inside storyWhen she's not writing for Business Insider, Julie can usually be found on the trails, on my mountain bike, or on my skis, if you know where to look.