... and on the last 10 financial years at MS, by Jean-Luis Gassée can be read here

The piece takes a few minutes to read, but it's an interesting, though quite sombre, take.

The hilights are

• Allard's and Bach's exit as signal of creative and focus crisis. HP's tablet and the Courier business cases are brought to attention.
• Over the last 10 years the share value of MS stagnated in face of good profits, as if the market could not credit MS with trust in their business vision for the future. Compare that to Apple's success in the same terms and timespan.
• Lack of innovation and agility in new expanding markets. Being left in the dust in internet search and advertising, social networks and messaging, smart phones. WindowsPhone 7/Zune future doesn't look too rosy in the face of Apple devices on one end and Google undercutting them with the free Android OS on the other end.

And the signature quote would be

"So, there we are. An immensely successful company, still making large amounts of money but unable to go beyond its original Windows + Office + Exchange franchise, left behind by a combination of newcomers such as Google and Facebook with the old frenemy, Apple."

PS: To give a bit of perspective to readers who are not knowledgeable in OS history, the author  - Jean-Luis Gassée - is sort of a personality in the tech field. An executive at Apple, left to found Be, which created BeOS, a very interesting operative system that pioneered pervasive multitasking and focused on a responsive, efficient user interface over unix-like underpinnings. The idea around '95 was basically to develop externally a new OS for Apple to replace the stagnant classic Mac OS, but Apple in the end bought NeXT (and Jobs) instead and developed OS-X on the NeXTSTEP codebase. Both BeOS and NeXTSTEP were remarkable pieces of software at the time, mind you. Anyway, the man might not be the most neutral source when it comes to MS vs Apple and MS vs innovating newcomers, but he's a smart one.

Just sounds like doom and gloom going by the opening!

Its a nasty thing overall. The funny thing is that Alan Greenburg retained his position. I guess it implies that they believe hes doing at a reasonably competent job.

Rather than just come out with a bunch of lines, I'll just say this: Microsoft are a fumbling giant and every opportunity has slipped through their oversized fingers. The only positives to come out of Microsoft recently is that both Win Mobile 7 looks to be only a semi screwup and the Xbox 360 is only a semi screwup.

The final consolation is that both Windows 7 and Office 2010 are good, the bad is that Apple, smart phones, embedded systems etc are growing at a massive rate and alternatives to office from Google look like they are going to steal considerable market share around the margins with the regular home users falling first.