What this article misses is that despite the successes and failures of SteveB, to the outside world Microsoft is largely considered as a company without a vision. I don’t know if they ever had one, but all those talks all these years about tablets and handheld devices and those beautifully crafted videos about how computing will be 20 years from now, all that don’t materialize into products.

Take for example Surface (the table not the tablet). They go and produce a sci-fi table with a touch surface which looks amazing but costs an outrageous $10.000 and has no freaking applications. And that coming from a software company which has spend the better part of the last 30 years building APIs. Where’s the vision in that?

I use .NET daily as a platform for building web apps. I love it. I consider it a pretty solid platform and the IDE is like the golden standard in the industry. But in the long term I don’t think that they have a clue as to where they’d like to take things. Right now MS seems like the company that waits others to innovate and then follow on their steps. They spend $7B yearly on R&D and you get to wonder what’s the end result.