Excellent article by John Kirk on the strategic mistakes Microsoft keeps making in its repeated attempts to recover the dominant position they held during the 90’s. Very appropriate in light of Satya Nadella’s recent public email about the future of the company:

Microsoft could learn much from Sun Tzu. Over the past fifteen to twenty years, Microsoft has engaged in the very worst kind of generalship. Microsoft has allowed their competitors to join forces and successfully scheme against them. Microsoft has responded to the successes of their competitors by forswearing their strongest weapons, abandoning their strongest defensive positions and rushing to attack their competitors wherever they may be, even if those battlefields were located where Microsoft was at its weakest and their competitors were are at their strongest. When these attacks inevitably failed, Microsoft resorted to wars of attrition. Yet in these wars of attrition, it was Microsoft, not their opponents, who suffered most, taking disproportionally greater losses than they inflicted.

Via Jean-Louis Gassée, who utterly destroys Nadella’s purposefully vague and cryptic words.