I’ve always been fascinated by Microsoft, and it’s led me on a somewhat surreal path to covering the company for most of my life. It all started in my teenage years, when my curiosity over the inner workings of Windows led to brief moments of fame and lots of moments of trouble with Microsoft’s lawyers.
As a nerdy teenager in the early ’00s I would spend hours building PCs to run prerelease versions of Windows, and I would regularly lug my custom machines and CRT monitors to house…