They bought Kinect, other than that I can't see any real innovation in the last 5 years. Consider there is plenty of talk about surface, but they where talking about it before the iPad came out and it's still little more than a tech demo. Bing is not bad, but it's interface is on par with Duck Duck Go and hardly the 'revolution' in search they were hoping for.

That said, they do seem to keep refining things and that's a path to great products. But, innovation is more than just doing a mash-up that meets everyone's expectations without any 'wow' factor.

We must have very different definitions of innovation, or even success. So you're saying the Windows Phone and Metro isn't at all innovative? How do you figure?

>They bought Kinect

And Apple bought FingerWorks, which means there was no real innovation from Apple in iPhone multitouch technology, same with Siri. Or does it?

There is a lot to getting research technology into a usable, affordable and marketable form than just buying it and copy pasting the code.

There is a lot. But that still doesn't explain why Microsoft has canceled some actually interesting projects just because "they weren't Windows" -- the Courier comes to mind.