Many people have been burned by Microsoft's grandiose promises and biting the bullet early on. See Kinect, Surface RT adopters, Windows Phone 7 adopters (no WP8 update), Windows 8 adopters (with the promise of 100,000 apps in the first 90 days), HoloLens which I'm sure will disappoint many after they buy it and they see it's nothing like what Microsoft showed on stage, and so on.
The best advice is to wait a few years and see if Microsoft is really following through on its promises instead of just buying its hype.
Besides products that get killed, Microsoft has a decades long history of documented bad behavior in every arena they operate in. I'm not about to reverse my distrust of them this quickly. I'm open to changing my opinion, but as of today, this feels like an abused spouse asking their friends to forgive their abuser because of an empty promise and a relatively short term change of behavior. No. If they can keep up the good work for like 5 or 10 years, then maybe the ship has really turned around, but right now this feels like a company feeling irrelevant doing anything they can to bring attention back on themselves.
There's a really good chance this is a "new" Microsoft. Gates and Ballmer were the "old school" Microsoft that only thought that obstructing the competition was the best path to success. The new CEO Satya Nadela built the Azure platform, the most "open" technology that Microsoft has. His mantra is "mobile first, cloud first". This outlook is the opposite of Ballmer's, which was to drive everybody back to Windows.
Microsoft is now a multi-device, multi-technology company that is focused on getting their software and services on as many platforms as possible. The cloud and their services are their future, if they cannot make the transition to interoperability, they will collapse. Prior to this, Microsoft was structured in such a way that everything depended on their OS, so Microsoft declared war on OS/2, Linux and MacOS.
Windows sold Office, and Office and NT sold the enterprise market.
Now, any platform sells office, mobile and desktop. Windows sells Microsoft's cloud services like OneDrive and Office 365, but so does OS X now. NT drove enterprise revenues, but now it's Windows Azure running Linux or Windows, either way Microsoft makes money in hosting it. For consumers, Windows licenses were a cash cow for Microsoft, but Apple has set the price of Operating Systems to $0 with their upgrade policy, now Microsoft is following with free Windows 10 licenses for a year. My guess is that they will bundle Windows licensing as a service that gives you access to Office , XBOX Live and other Microsoft properties, so it will is less of a Windows license and more of a Microsoft Experience license. Either way, if you use Microsoft's services on any platform, Microsoft will still earn their revenue.
To sum that up, Microsoft's interests are no longer in opposition to the rest of the computing market, it is in alignment with it due to their multi-platform strategy. They are in a position to more easily do things to earn your trust, as those things will also add to their revenues.
Ok... but we've seen this new, better Microsoft behavior for like 2 or 3 years while they've been in a pretty down or leveled position after a history of bad behavior dating back to basically their inception. Have they genuinely changed or are they just being forced by their new market positions to behave better? None of your examples point to a MS doing things for the right reasons and trying to regain trust, they point to a MS that ran out of options. I don't trust a dog to not run away while he's locked in a kennel, I trust him to not run away because he has no choice.
What happens if they gain a dominant or monopoly position in something again, are we just supposed to trust that they won't behave badly once their market pressure is gone? A new CEO and a company the size of MS won't magically change their company culture overnight (especially with a CEO who was previously a longstanding MS employee who participated in past wrongdoings). Rebuilding trust takes more time than this.
Well, I said they are in a better position to do the things to earn your trust, I didn't say you should necessarily have it yet.
Microsoft picked Satya because they were backed into a corner, but everything I've seen from this man tells me he's the real deal and believes that a multi-platform strategy is the right then and the best way to earn revenue. However, as with any company, expect them to have a bias towards things that will make them the most money. At the present time and the foreseeable future, for me, it appears that the interests of Microsoft are in alignment with the interests of users of all platforms.
If they gain the dominant or monopoly position in something again...what would that be, and in what decade do you suggest it will happen? If holographic computing somehow takes off, that appears to be the only place where they are positioned to lead a market in the near future.
If it's a question of Apple or Microsoft, Microsoft appears to be the good guy these days, as Apple is still building their walled garden. Microsoft is being a major contributor to Open Source code though. Everything on the new Microsoft stack is getting open sourced as quickly as possible. They make the best commercial software tool in the world for making software (Visual Studio), and it is particularly adept at deploying .NET software, so they are opening that up to the world to get .NET in as many places as people want it. They are also opening up Visual Studio to a variety of languages, and making it a development tool for cross platform development for iOS and Android. They want to sell Visual Studio.
Trust takes time though. Keep your eye on them and compare Microsoft to their peers, you may be surprised by what you see.
The best advice is to wait a few years and see if Microsoft is really following through on its promises instead of just buying its hype.