This post from an anonymous MS insider hits a lot of good points on what's wrong (and right) with Microsoft - but more importantly, it makes points that many companies would do well to listen to. Take this, for instance - which is very much in line with things Laura Ries has written:

Stop fighting major wars on multiple fronts simultaneously. It is simply ridiculous for current management to assume that MSFT can fight the biggest and best companies on earth, across a dozen or more battlegrounds, and still hope to prevail. Just take a look at some of the folks MSFT is going up against: SONY (and Nintendo) in gaming, Nokia and many others in mobile, GOOG and YHOO in Search, Everyone from Alcatel to Siemens in IPTV, IBM/Oracle/SAP (and smaller players Salesforce.com. Rightnow, etc.) in ERP and CRM, IBM/Adobe/FOSS in middleware and development, AAPL and most of MSFT's former partners in mobile media, AAPL and GNU/Linux in Operating Systems, and FOSS in personal productivity. Worse, these battles are spreading MSFT too thin, and leaving its core cash cows increasingly vulnerable (would Vista have taken 5 years to develop if management hadn't been distracted with a dozen other battles?). MSFT needs to prioritize the current list down to something more realistic, while ensuring that the appropriate vigilance is maintained on the crown jewels. As a start, any new battle should require them to give up an existing one. Notice how that NEVER happens and they're always additive instead?

In the small, the new roadmap we just published takes that thinking into account: we (Cincom Smalltalk) simply cannot pretend that we can keep up with every development trend in the industry - while we aren't tiny, we certainly aren't as big as IBM, Sun, or Microsoft.

It's something that every company needs to keep in mind though: MS might dwarf a lot of outfits, but even they can be spread too thin and be fighting too many battles. If you're a product manager, as I am, that paragraph I quoted above provides a lot of food for thought.

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