Thanks for that honest assessment.

>>While Microsoft has achieved some innovations over time, for the most part they are a marketing/sales company. What Microsoft has always been best at is "leveraging" ideas and technology from others, repacking it, then marketing and selling it better than their competitors. Ballmer was the key "sales" guy before becoming CEO, and it's mroe about the bottom line (profit) than anything else. And lately more so than ever, killing Encarta, Money, Soapbox, and many other products/services. Also, what often drivees Microsoft to do good work is competion. The best thing for Microsoft is competition. Look how long they left IE until Firefox came around. Windows Mobile is in that same place. What made Visual Studio good (and get a lot of resources) was Delphi, PowerBuilder, and other competition. Now Google Apps is driving the new Office Web Apps. Steve Jobs was once quoted saying "Microsoft lacks style". It's a true statement, nothing personal by Jobs. Microsoft doesn't design products to be loved, to have great design, or to connect with a lifestyle with the customer - instead it's all about marketing and sales.

>>What I find very ironic today is that what helped Microsoft win against the Mac was that Microsoft created an open OS (platform wise) and provided developer tools for companies and developers to build applications for, unlike Apple. So when you went into a software store like Egghead or CompUSA, you would see rows and rows of Windows softare and one small rack of Mac apps, with Microsoft Office for Mac as the biggest seller. Now fast forward to last year, Apple opens up the iPhone and iPod Touch to an SDK and an open platform, creates a great innovative and easy to use app store, and the result is nearly 50 million devices sold, 1 million downloads of the iPhone SDK, 85,000 apps created for the platform, and just passed over 2 billion app downloads. Meanwhile Microsoft's mobile OS is losing smartphone marketshare, and their Mobile Marketplace will launch with about 600 apps and almost no momentum in the developer community. Then fast forward into next decade, which will be the decade of portable and mobile devices. The irony is, Bill Gates "leveraged" the GUI OS ideas from Mac after he saw it and created a competive Windows OS which beat Apple and the Mac. Now Apple is doing the nearly the same against Microsoft in the mobile space.

>>Funny short ending to my comments here. Until last month, the only time I ever used a Mac at all was when I worked at JPL in '93-'94, and I spent a few days on an Mac testing FoxPro for Mac to make sure my free (public domain) GenScrnX utility worked cross-platform. Even when I created the Class Browser for VFP, I didn't use a Mac ever, I just had testers on the team find any issues and fix them in VFP 3.0 for Mac (since VFP had to be cross-platform). Fast forwards to last month, I bought my first Mac, a Mac Mini, and I joined the Apple iPhone Developer Program to start to learn the iPhone SDK. There's a good chance that Apple will release a tablet device next year, and rumor is it will run the iPhone OS rather than the full Mac OS, which means the app store will also feed the tablet platform. IE is often catching up to Firefox and others, Windows Mobile is catching up to iPhone and others, VS extensibility is catching up to Eclipse open platform, Windows is catching up to other OSs with light footprint and stability, Office is catching up with online apps and services, Windows Live is not even catching up to the competition and mostly integrating with the competition. MIcrosoft still does will in the enterprise space, where IBM is their biggest competitor. Microsoft moves very slow now compared to a decade ago. Not as slow as IBM, but much slower than many of the companies looking to take bites out of various marketshare areas.