While Microsoft has lots of clever and smart people working for it, as a whole it is stupid and slow, and has only succeeded by sheer dint of being able to throw 10 or even 11 figures and thousands of people at any problem it wants to solve and simply succeeding by the brute force afforded by the fact that it is richer than most countries in the world, and can take years and expenditures that would bankrupt almost any other company to finally blunder into some level of success.

No one Microsoft product is the best of its kind these days. That might have been true in the past, but right now they are coasting on momentum and their ill-gotten monopoly. Microsoft's decline will accelerate unless the company can radically alter its horrendous management processes. Microsoft has enough talent in its ranks to truly be the world's leader in software technology, but as with any large organization, upper management will delay, dilute or completely destroy any real innovations, either intentionally, or more likely unintentionally. After all, they've invested most of the company's resources in avoiding having to compete fairly, rather than actually competing, and have seemingly reached a point where it can no longer compete on a level playing field (if it ever could).

But Microsoft is still huge, still rich, and still has a 90+ percent market share in most areas. They aren't going away for a long time, but if recent history is a trend that doesn't change, their decline will be long and painful, and their customers and competitors will bear much of the pain, as they do today.

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