That's fine, but the problem is that his early mistakes means that Microsoft has been playing catchup, and will continue to play catch up. They've effectively coasted on their existing installed base without innovating. Nothing about the experience of Windows now is any different from what it was in 2000. There is nothing audacious about what Microsoft has attempted to do this century, save for the xbox & the kinect. My life isn't better because of Microsoft.
That despite the fact that Microsoft has had some awesome researchers and projects. They have by and large failed to bring any those tools and products to market (the kinect again being a notable exception).
If you look at the latest Windows Phones (seriously, Apple and Android have virtually identical interfaces - the odd one out is Microsoft) and Windows 8 (yeah, it isn't on the market yet, but they released the beta), that's clearly not true. There was the Ribbon too in Office, which was radical enough a lot of users complained during release. They released the Surface and Surface 2.0 as well, though I don't know how strong their market is. Bing has done some interesting things, particularly with video search and maps. I've just gone through 5/6 divisions, 5/7 if you include Skype.
All of this aside, Microsoft hasn't needed to innovate to the degree of the other big players for a while. Apple needed to innovate in order to secure some set of markets in order to survive. Google wants to innovate since it needs to gather more data to boost its ad business. Amazon wants to be the retailer for everything, and anyone selling anything else (e-books, music, movies - notably) cuts into their profits, so naturally they want to cut into those markets first. Microsoft... had Windows and Office, no real issues there until Apple started to edge in on the consumer market alongside non-PC devices. Even prior to that, Vista was an attempt at innovation that resulted in major screw-up for a ton of reasons, Windows 7 was the fix. Is it really any surprise we're only seeing real innovation (in Windows) now?
I think the main keyword out of your rant is "My life...".
Many small businesses or mom & pop shops may have benefited from Windows+Office (specifically Excel, Word, and Access).
They can also purchase Office 365 and have tight integration with their one and only laptop to run their small business.
Sharepoint Online + Office 2010 are extremely powerful and beneficial for those that don't have their own IT department.
Sure, people can keep pointing out Salesforce, Basecamp, Highrise, some random CRM, some random Time & Expense stuff, shopify and so on but if you can get SP Online + Office 2010 for less than $25/month... that's hard to beat.
They have made a lot of progress on the Sharepoint side which will keep them in the enterprise market for a long time. .Net was released in 2002 and it's become a completely viable alternative to Java which was vital in the long term. Bing is an also ran, but it's still the #2 search engine in the US which IMO is not that bad of a place to be considering where they where in 2000. And Windows 7 was fairly good, heck Vista was fine on decent hardware far better than there old school failures like Windows ME.
With that said, I think they are in for a vary long vary profitable decline but IMO so is Apple. Honestly, that's just what happens to large companies.
I'm curious what progress you think they made in Sharepoint?
Last I heard everyone was ditching it for Dynamics or anything-else-but-Sharepoint. I've never heard a good word said about Sharepoint. Though they seemed good at selling it. But it sounds to me that it invariably turned into a disaster.
I've always regarded Sharepoint as the new Lotus Notes, I'm happy to admit being wrong as my experience with it is a little tainted as I once worked for a company that Sharepoint was often suggested as an alternative to our product.
Sharepoint is a big and growing product for Microsoft.
Dynamics is their attempt to join the ERP, CRM market and so far it's still a niche because they're targetting mid-size to large enterprise but the larger companies typically would either go with Oracle or SAP for ERP and something else for CRM.
In some respect, it is similar to LotusNotes in which you can write little apps backed by a data structure called SharePoint List (or SharePoint Document Library). So when I saw Trello, that's like Sharepoint List. Period. Sharepoint List is the core data structure, everything else seems to be derived from it.
The biggest difference is of course SP is web-based and tightly integrated with Microsoft other products: Office, InfoPath, .NET, Dynamics, Outlook, Exchange, AD, etc.
You can pretty much do/build almost everything (specifically Line of Business type of app) with SP (let's avoid technical discussion regarding whether an implementation of Time Tracking should be backed by RDBMS or not since these days people are using NoSQL anyway).
I have to say that it's not a bad product and there are use-cases where Sharepoint can fit.
Dynamics is Microsoft's line of enterprise business applications (CRM, ERP) - products like Dynamics AX (their top-of-the-range ERP) can integrate pretty tightly with SharePoint, they aren't competing products.
"They have made a lot of progress on the Sharepoint side which will keep them in the enterprise market ... it's become a completely viable alternative to Java ..."
Sharepoint appears to be little more than a recreation of the Internet "in the small". First time I saw it I had the same thought as the last time I saw it: "WTF do we need _this_ for? We already share files; we already have FTP; we already have the Internet. WTF???"
I mostly try to avoid Sharepoint, but I see it used all over the place.
IMO, It is mostly just a mix of document repository (SVN) and custom website with permissions linked to active directory. However, organizations that can't roll their own intranet site worth a damm can often setup a SharePoint site that meets most of their needs. It supports customization through both plugins and custom code which is how MS get's their long term lock-in. For companies that can maintain say a talented Ruby on Rail's team there is little benefit but where the 'programming team' mostly slings excel macro's SharePoint can still get stuff done.
It's a slippery road to re-implement Sharepoint capabilities using Rails.
It's a typical buy vs build scenario. From my understanding, it's not difficult to integrate other enterprise apps to Sharepoint and make a dashboard.
You can probably do that with a bunch of Rails people but if the platform provides a decent "Portal" capabilities out of the box with minimum modification, why build from scratch?
The alternative is to install MediaWiki, WordPress, some sort of CMS perhaps, some sort of Portal (LifeRay?), some sort of document management system that supports versioning and decent web UI, integrate a bunch of services using custom web-app. That's a lot of infrastructure to deal with.
To be fair, it is a FTP with permissions and a decent user interface, and plays nice with a Microsoft ecosystem.
Whether that is worth what Microsoft is selling Sharepoint for, well, that depends on the buyer. It also has the "nobody was fired for buying IBM" point (and Microsoft does have decent support).
I still haven't seen an Open Source Sharepoint "killer", though I might not know of it (I had good hopes for Alfresco).
You could say the same thing about the release of OSX. MS is playing catch up in the mobile sector, a place they never dominated. They still OWN pc marketshare.
Now make me stop defending these guys, I'm getting heartburn.
That despite the fact that Microsoft has had some awesome researchers and projects. They have by and large failed to bring any those tools and products to market (the kinect again being a notable exception).