The company’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, has continued to deliver huge profits. They totaled well over $100 billion in the past 10 years alone and help sustain the economies of Seattle, Washington State and the nation as a whole. Its founder, Bill Gates, is not only the most generous philanthropist in history, but has also inspired thousands of his employees to give generously themselves. No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure.

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Dick Brass, writing in the New York Times about why Microsoft is no longer an innovator. Follow that clever bit of logic? Because Bill Gates is a good guy, we should all really hope Microsoft finally gets their shit together. Not sure how to explain Paul Allen and his string of failures while basically cavorting about like an overgrown child since leaving Microsoft 25 years ago, but whatever. And did you catch the part about how Microsoft has three CTO’s? Sounds like the definition of “chief” may have gotten lost.

His analysis is probably spot on, that Microsoft is too big and too unfocused and too internally competitive, but it’s nothing we haven’t heard plenty of times over the past decade. The whole piece reads like one big justification for the life and times of Dick Brass, bylined only as “a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004” – you know, right around the time Microsoft started its long, slow slide into obsolescence. Listen, Dick implores, I wanted to make cool shit but all those pesky VPs wouldn’t let me. A little digging reveals that Dick led Microsoft’s earliest tablet and e-book efforts – gee, I wonder why he’s suddenly showing up on the Times op-ed page? A page Dick boldly predicted would no longer be on printed paper in 2018.

I’m sure Dick Brass is a great guy but this seems like a time tested, perfected by political flunkies, cover-you-ass routine.