Yes, one of them admitted, "We have a perception problem."

You don't have a perception problem, I said. You have a reality problem. And the reality is that, despite whatever people living inside the Microsoft bubble might think, the rest of the world thinks you're a bully. And nobody likes bullies.

Another of Microsoft's big reality gaps is its insistence that it's one of the great tech innovators. Sure, Microsoft Research can go head to head with the best labs in the world; it's done some amazing things. But Microsoft's success is built on imitation, not innovation. Nearly everything it does, somebody else did first and usually better -- from graphical interfaces to music players, personal finance software, search engines, Web portals, virtualization software, phones, and PDAs, you name it.

A third reality disconnect: The notion that Microsoft has made computing easy and ubiquitous for the masses. Sure, it's preferable to master one set of file commands rather than a different batch for every program; I, for one, do not miss the Lotus 1-2-3 backslash. But Microsoft designs software under the assumption that everyone who uses it is either a gibbering simpleton or an engineer -- so it vacillates between condescending and pointless dialog boxes and incomprehensible error messages, with few stops in between.

The only real consumer success Microsoft has had is with the Xbox. That's because the in the late 1990s -- allowing it to avoid much of the internal politics that Brass describes in his editorial.