The genius of Microsoft is in the long-term thinking. The individual products are easily critiqued. Their planning often mistimes stuff or gets caught out by ne

The genius of Microsoft is in the long-term thinking. The individual products are easily critiqued. Their planning often mistimes stuff or gets caught out by new developments, and they play a lot of hardball to get where they want to go (which has never made anyone look good), but when they hit, they hit big, and make not just a product but an entire kingdom, which has all the downsides of monopoly but also substantial upside too. While the Ballmer years saw the company coast along on its old crown jewels, missing nearly every opportunity, Nadella's MSFT has shaped up to be one that is building a few new kingdoms - in the cloud space, open dev tools, new consumer hardware (see the upcoming Surface lineup) - it's definitely not the Windows + Office company of old.