From Screw Google, not the point of the article but the name of an alleged lobbying & PR campaign by Microsoft to fight Google in the legislative and regulatory rather than market space.

The conclusion pretty much sums up how I feel about Microsoft today:

maybe its time for Microsoft to realize that they can’t afford to spend their time and energy tearing competing companies down. Instead they should be using that time to focus on building themselves up. While others are bringing new and innovative ideas to customers no matter the cost (see YouTube), Microsoft seems to be that 32 year-old guy who is obsessed with how awesome and popular they were in high school without realizing they are no longer awesome or popular.

Let me be clear… I don’t want Microsoft to fail. In fact I’d like to see them succeed. But the company seems to be driving itself into the ground with a corporate culture that may have worked a decade ago but will not work now.

I’ll specify, “I’d like to see them succeed as one of multiple options.” I’d like to see some diversity in the computing biosphere, something that is generally lacking today.

I think that the same thing could be said, though, for the long-term incumbents of any style- or innovation-driven business out there today. This is not just a Microsoft or technology problem. The automobile industry (which has inherent structural problems, and which it has effectively ignored in favor of lobbying), banking (”build more branches” and “layer risk” are not innovation, they are anti-innovation since they consumed capital at the expense of any potential real value creation), tech (see above), energy (”Clean Coal”)…and don’t even get me started about telecom, the kings of regulatory defense of business models.