Um, their OS releases have almost always been late too.
I agree with his conclusion that MS is beyond its peak and in decline, but I don't think he presents very strong evidence.
Windows 3.0 was years late. Windows 3.1 was late.
Windows 4.0/95 was years late.
Windows NT was years late.
Windows XP SP2 was late.
Now Longhorn's late.
And we're still waiting for Cairo....
It's not just MS's applications that it has trouble getting out the door when originally promised.
But they are in decline. They have almost no presence in cellular phones or TV set-top boxes. They don't dominate on-line consumer and small-business financials over Quicken. MSN hasn't crushed AOL. MSNBC hasn't crushed CNN. XBox hasn't crushed Sony's PlayStation 2. The PDA market has tanked. Tablet PC has been a fiasco. The MediaCenter PC hasn't taken off. Apple dominates the on-line music business. Java is still very important. MS killed Passport recently. Etc.
Potential partners are very suspicious of MS. Who would trust them?
People who were investing in MS because the stock doubled every year left long ago. MS still has their monopoly profits from Office and Windows, for a while. Linux and free software are making a dent there. But what comes next for them? Where's their big growth market? They haven't found it yet. They'll keep throwing money around like it's going out of style, and they'll have some hits once in a while (mainly by buying successful products and companies from elsewhere). But it's hard to imagine them ever having a franchise like Windows again - in large part because they're a proven monopolist so they can't have things like per-processor contacts again.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
