I read a great article about an airplane manufacturer that had tight operations and grew at a solid, relatively slow rate. They had a really solid engineering c

I read a great article about an airplane manufacturer that had tight operations and grew at a solid, relatively slow rate. They had a really solid engineering corps, and didn't hire new engineers for certain But wasn't hiring much on certain parts of their engineering corps. Then they look around, and realize in a decade, everyone's going to retire and they'll lose all the knowledge that wasn't handed down. All that expertise, know-how, common sense, and hard lessons learned were going to evaporate if they didn't have young people working on it, and veterans handing down the valuable lessons. Microsoft absolutely needs to be developing and growing online business for the innovation and expertise that come from it. Even if they lose money on most of their online ventures, they still need to do it. Who thinks the desktop OS and business software is going to be a huge cash cow in 20 years? MS needs smart people learning, building, experimenting, and doing cool stuff online to keep going.