Why MS Office has not created any new tech for well over a decade

I recommend reading the follow up comments on Reddit. There are some real gems in there from current and ex MS employees.

The core lesson is a good one for startups: don't let the PMs run your technology development. A good engineering idea attracts customers, once customers are on board they want fixes, changes, new features. That's all fine, as long as they make sense within the technology direction. Once the customers start asking for ponies and unicorns and the PMs start listening to them for direction, the product gets stuck.

"I hope, I deeply hope, that the computing power of mobile devices increases to the point that we see another PC-like shift toward decentralization. When every mobile phone can hold terabytes of storage, when networking links are > 1Gb/s between phones, will we move away from carriers running the show, and move back toward giving users control again?"

I hope the industry will find the right path between the horrors of the closed ecosystems on one side and the horror of the JS-is-actually-not-bad-since-we-have-no-choice "open" Web.