Why I disagree when people say Microsoft is no longer leading the way

Just as some seem to look back on Microsoft and portray it as having been so good, there seem to be some rose colored glasses looking at XP too. Yes it was hugely better than earlier consumer versions of Windows, but between it's inferiority to OS X, and massive number of security holes, and the various ways people were locked into it, it was pretty sick.

I think it was some of the disappointments of Vista that somehow made XP seem better in retrospect Sure XP was popular in the sense of it being widespread, but the same could be said of herpes.

It's sort of like Bush making Reagan and Nixon seem better. Nixon, the criminal, sure looks saintly now. And as much as some may have disagreed with Reaganomics, he still came across as honest about his intentions, and likable with a sense of humor.

Its funny how perspectives age.

You say that like it is a bad thing. Let's hypothetically say you can duplicate all of the Excel macros and VB apps which, ahem, run the world with a sufficient quantity of (e.g.) Perl scripts. That doesn't by itself help anybody -- you still have to teach them "Hey guys, Perl: it solves boring business problems in addition to enabling golf games." Microsoft has done an awful, awful lot of teaching over the years.

While you sit at your desk analyzing this and that, thousands of business flourish and make money, thanks to the privacy killers (Google), the imperial monopolists (Microsoft) or the vertical Nazis (Apple) or the old Nazis (IBM). What have YOU been doing to change the world like that, huh?

And don't come all "I have been doing Linux!" on me, because the largest amount of contributors to Linux are the very companies you pathetically try to bash from your fantastic jobs as code monkeys at ACME International Ltd.

"Hacker" folks need to understand that software is just a tool for business and consumers to use to get shit done; it's not an end on itself. The massive success of all these companies, MS included, shows that shit is getting done, lives are improving, people are making money and being happy.

In the end, that's all that matters. "Experts" have been killing IBM, then Microsoft, then Oracle, even Apple, for years. These people grow old, retire, and these companies continue (and will continue) to be successful for a simple reason: they provide value.

While they suck at the traditional approaches, (Jerry Seinfeld / Bill Gates etc) they are willing to spend insane amounts of money so they can leverage what works. Buying Halo / Bungie sacrificing all that cross platform money so they could "buy" hype. Buying Hotmail for far more than it was ever going to be worth so they could change the backend to use MS server. The problem for MS is they don't know how to scale back to less profitable industries.

Edit: It could be argued that MS simply understands the value of creating a monopoly and is willing to spend to create new ones. They seem to make money selling MS branded mice without those tactics just fine, but I don't know how profitable that is.