Microsoft is suffering a slow death by committee as bureaucracy stifles the companys core creativityHeres a question you dont often hear asked: whatever happened to Microsoft? To many people, it will seem a silly question. Microsoft, they point out, is still around – with a vengeance. Its a huge company worth $250bn (£160bn) that employs 94,000 people worldwide and earns vast profits. (OK, it made a loss last quarter for the first time in its history, but thats because it had to write off $6bn it blew in 2007 on a company called aQuantive which turned out to be a turkey.) Microsoft dominates the market for PC operating systems and Office software, products that are still licences to print money: its Xbox game console sweeps all before it; its server software is a big seller in the corporate world. In 2012, the companys net revenues totalled $74bn.Sure, there are some flies in the ointment. Microsofts search engine, Bing, has failed to break Googles stranglehold on search. The companys repeated attempts to break into the smartphone market have been failures, and its new partnership with Nokia hasnt changed that. Its effort to get into the music business with the Zune player (remember that?) turned out to be an embarrassing farce.As far as social networking is concerned, Microsofts modest shareholding in Facebook represents its only successful foray into that territory. It has zero presence in the tablet business (though its been making brave noises about a forthcoming product called Surface). And its share price has been flat for as long as I can remember.But when you set all these failures against the money pumps that are the Windows and Office franchises, its
