Traditionally, Microsoft has been a corporate company. They rake in huge profits from businesses using Office and Windows. That's great, but in the last couple years Microsoft has been trying to reinvent themselves as a more consumer-oriented company to compete with the wild success of Apple. There's no ifs, ands or buts about it; Microsoft is changing.

Now, that's a very good thing. It's what Microsoft needs to stay profitable in wildly competitive markets like the smartphone market. They've taken massive strides in regaining their image with Windows 7 and are retooling what people think they can do with Windows Phone 7. All of this is amounting to Microsoft achieving that goal of becoming more consumer-friendly. The problem is is that they're still not all the way there yet.

We'll start with Windows. Windows 7 is by far Microsoft's greatest operating system to date, but it's still not nearly as consumer-friendly as OSX. It's still way too hard to do simple tasks. Just look at the Control Panel; even though it's been simplified, it's still incredibly intimidating. Compare that to the relative simplicity of the OSX control panel, and you begin to see why it's so overly complicated.

You might be thinking "well, so what? It's just the control panel!", but it's more than that. Businesses need those advanced options. That's great, but the average Joe scarcely ever looks in the Control Panel. When they do, they're met with massive lists and complicated naming structures. It's the same way throughout Windows; it's just all so unnecessarily complicated for the average user.

Naming is another thing that really makes Windows seem like a boring brand compared to Apple. All you have to do is compare the two company's suites of programs to see how. Apple's suite is called "iLife", and comes with iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and Garageband. There's a naming paradigm there that instantly unites them all under one banner and makes them recognizable. Meanwhile, Microsoft has its "Live Essentials" suite, which ships with Movie Maker, Live Messenger, and Photo Galley. What? How boring is that? There's absolutely no correlation between them, and it's just so drab.

Microsoft has been trying to re-invent itself lately, to great successes-at least on some fronts. It still needs lots of work to get it up to where Apple is in terms of sub-brand recognition and polish. Ultimately, while businesses are a massive chunk of Microsoft's revenue, end users need to become just as important to them if they want to survive in the ever-changing tech industry.

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