I've said it before, but I feel Microsoft's problem is that they cannot say no to things.
This serves them well in the Enterprise, where every installation requires customisations (and people can afford to pay for the maintenance of those customisations) but spills over into everything they do, meaning they cannot keep things simple.
The dozens of different Windows versions, the fact that their new flagship tablet ships in two versions with incompatible instruction sets, where one will only run "Windows 8 style" applications, and that the operating system itself has two completely different user interfaces that doesn't interoperate well. Actually taking the Kin to product launch instead of killing it off internally and refocusing efforts at a time when Windows Mobile was losing market share.
>Actually taking the Kin to product launch instead of killing it off internally and refocusing efforts at a time when Windows Mobile was losing market share.
The Kin is a case study in everything that's wrong with Microsoft as a company.
In-fighting and turf wars, discarding products they bought up (e.g., Danger) to shoehorn in Microsoft technologies while failing to leverage their own technologies in places where they'd make sense, lack of a cohesive corporate vision, the list goes on.
Ars had a pretty decent post-mortem of the project.
This serves them well in the Enterprise, where every installation requires customisations (and people can afford to pay for the maintenance of those customisations) but spills over into everything they do, meaning they cannot keep things simple.