Pretty hard to say. I'd say it's just MS's size that has done them in. When you get that big, it's just too hard to change your dominant technology and busines

Pretty hard to say. I'd say it's just MS's size that has done them in. When you get that big, it's just too hard to change your dominant technology and business cultures. Plus, I'd say there's a general lack of elegance about the whole MS empire. It's more "hack it until it works," at all levels of their software stacks. Not that there aren't a whole bunch of brilliant folks laboring there, nor that there isn't good software in their stable, but I think they're laboring without people at the top who have some clear sense of "taste" as well as some clear sense of long-term technical vision. Or maybe they do have those people, and their vision is just out of date or wrong-headed. Windows Mobile is probably the best example of this. Who in their right minds would think that just subsetting Windows itself would be a good idea on a mobile device? Including assuming a little mouse-like pointing device, so the whole WIMP stack could be used unchanged? People who are blindly convinced that the Windows API is the best and doesn't need to adapt or change or grow to move with changing environments, I guess.