The 7 is for "7 Years too Late"

A GREAT piece on Microsoft's slide into irrelevance by Fake Steve Jobs, the essence of which is this battery of rhetorical questions:

How did all these billions of dollars slip through Ballmer's fingers? How did Microsoft find itself a leader in nothing and playing catch-up on every front -- in MP3 players, on the cloud, in search. How did Amazon roll out S3 and not Microsoft? How did Google control the search market? How did Apple take over online music retailing and MP3 hardware? How did Microsoft let that market for smartphones get away from them? How is it that everything about Microsoft's business is backward looking?

Sure, Windows 7 is coming out soon. [Cue musical fanfare and cut to vox pops.] After eight years (almost to the day), that'll finally bring Windows users to a level that kinda sorts approaches what's already been available on OS X for quite some time. And then in another two years, as their OS development cycle brings another system upgrade, Apple will once again extend its lead even further. When it comes to checking my calendar for key technology-related dates, the release of Ubuntu's "Karmic Koala" on October 29 holds much more excitement. Windows 7 is merely Microsoft's attempt to recover after fumbling Vista; Ubuntu, however, is making Linux into a viable OS alternative for the mainstream user.

It's also worth reading this New York Times profile, which, as FSJ points out in a follow-up post, dances the dance of feigned deference while trying to get a simple message across: that Microsoft is a lumbering, outdated behemoth.