It's actually worse -- MSFT has the skunkworks, but they keep ignoring the nifty new toys that come out of them. It reminds me of IBM -- there was an amazing a

It's actually worse -- MSFT has the skunkworks, but they keep ignoring the nifty new toys that come out of them. It reminds me of IBM -- there was an amazing amount of very cool new stuff appearing out of the TJ Watson lab (when my parents were IBM'ers, I got to read their journals regularly). IBM brought very few of them to market, even when other companies did so with gusto (PDAs are an example -- IBM had working prototypes stuffed on a shelf somewhere long before Apple started even hyping the Newton). And the defecutives didn't learn their lesson -- when their server market started suffering when the bubble burst, my mother started asking friends and colleagues about potential candidates for IBM tools and servers when she became a marketing exec there. I gave her a list of companies like PIXAR, Blue Sky Studios, Digital Domain (you see where this is going). 3 months later I went to Linux Expo with my mother and several of hear colleagues, all of whom wondered why IBM hadn't gone after those markets -- the people who gave my mother her mission stopped her from going after the companies I referred her to. We were particularly impressed by their foolishness when we attended Carly Fiorina's keynote -- in which she listed nearly every company I'd suggested, some with video interviews, and making a big deal about how HP had provided them with Linux based solutions.