Today Apple is worth $683bn, over double Microsoft at $338bn. Apple made a profit of $18bn in the last quarter. My feeling is that Microsoft haven’t even hit their biggest challenges yet.

As a Mac user I don’t have much interaction with Microsoft products, aside from occasionally having to use Excel, and even more infrequently, Word. But last week I installed Windows 8.1 (is that the same as Windows 8?) on a friend’s laptop. Followed by installing Office. I dreaded doing it - I haven’t used windows for three years, and even then I was still fairly lost at sea. My first thought when I touched this new Dell laptop was how flimsy, plastic and breakable it felt. I swear I almost cracked the screen in half trying to open it at the hinge side. The build quality is laughable. This is part of Microsoft’s problem - Apple products ooze quality before they’re even turned on. Microsoft Windows is encased in whatever plastic shell a third party manufacturer can sell. Textured, chrome effect, leopard print - whatever will sell. It reminds me of Nokia’s Xpress-On phone covers.

Windows installed neatly. Obviously I had to go hunting around for drivers for various unrecognised components of this very standard computer. Dell’s Service Code system worked reasonably well, but I cannot believe that the process is exactly the same as it was back in 2001 with XP. Open device manager, right click the little yellow exclamation marks and try to find some sort of driver that will work. SURELY this should be a solved problem by now? At least between Microsoft and Dell???

My friend had moved from XP which would no longer run the versions of Office she needs to deal with accountants and the government. She HATES Windows 8, the start menu is gone and replaced by a context jarring screen full of ill-ordered applications. I genuinely think Windows XP had a close to perfect UI and that XP is closer in experience to OS X now. That’s bad news for Microsoft as users are reaching the end of the road for XP and find themselves standing at a fork: More plastic, marketing bullshit, spyware and salesmen at Bestbuy, or something sleek from Apple that actually seems more familiar to an XP user (especially one that uses an iPhone), and at not a huge premium.

Microsoft have close to zero presence on mobile. No meaningful digital marketplace like iTunes, Amazon (Prime) or Play. Bing is barely used. Hotmail (now Live Mail?) is shit. Office 365? I’ve no fucking idea why 99% of consumers need anything more than Google Docs, and Open Office is bordering on mainstream now. XBox still seems strong. The Surface tablet was a decent attempt at marrying up hardware and software. It seemed to have some fans but completely missed the mass market and got undercut by commodity Android tablets.

Not to say that Apple are doing everything perfectly. I hate the iOS 8 flat, featureless design and iTunes is still a sluggish piece of crap. Still, they’re selling 34,000 iPhones 6 handsets. Every. Single. Hour.