Your comment got me thinking. I think the issue is not that MS are slow - they used to be pretty quick at some things. Rather, it's that they've always been willfully ignorant of the larger computing culture. They never had any interest in connecting with or learning from the richest programming traditions or the best ideas or the hacker communities. They just created their own technological anti-utopia, a sort of Greenspunland in which myriads of half-baked, wildly complicated things conflict with each other. Entire armies of programmers grow up there and never leave.

I know this sounds cranky. It's because I started my professional programming life in this dark forest and it took years to find my way out. And I think it's a shame that they dominated the industry for as long as they did, because they wrought such damage on the level of ideas.

There's a certain type of smart-but-ignorant programmer who is infatuated with his own IQ, doesn't want to learn from anybody who knows more, and just cranks out reams of code (often filled with pseudo-abstractions that make it a lot worse than plain old bad code). I think of MS as the corporate equivalent of this type.

Edit: I should add that not everybody at MS is like this, of course. But the exceptions are people who grew up outside that culture.