The really object lesson here is the strange behaviour of giant money printing companies when their core business slows down. If Microsoft had stopped at o/s and productivity and released all of the extra money to shareholders as dividends then I'd guess Bill Gates would have an extra $10bn of cold hard cash to solve the world's problems with. Their share price would now be gracefully declining as the market matures away from them, but shareholders would have had large sums to reinvest to better effect than this.
Of course, if they'd stopped at just o/s they'd be a smaller company and possibly have been taken over so this isn't a tirade on takeovers per se, but that's where real management comes in. Complementary products which are well integrated into your core, good! (at least for you. Not necessarily for the people who have to support or use more of your crap). Random purchases of free IP phone brands and hardware manufacturers with no obvious synergy, bad!
Amazon and Apple have been spectacular at this, at least so far. Discretely purchasing $10-$100m sized capabilities to speed up your R and D is tremendous management and even if you have a 50% complete failure rate it affects neither your bank balance nor your brand.
Google have been less good, and HP have probably pissed away more than half of their shareholders equity on Autonomy and Compaq alone.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
