MicroYaSoftHooPaq

Poor Microsoft. I almost feel sorry for them. Well, I would except for the whole evil empire of the 90s. Ah, screw 'em.

I just don't get them. They have so many brilliant, talented people working there, and they just can't be an excellent company. Why are they so competition centered? Instead of going out and finding new markets, its like their standard operating plan is to sit around and identify a competitor, and then just try and knock them off of their roost. They seem to miss so many opportunities - for example:

• X-Box could have been the "digital hub", the way the iTunes / iPod / AppleTV is shaping up. They could have owned that.
• They disbanded the IE team after the end of the browser wars and left IE6 sitting around for five years, allowing Firefox to ascend to its current status. They just ceded the market they had fought for so hard, previously.
• They have more than enough engineering firepower to own the online document collaboration space, but instead they just sunk everything into the black hole that is Vista. People still struggle with good online collaboration tools.

It might be classic Christensonian disruption mechanics at work. Or maybe they're just trapped by their own culture. I just don't know. But know they're starting to get into corporate M&A hijinks. I woke up this morning to find they've offered to buy Yahoo for about $44.6 Billion.

Ok so clearly such an acquisition would be a customer grab - getting Yahoo's ad revenue and market share. But would MS be able to stop with that? I doubt it, I think we'd see Yahoo get sucked into the whole MS technology wormhole - no more FreeBSD for Yahoo servers, you need to run IE to use it, etc. Sigh.

I can't help but think about this in terms of the HP-Compaq merger a few years ago. They're moving towards where the game used to be, instead of where its going. A MS outright purchase of Facebook would have been a lot more interesting. At least then you might get a sense of where there game was going ("trading documents with your social network on XBox!!!!"). They really need to start to actually innovate, or they're going to be about as relevant as IBM in a couple of years.