The end of an empire--a single, lucid paragraph that sums up Microsoft's decline
"How did all these billions of dollars slip through Ballmer's fingers? How did Microsoft find itself a leader in nothing and playing catchup on every front -- in MP3 players, on the cloud, in search? How did Amazon roll out S3 and not Microsoft? How did Google control the search market? How did Apple take over online music retailing and MP3 hardware? How did Microsoft let that market for smartphones get away from them? How is it that everything about Microsoft's business is backward looking? This is the real problem they have now. They're fighting wars that are already over. They're investing huge energy into defending things they already control, like Windows. As they do this, as they put so much effort into lost causes like search (Bing v. Google) they keep missing out on new things. So their problems just keep getting bigger and bigger, like a snowball rolling down a hill."
