How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo in Vanity Fair demolishes the idea of the stack rank for intelligent tasks. The corporate in-fighting that the bottom-10%-out approach created is breathtaking.

On the meat of the article, it is true that MS has been outpaced by Apple in the last decade, but that is true of pretty well all companies in the industries Apple is in.

I wonder if a more interesting take on the story, having described the decade of “decline”, would have been “what could / would / should you do with a company with $50bn in the bank and $17bn of annual revenues”?