If Microsoft trimmed the friction points (management/bloat) they would actually be rocking it. Look to the XBox team for inspiration. They've absolutely come out of nowhere, dominated, innovated (look at the tech behind xbox live), and even beat apple so far in the living room.

Have you guys ever checked out windows home server? Probably not. They don't promote it enough, but it's the best product they have made in ages. It's functionality pisses on Apple's Time Capsule and I love time capsule to death.

My guess in the next decade? Their core businesses get shaken up (office, windows, etc.) causing them to trim a LOT of this fat after the stock takes a rocking. They finally get the gut check they need and start pulling ahead in other areas (Bing, XBox/Entertainment, etc.)

Back in 2003 or so, I was at a conference where a former Microsoft manager of some variety told me (paraphrased) that Microsoft's product strategies always revolved around selling more server licenses: Windows Server, Exchange Server, SQL Server. So all their product development was bent in that direction, causing some otherwise good ideas to miss hitting the customer need because there always had to be a tie-in to selling more licenses. Seems to explain a lot of the failures that are outlined in this piece.

OTOH, any company the size of Microsoft has a lot of failed ideas, or poorly executed ones. Not every idea is a home run; foul balls are part of the game.

This doesn't mention the elephant in the room - open source. 2000-2009 saw open source software become completely mainstream, probably best illustrated by the Firefox browser. Microsoft really failed to adapt to the rise of open source and the increasing developer mindshare which it commanded. Instead of trying to harness its potential and ride the wave their strategy was mostly one of antagonism and FUD.

Steve frickin' Ballmer... Does anyone believe that he'd still be CEO if Bill Gates hadn't anointed him as his successor? He's the Gordon Brown to Gates' Tony Blair. Microsoft is never going to be relevant until Ballmer and his horde of bean counting lackeys get the boot.

That is simply incredible. I didn't realize that Microsoft had come up with so many good ideas and then abandoned them. If they had come up with good implementations of each of those ideas and stuck with them they would have easily had a monopoly on most of computing.

Not sure if the .NET dynamic languages (IronPython, IronRuby, etc) came before the JVM dynamic languages (Jython, JRuby, etc), but it also seems like Microsoft let the .NET languages languish and missed out on a opportunity to bring a lot of the dynamic language programmers into the .NET fold. Meanwhile the the JVM has experienced a rebirth with the vibrant JVM language communities.

Hackers often blame MBAs, management, and hierarchy for technological mishaps.

As often did I. But it turns out that managing people is hard. It is amazing to me that an organization that is Microsoft's size can decide and execute on anything at all, much less on the number of things that it actually does.

Cutting five layers of management, which is already few for an organization that's Microsoft's size, is really a recipe for chaos.

I'm not sure passing on Youtube and Yahoo were bad decisions for Microsoft as stated by the article.

As far as Youtube is concerned, AFAIK it still hasn't been profitable for Google and would have likely bled more red ink with Microsoft in higher bandwidth charges, or alternatively, MS might have tried monetizing sooner slowing Youtube's growth. It's doubtful purchasing Yahoo in this economic climate would have been a big winner either.

I also don't really buy the article's description of the Xbox business defying the data and business common sense. For a long time, Microsoft has wanted to be in the living room, purchasing WebTV in 1997. If anything, it's an example of how Microsoft has succeeded in the past; constantly improving upon it's past mistakes and not giving up as quickly as other companies might. The original XBox wasn't all that successful, but they did some smart moves with the 360, getting it out earlier than the PS3, providing good tools and support to their development community, and realizing that good networking support at the OS level to allow seamless multiplayer experiences was going to be a game changer for this generation of consoles.

Microsofts biggest problem is that "they just have no taste" to qoute Steve Jobs.

Taste is what the enduser sees. Endusers don't care about strategy, proprietary technology, bottomlines, acquisitions, tie-ins, and what have you.

The big problem here is that having good taste is like being a good hacker - you have to be one to spot one. And since Microsoft doesn't seem to have many people with taste they don't recognize it when they see it. This is why Microsoft isn't doing well on the web - it's easy to switch to a competitor if a site doesn't just work right away, and many Microsoft offerings don't. They're clunky, hard to navigate and often have a hidden agenda thought up by a MBA. This is also the primary reason that Apple is doing so well: Their CEO has taste.

Endusers just want shiny stuff that works.

This article lists missed opportunities for market penetration when MS had technology ready.

I think the article is a bit harsh, even hostile. The criteria Most every technology decision must be justified by some data point. No company spends on research like Microsoft is not unlike the criticism leveled at Google by that departing designer. Large companies need operate this way.

The heart of the challenge is what transformations are necessary for a seriously successful company to stay vital. IBM went through a catastrophic point and came out due to some very astute business leadership. MS is more technologically focused.

Sorry this article is borderline ridiculous. Comparing for example, Amazon S3 to NTFS is like comparing an online storage platform used for building web services on top of, to a local file system used for storing files on desktops. Oh wait.

Seems to me like its a hurried piece of negative PR in part of a much larger war. Probably a response to the "Top 9 products Google killed" story somewhere else on the internets.

The MBAs (and lawyers) will do the same to GOOG. Correction: are doing the same to GOOG.