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For the past two decades, Microsoft has been the technology company that people love to hate. (We love to do it, too. Check out our companion story "10 Things We Hate About Microsoft.") But sometimes even the lumbering giant deserves a hug. Microsoft undeniably does some things extremely well. Its employees have a track record of doing the right thing--at least on occasion. And sometimes it's simply lovable despite itself. In this story we'll cover our favorite features and foibles of the company no one can ignore.

For a similar love/hate appreciation of Microsoft's greatest competitor, see our articles "10 Things We Love About Apple" and "10 Things We Hate About Apple."

1. Steve Ballmer: Video Star

Bill Gates may be the public face of Microsoft, but Steve ("Give it up for me!") Ballmer is its most colorful personality, thanks in no small part to the widely circulated video of his screaming, supercharged "monkey-boy" dance, in the course of which he upstaged everything else at a 2001 Microsoft event before he ever reached the podium. Equally notorious is the video clip in which, shirt soaked with sweat, Ballmer pays homage to "developers, developers, developers, developers" by repeating the word, mantra-style, some 50 times. So much for "location."

Ballmer has behaved with more restraint lately, but we'll always have YouTube (which also has some entertaining remixes, including a brilliant version of the Monkey Boy dance re-imagined as an animated iPod ad and a video of a domo kun puppet synced to the "developers" soundtrack--with samples from "monkey boy" and a cool rockin' instrumental for just the right mood).

2. Corporate Blogs That Actually Say Something

Microsoft may be a lot of things, but shy isn't among them. And that translates into some often-substantive corporate blogs. In fact, Microsoft seems to encourage its serfs to blog as though they're getting paid by the word. Technology topics dominate at the company's TechNet blog page, but the Microsofties show they're hardly automatons (well, the jury may still be out on a few of them).

One of our favorite Microsoft bloggers is Robert Hensing, a member of Microsoft's Secure Windows Initiative team. Though many of his entries are too technical for non-engineers to get much from, the less-geeky posts are chock-full of useful tidbits about Windows security and just about anything else.

For the full story on Microsoft-related blogs run by insiders and outsiders, check out Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog Directory.

3. Open-Source Software

Here's a great reason to love Microsoft: If the behemoth didn't exist, there might not be an open-source movement. If Redmond hadn't put so much effort into crushing Netscape and every other browser with the diplodocus that is Internet Explorer, we might not have Firefox today. If Linus Torvalds had been able to experiment with the Windows source code and customize it to his own liking, he might never have created the Linux kernel. Ironically, we've managed to get a lot of great free stuff because Microsoft continually riles people up.