Pretty much everyone I met at Microsoft was very smart. But at least within my division, the available energy was never utilized very effectively. I always compared it to a muscle car, sure that V8 has a lot of power, but boy that car can't handle for anything.<p>With that said, you just can't apply blanket statements to the company. "Microsoft isn't good at the web" just doesn't really mean anything. The Bing team is for all intents and purposes, a completely different company from the IE team, from the Xbox and Zune teams from DevDiv... How a given team at MS does largely depends on how effective its management is. Some teams have really effective managers, PMs, and developers that can execute. Others don't. There is very little (almost none) energy, process or direction that gets applied across the entire company.