Where's the Microsoft I loved in the 80s and 90s?

Went to the Microsoft Store yesterday and I'm nearly in tears.  I was really hoping to find a Microsoft product I could really love again.  I was excited about the Surface Pro 3.  I was excited about the size as the older Surface wasn't as big as I wanted.  But, it still fails in a couple areas:  speech recognition and apps.  Sure, it's nice that you can use a stylus pen and it has the nifty keyboard; but, those aren't as important.


Here I am, father of two, 3-decade veteran of the personal computer era; and, my family has Android phones, a couple iPads and a couple Windows PCs!  Not to mention the Windows laptop I use for work.


Why?  Well, it mostly comes down to the apps.  Timing is part of it too.


I chose the Android phones because I like the larger size of the devices (i.e. Samsung S4) over the iPhone, and Microsoft was late in the game with something that was competitive.  Sad, really, as Microsoft was certainly not late with it's initial foray into the phone market.  I don't know what went wrong there.


I chose the iPads because of the availability of good educational games for my two young sons.  I was honestly surprised by the lack of them for the Androids as almost anything you could get on the Apple devices you could get on Android.


I have been struggling with tendonitis in my mouse-using wrist.  I move the mouse around all day at work.  Thus, I was really hoping to put speech recognition and touch-screens to work.  At the store, using Windows 8, I tried the speech recognition.  It looks like it's the same as what is in Windows 7.  I couldn't even get it to hear me.  The microphone was clearly hearing something, but it was not able to discern me (the person holding the Surface Pro 3) from all the background noise, or I was just using it wrong. I have tried it on Windows 7, but it is not nearly as accurate as the iPad or Android.


I do have some hope for touch screens, though.  They had some large HP screens there.  I'll need to make things larger on the screen so I can have some accuracy when using my finger, but, it'll suffice.


I probably would have typed this out on the iPad or my phone using speech recognition, but I don't have a full-size keyboard for either of those (yet) to make corrections if needed.


I loved Microsoft for taking the great ideas in technology and integrating them into easier-to-use packages (i.e. Microsoft Office).  Not sure I approve of the way they went about it (they probably should've bought or licensed the Netscape browser), but it certainly made things better for the end-user.  I like the idea of having a single operating system across all devices.  I like the idea of the live tiles.  However, until the apps and speech recognition come along, I will continue to expand the use of my Apple and Google devices.  Bluetooth keyboard:  you're my next purchase.