Microsoft has the technical chops for OS's, no doubt.
The business chops to introduce and push device platforms is iffy--they got XBox through, but against weak competition and with very high expense. Apple and Google are much stouter competition than Sony and Nintendo and have significant advantages over Microsoft, not least among them the fact that Google has completely undercut Microsoft's traditional point of entry in the OS market (the low cost commodity OS).
Since Xbox, Microsoft can't get a decent offering together until well after the real competition and growth stage in the market is over. It's not like IE where they can leverage their desktop monopoly and deliver a compelling product 2-3 years after the competition and clean up--lately they're only really competing 4-8 years too late, in markets where their dominance in other markets gives them no advantage and their competitors have already moved on to newer, higher-growth markets. Maybe if they weren't spread too thin and were focused on Windows Phone 7 as much as Apple was focused on iPhone years ago and it was still 2008 or 2009, but none of these conditions are true. And they're not likely to become true in time to affect this particular project.
> Microsoft has the technical chops for OS's, no doubt.
Kind of. How many really good OSs they made? DOS 4? Windows classic? Windows 3? Windows NT?
Out of that list, only the VMS-inspired NT could be called cutting edge. It had a microkernel-ish architecture with multiprocessing, multithreading and security wired in from day one. And they hired the NT team out of DEC.
I have great respect for the SQL Server team. Even after diverging from Sybase, it matured nicely and is a very good database server, comparable to MySQL and PostgreSQL. ;-)
The business chops to introduce and push device platforms is iffy--they got XBox through, but against weak competition and with very high expense. Apple and Google are much stouter competition than Sony and Nintendo and have significant advantages over Microsoft, not least among them the fact that Google has completely undercut Microsoft's traditional point of entry in the OS market (the low cost commodity OS).
Since Xbox, Microsoft can't get a decent offering together until well after the real competition and growth stage in the market is over. It's not like IE where they can leverage their desktop monopoly and deliver a compelling product 2-3 years after the competition and clean up--lately they're only really competing 4-8 years too late, in markets where their dominance in other markets gives them no advantage and their competitors have already moved on to newer, higher-growth markets. Maybe if they weren't spread too thin and were focused on Windows Phone 7 as much as Apple was focused on iPhone years ago and it was still 2008 or 2009, but none of these conditions are true. And they're not likely to become true in time to affect this particular project.