If your point is that the Microsoft Corporation, as a business, is doing fine, then I agree with you. Afterall they are the 5th largest corporation (measured by capitalization). And yes, their business is mostly the enterprise side. However... Apple came from nowhere to become the SECOND largest corporation - so no one should think that the consumer side isn't relevant. MS has got the enterprise side sown up, for sure. However every corp needs to GROW to survive, and MSFT is struggling to GROW. It appears that they want now to shore up their mobile and consumer devices side of things - can you blame them? Not only is MSFT struggling to gorw, they're also struggling with entry into the Mobile Space and with Developer and Consumer Mindshare - and mind share is so very important. It's what propelled Apple into #2 position (behind Exxon Oil). So when you hear/read that MSFT is yesterday's news and their offerings are being ignored and hated, what you are witnessing is peoples' sentiment - and this is a clue about Mindshare. These days a tech firm can fall in as little as 5 years. It may have taken 20 years to kill Motorola, or 10 years to kill Nokia, but the horizon is shorter today and Microsoft has to do everything they can to grab Mindshare in order to secure their future. I still believe that with their enormous enterprise position and almost bottomless bags of cash that they will get over the current problems with their Win8 tablet sales - even if that picture is hard to see in the near term - but so far I see absolutely NO progress with Mindshare. People routinely mock Microsoft and their products. On Sept 10th when Apple had their showing of new phones I was looking through Flipboard and I couldn't help but be aghast that EVERY SINGLE tech story was about Apple and their new phones. Now THAT'S Marketing power, my friends, and without Mindshare that's not possible. I think Microsoft's products are good enough (for them to have a good business) but the company absolutely SUCKS at Marketing and Promotion and they should really STUDY Apple in order to get a clue for what to do. And if they really want to increase Mindshare then they need to clue in that people hate them for a REASON. Yeah, Karma's a biotch.

It totally resonated with me. A few weeks back I totally had a "Peter Gibbons" day at work and just flat out wanted to change [i]careers[/i] - not go to a different employer, just flat out stop programming. I'm not sure why exactly I started feeling this way, but this article really hit a nerve with me. It's just flat out not fun. I have a co-worker that is consistently changing frameworks, APIs, new implementations, and find out how to "weave" them in to our infrastructure. It's like buying an erector set, then seeing that Lego has something you like, but instead of challenging yourself to make the same thing w/ what YOU have, you spend 4x as much time making your stuff work w/ the Legos... ugh.