Microsoft's June unveiling of the remarkable Surface tablet came almost exactly a year after a much more important milestone. In May 2011, the nine years of legal sanctions against the company—part of the consent decree Microsoft reached with the Feds to end its long antitrust battle—finally came to an end.

In a world where Apple's white logo glows angelically in our shopping malls and Google exhorts us not to be evil, I'm ready to embrace a big tech company that's not afraid to get mean. And the Surface tablet suggests that Microsoft is fully back in the fight for the first time since the turn of the millennium.

Microsoft's refrain during its days as an all-consuming startup was "Embrace and extend." (Read: "Copy and improve.") That philosophy led the company to clone menus from Lotus 1-2-3 for its own spreadsheet program, Excel. It's the type of thinking that led to Internet Explorer being able to run Netscape plug-ins. Over and over, the company used brilliant technical judo to neutralize competitors so effectively, it probably could have succeeded wildly without ever crossing the lines of legality.

But it did cross those lines. Government investigators found Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer and its pricing of Windows to be downright abusive. The Department of Justice launched an antitrust suit, and Microsoft agreed to a settlement that, among other things, created an independent committee with broad powers in Redmond. It inspected source code, reviewed new features for competitive fairness, and in general hobbled what had been one of the tech industry's most formidable players. The government meddling was necessary, given Microsoft's history of stretching/flouting the law, and it forced the company into some valuable concessions—like giving users more choice over their default browsers and supporting open standards for web pages. But it exacted a heavy toll on Microsoft's ability to adapt and innovate.

The tech scene since then has been all about Apple. True, Steve Jobs headed up what is arguably the most remarkably innovative decade of any company in history. But it's worth noting that Microsoft was handcuffed that entire time. While Windows is still the most popular OS on the desktop, it's struggling for relevance on phones and has barely gotten started on tablets. Microsoft has become an underdog in all of the most interesting areas of technology.

If anyone questioned whether Microsoft could get back in the fight once the cuffs finally came off, Surface should put those doubts to rest. The gorgeous PC/tablet hybrid is the only example in recent memory of a company clearly and emphatically going toe to toe with Apple on the industrial design front. The iPad will have to improve. Android tablets will have to improve. Surface isn't another me-too device—it moves the entire category forward.

And with Surface, Microsoft is taking on more than Apple; it's swinging its fists at all of its PC partners who've been churning out dull tablets and laptops for years. That's old-school Microsoft, a company that was never afraid to knife its own friends in the back if it meant getting a leg up in the marketplace.

Renewed aggressiveness from Microsoft could do the whole tech industry a lot of good. iTunes is as bloated and user-hostile as Outlook was in the '90s. That old embrace-and-extend mentality could give us an iTunes competitor that would import your playlists and sync your iPod without making you want to gouge your eyes out. Or the company could channel its inner mean streak to offer browser tools that block Google's annoying +1 buttons in Explorer, protecting your privacy while showing that it's still willing to get its hands dirty.

Surface suggests that the core of Microsoft's fast, paranoid, win-at-all-costs culture survived the consent decree. That might be exactly what we all need.

Email: anil@dashes.com

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