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When i put my manager hat it turns into a nighmare.

If you, hypotetically, are managing a cash cow business, your first mission as a manager is to protect that business. You have to develop long term relationships with clients, spot early all the competition, grow organically your main business and control costs so you don't end in jail when the bad times arrive.

Here comes the first problem. Usually, in the business sense, innovation isn't something 100% new, is something 10-30% new. You know, the car still have 4 wheels but now it comes with a sensor that makes parking easier. The problem appears when your innovations start to compete with your main product. To compatibilize that stuff (think the way MS killed the IE team) requieres very large amounts of quality managment, something that is as scarce as high quality programmers. Think politics (hey, that is MY business!), incentives (you told me to control costs, else I would have done that!) or resistance to change (that will be a failure, it will make us look bad in front of X and Y), etc.

The proposition of the author is one of the classics propositions to sterilize change: to spin off. Make the change independent from the current managers, let them suffer their rigidity... but it may not be the better business decision to spin off somthing that will compete with yourself in 80% of the business.

The article just tries to (mis)analize a management problem without relevant expertise in management and from an investment point of view, and commits the usual mistakes that inexperienced managers make to a level that is doesn't even spark the usual insighful analysis from a engineering POV from the HN crowd.

Defending Windows from competition, for example, is only useful to the extent that it helps the company's stock grow. If the stock does not grow, it would be better to preside over a gradual decline while throwing off as much cash as possible so that investors could invest the remaining dwindling cash flow in better companies.

Given their stock buybacks and dividends they may just be doing that...

This is just back of the envelope, but 24 years ago Microsoft's [EDIT: split-adjusted] stock price was .10. With today's price at $28, that is an annualized rate of return of a little over 26%, which should exclude the $5.79 they've distributed in regular and special dividends since they instituted their policy in 2004.

Also, the criteria for investing money you've described is baffling. I thought return on invested capital was based on earnings, not stock price.

I think you are confusing sentiment with fundamentals.

The last time I looked, 24 years was far too long a period to examine the performance as the stock has had a reverse hockey-stick profile for quite some time.