- The XBox line isn't exactly a sidelined product.
- Surface Pro is loved by those who use it, and many (including me) think it is a product whose time is only just arriving. It is the closest we've come yet to being able to go truly paperless, especially as a student.
- OneNote is the best note-taking app on the planet, the only limitation being it's lack of broad device support.
- Office 365 with documents stored on Skydrive ROCKS. It is like GDocs, except with more features and not totally sucking. Full real time collaborative edits would be nice, but I'll take the ability to work on and generate .docx / .xlsx files without munging them up any day*.
Let's also not forget that even after decades, Excel and Word are light years ahead of anything else that has attempted to challenge them. Sure, I have issues with some of their moves (I'm looking at you, Metro!), but I can't say, as a mature objective person, they anything they've done has totally ballsed things up to the point that I have to go running into the decrepit arms of OpenOffice.
Oh, and before you go off yelling "OMG shillz0r!!" I would like to point out that I have been around here a long, long time. I've earned my stripes. I use Linux daily, admin several servers, have a homebrew NAS running FreeBSD and did my share of M$ bashing. However, berating them as though their products aren't worth anything is just immature. Grow up.
Also, don't be coughing up the old argument "$other product is better than Microsoft's offering because my personal use case fits into its feature set!"
* And yes, the OOXML format is here to stay. It's what the vast majority of businesses use, so get used to it. It'd be nice if ODF was the standard, but then again, try creating ODF files in OpenOffice, editing them in AbiWord and back again a few times. ODF is no better at providing word processor agnosticism than is OOXML, and has the detraction that all the ODF word processors suck royally.