Your use of the present tense is odd in that post, given Microsoft’s current championing of PowerShell—and, for that matter, Linux—on Windows today. This is not the 1990s anymore.
And Microsoft never had any relationship with IBM they could “split” from apart from being a vendor of DOS, and a development partner in OS/2 - both in the 1980s: anyone managing then retired long ago.
The rot in the 1990s was what happens to any dominant player in a market: gaining share becomes more difficult, so management decides instead to rent seek, and adopt defensive positions to block competition (we’re seeing this with Apple on mobile). Of course, these tactics are contrary to the needs of customers, and can sow a long-lasting poison that damages the chances of any genuinely good product that comes from the company later. As an example, Windows Phone was the most techically advanced mobile SDK, with amazing low-resource performance, and I believe that it would have been a success had it not come from Microsoft, with all the baggage and industry distrust that that entailed...
Microsoft, like other successful companies, also attracted the bullshitters. I worked for Apple in the 1990s, and we used to say that the only good thing about working for a dying company (which it was then) was that the kind of MBA-but-no-intellect manager-class tended to avoid us when choosing a place to inflict themselves upon. Instead they flocked to Oracle, Netscape (heh), Microsoft and Sun, who were all on the up, and thus offer a low-risk environment for their inept ideas. (Not to say we didn’t have home-grown assholes, but nobody tried to bring in morale-destroying “new ways of working”)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
