I go so far as to say, starting a bit over two decades ago, that one of the &quot;secrets&quot; of Microsoft&#x27;s success is their long term ability to write software that basically works.  As I mention in another part of this subthread (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10352022" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10352022</a>), they beat their &quot;Office&quot; competitors in part by not losing that ability when all else but Borland did.  (Borland didn&#x27;t, but lost at higher levels of management, including buying one of those failed competitors.)<p>As far as I can tell, general management incompetence, including of course &quot;political bullshit&quot;, is most responsible for their post-XP problems (along with becoming too toxic for healthy peer companies to want work with them, but I&#x27;m not sure that matters when enough of the people at the top are so bad).<p>Although ... what would you say was responsible for the failure of Longhorn?  Wasn&#x27;t that in part technical?  Or did that derive from higher up?