That's a pretty good litany and you're on target with most if not all of it.
However, consider the alternative .. no failures because of no attempts at innovation.
Any company worth its salt has failures.
If Ford had stopped innovating after the dismal failure of the Edsel we'd have had neither the Mustang nor the TBird.
I grimace when I remember some of the dogs IBM released to the market before the 360 revolutionized computing in ways which are still being unveiled.
IBM pulled those pigs off the market quickly and the poor souls who had bought them were left high and dry.

Of course a company has to cut its losses when the market tells it to.

As one of my early bosses told me when I questioned a similar decision to cut losses at the expense of some clients:

"We're not running a bowling league here."












>>Agreed. MS has absolutely no long term cohesive plan. They continue to thrash about.

Buy VFP. Kill it. Still can't touch productivity in .NET that was had in VFP for small desktop data apps.

Use WinForms. No! use WPF. No! Use SilverLight for everything. Nevermind, Silverlight is only for phone dev.... or maybe it isn't, don't ask us.

Want some XAML for vectory goodness? Nevermind, everything is going to be HTML5 and javascript.

Hell you don't even need to be a programmer to program. Have some Access. Better yet, have some LightSwitch. It's like Access only MVVM'ier. Mmmmmmmm, tasty!

Use drop down menus. Hey, these drop down menus seem to be working pretty well. 20 years later: Fire Zee Missiles! Drop down menus killed for Ribbons User Interface. Guess what MS? Ribbons suck and now they're creeping into Windows 8 File Explorer! http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/cut-the-ribbon-why-microsoft-needs-a-fresh-start-with-windows-8/

Use SOAP/ADO/ODBC/OLEDB/XML, shit we don't know! Hey, hope you didn't embrace OLEDB even though we told you to because now we're killing OLEDB.

Does anybody at Microsoft know how to effing lead and present a cohesive long term strategy?!?!?!?!?!?

MS isn't embracing emerging technology... it has no idea what the hell it's doing.

Using MS technology is like swimming with a school of piranhas. MS business units will just as soon eat each other as they will you (the developers).