The biggest problem with Microsoft after say 2005 was that it let things like Windows and Office drag it down to the point that if things competed with either,

The biggest problem with Microsoft after say 2005 was that it let things like Windows and Office drag it down to the point that if things competed with either, they were killed with fire. For example, look at what Ray Ozzie got built with Azure, or what J Allard did with the Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune, and Courier. Azure was in a prime spot to do what Amazon ended up doing - being the computing platform for the cloud. Instead, nobody at Microsoft wanted to listen to Ray because selling Windows and Office on PC's and servers is the thing that drives MSFT today. Thus, if it competed with either, it's not going to get the kind of respect it deserves. Look at where Microsoft is now on the consumer side. J Allard and his team were basically paving the way for Microsoft to make great consumer devices. Zune basically gave them Metro UI, Xbox 360 showed them how to do consumer hardware and supply chain management worldwide, and they were working on the Courier about the time the iPad hit. Microsoft did nothing with it and the iPad replaced literally millions of low end Windows laptops and netbooks. It took Microsoft something like 3 or 4 years to have an even competitive touch tablet experience with the Surface, and then it bundled desktop Office on a touch device. The iPhone debuted in like 2007 and Microsoft is still peddling a desktop mode Word Processor on a touch tablet as a good idea. The Surface launched without consulting the one team that had shipped tens of millions of hardware devices at Microsoft - the Xbox team and consequently built about 3 million too many Surface RT units which cost the company $900 million in losses. For as much as Microsoft is trying, and they really are trying, Windows and Office are as much of a curse as they are a blessing in the modern era of devices, services, and the cloud. Where they end up is anyone's guess, but all the people who seemed to "get it" at Microsoft the last 7 years or so basically got ran out of the company and I have no idea if the people who are still there really "get it" enough to compete with the likes of Samsung, Google, Sony, Amazon, and Apple. Also, remember when Microsoft was so terrified of Google owning search that they tried to buy Yahoo! for $45 billion? Imagine if that had gone through.