On Feb. 3, a former Microsoft executive named Dick Brass published an op-ed piece in The New York Times that suggested his ex-company was "failing" due to a combination of infighting and an inability to innovate. Those issues, Brass said, had led to Microsoft losing the lead on a number of technological developments, including e-reader technology, that if carried out successfully could have potentially led it to greater market share in various areas.

For example, Brass suggests that work on a tablet PC was effectively hamstrung in 2001 when "the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn't like the concept" and "thought our efforts doomed." To this day, he asserts, "you still can't use Office directly on a tablet PC."

Microsoft responded (responding is basically your own response, when an ex-employee gets their hands on a megaphone as large as the Times) on the official Microsoft blog. "Former Microsoft employee Dick Brass has an op-ed in the NYT arguing that our better days are behind us," Frank Shaw, corporate vice president of corporate communications, wrote in a Feb. 4 posting. "Obviously, we disagree."

Shaw went on to argue that Microsoft aims first and foremost to deliver technologies with "broad impact." When it comes to things like tablet PCs, he argued, "You could argue that this should have happened faster. And sometimes it does. But for a company whose products touch vast numbers of people, what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed." He highlighted Xbox 360 as "the first high definition console" and cited the upcoming Project Natal as "the first to deliver controller-free experiences" for gamers.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has insisted at several points that he wants the company playing to the broadest possible audience. "You can't be high priced," he told a gathering of financial analysts back in July. "That doesn't get us to the high volume that we aspire to."

When it comes to tech, you don't necessarily need to be first out the gate--both the iPod and the iPhone were late entrants to the portable media player and smartphone markets--but you do need to produce something that offers a differentiator of some sort if you want to build and sustain a competitive advantage. Every time a company announces an upcoming "game-changing" product, you wait to see whether that device or software platform will indeed hit that sweet spot between the radical and familiar, and become one of those objects that reorganize your whole world. It's possible for any company to offer a technology like that, but the larger ones run the risk of becoming calcified in their habits and self-destructive at their core--something that Brass seems to allude to.

What do you think? Is Microsoft "failing," as Brass asserts? Or does the company have something going in this supposed focus on disseminating technology to a wide base through its massive channels?