Microsoft has almost always been a more innovative company.
Microsoft Research alone is enough for this to be true.
Surface is a very very very old brand/moniker that goes back almost a decade at this point - originally a tech demo of a table that you could interact with in various ways.
They explored touch, VR and all sorts of alternative interfaces before anyone else.
They took a stab at PDAs around the same time as Palm (which was also an insanely innovative company).
Their developer tooling is really innovative, the CLR itself, their IDE integration.
Hell the NT kernel was/is a really innovative piece of technology - it's driver model still completely stomps what is available in Linux/Mach.
Apple was never more innovative than Microsoft, they just executed way better.
Jobs might not have been a technical or even design genius (though plenty of both worked for him), but he definitely was a business genius that really understood the value of crisp execution and marketing.
I say all of this as an Apple user, that also happens to be a fan of the technical and innovative achievements of Microsoft and as someone that contributes to and relies on the OSS/Linux/GNU stack.
I have a horse in every race but at the end of the day you can't dispute that Microsoft is the clear innovation powerhouse remaining with IBM/HP/Bell Labs mostly winding down in comparison.
Is Microsoft more innovative, or is Microsoft simply more publicly innovative? Apple (and tons of other companies, for that matter) simply don't make hay out of their R&D efforts until they have something sellable to announce.
If one is to assume R&D spending it roughly equatable with "non-public" innovation than historically Microsoft is more innovative than even Google, let alone Apple. This assumption may be weak but I think it would at least be somewhat correlated.
Microsoft Research alone is enough for this to be true.
Surface is a very very very old brand/moniker that goes back almost a decade at this point - originally a tech demo of a table that you could interact with in various ways. They explored touch, VR and all sorts of alternative interfaces before anyone else. They took a stab at PDAs around the same time as Palm (which was also an insanely innovative company). Their developer tooling is really innovative, the CLR itself, their IDE integration.
Hell the NT kernel was/is a really innovative piece of technology - it's driver model still completely stomps what is available in Linux/Mach.
Apple was never more innovative than Microsoft, they just executed way better. Jobs might not have been a technical or even design genius (though plenty of both worked for him), but he definitely was a business genius that really understood the value of crisp execution and marketing.
I say all of this as an Apple user, that also happens to be a fan of the technical and innovative achievements of Microsoft and as someone that contributes to and relies on the OSS/Linux/GNU stack. I have a horse in every race but at the end of the day you can't dispute that Microsoft is the clear innovation powerhouse remaining with IBM/HP/Bell Labs mostly winding down in comparison.