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The problem is, can anybody at MS write code anymore?

I'm beginning to wonder, and I personally know a few programmers at Microsoft. I think the real problem is business decisions rather than programming decisions though. Legacy code, backward compatibility, Microsoft's own lax nature about standing by its own API's. I remember when Office used to patch the kernel upon install. There was an article a while back about Microsoft having hundreds of different implementations of the same string class internally.

When I worked at Apple I remember one thing that impressed me more than anything else was how clean the API was in comparison to Windows, and how respected it was internally. I really think that Microsoft needs to go back to the drawing board and create an elegant API and kernel. If they don't have someone up to the task there now, they surely can afford to hire one.

That API mess they have is the curse AND blessing of the company. Consider that nearly all applications written for Windows 3.1 - 15 YEARS OLD - still pretty much run on the OS. Can’t do that with any other OS out there...

The nature of the beast is that backwards compatibility means business application compatibility and developer compatibility. Breaking that eliminates the strongest thing they have going - a stable platform and stable supply of developers.

You can be a developer who stopped learning the Windows API in 1995 and still program effectively for the platform!

I thought the best work MS did was when they put the Win95 interface on NT, which eventually became Windows 2000. Since then, I think they've steadily declined. XP was good, but IMHO, starting to show the typical MS bloat. Vista was, I think the collapsing of the OS onto itself.

You obviously know much more about the inside of the industry than me. My perception, from a user standpoint, is that both Vista and Office 2007 were driven by the marketing guys who said "make it look and act like OSX." The Windows core isn't OSX, and while I think it could be a very useable OS, what they're doing is putting a sports car body on a pickup. The sports car body destroys the utility, while still not looking like a sports car. I'd guess that everything went through committees of managers and came back to the programmers as edicts, leaving the programmers very little leeway in designing function. It then seems like they tried to build in the legacy features on an OS that was fundamentally incompatible with most existing hardware anyway. It seems like a system that tries to go in all directions at once, and consistently kneecaps itself.