One of the things Jobs did when he returned was cut all the distracting crap and refocus the company on what it was good at.

One of the things that's always mystified me is the vast vast software and hardware product lineup that Microsoft has to service...mostly in areas it's not terribly good at. If you really look at where Microsoft has done well, it's not in consumer electronics devices like music players or phones, online services like search, consumer software like flight simulators or whatever and unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn't make computers (and probably shouldn't)...Microsoft does one thing and one thing really well, productivity software and providing centralized management of the enterprise. Both areas that they really don't have any serious competitors in. Apple doesn't care much about the enterprise, and iWorks is just a passable replacement for Office.

For my money, I still can't buy a comparable office productivity suite anywhere. iWorks is not bad, OO.org stinks, and everything else is distant also rans. Outlook on the Exchange ecosystem simply is awesome. And Windows these days ain't half bad.

Why are these pieces of software great? Because they can be abused beyond all recognition to do tasks so far off script that it can sometimes be jaw dropping, and still they function exactly fine...and the path to that madness isn't really all that long...and in a pinch, you can MacGuyver together an Office solution to many real world problems in a snap and the software will see you through the day. It's not great software, it's generally poorly designed, and full of feature creep, but it gets you through some serious pinches. Some of these user patterns are so common that they've become the defacto use for the software. Does anybody balance their checkbook in Excel anymore?

Microsoft needs to stop mucking about in areas that they'll never have a credible presence and focus the entire company on this core competency. We will always, always, always, need email, a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation tool.

Questions they should be asking themselves:

Why doesn't Exchange and Outlook expose enterprise IM better? This should be standard everywhere.

Why does collaboration with Office products still stink?

Why don't I have an instant file name search tool with optional content index built into the OS better than the crap they already provide? Something like everything http://www.voidtools.com/ with a Lucene index for full text search. This stuff doesn't have to drag the entire OS down.

Why doesn't Microsoft have a centralized and updated on-line repository for driver management (redirect-able to a local Enterprise server)?

Why does every Windows computer not ship with an IDE and half a dozen languages? How come I don't have Perl & Python installed by default?

Why the hell is Visio so poorly integrated with the other Office tools? This seems like a no brainer to me. The amount of half-assed diagram and chart building people do in PowerPoint is absurd.

Why doesn't Microsoft control the end-user software distribution channel by now? Why do I have Steam installed when Microsoft built everything to support gaming on my PC except for that last bit? Seriously, what the hell?

Why does the built in defragger suck so bad? Why do I have to defrag at all?

Why do I have to get virus scanning software? Why does Microsoft make virus scanning software and hardly promote it? Why isn't that just part of some Windows update? Don't look for something to certify protection status, and then not be the provider of that software.

Why does IE consistently suck? If there's ever a productivity tool that needs to be the best in class like Word and Excel, it's IE.

Why does Office not have photo and video productivity software? It doesn't have to be great, Paint.net is pretty good for photo editing. Ditch Paint, and get with it. There's some upsell opportunity here, everybody needs a paint program. For that matter, make a variant of PowerPoint as a stupid simple Vector Graphics tool...everybody uses it for that anyway, just formalize it and turn it into a revenue opportunity.

How can we better integrate our Office products? Everybody routinely uses the other tools to build content for Word documents, and Word to edit text for the other tools. Cut all the overlapping crap out and just use those tools instead. I shouldn't have a table and a drawing editor in Word, but I should be able to paste something from Excel into Word without the formatting getting screwed all to hell and the table running past the edges of the document margins. Just open the appropriate tool for the job when needed.

And then I should be able to use the copy and other assets I make in Word to better feed Publisher (which is also something strangely absent from most Office installs, but does a passable job for simple Desktop Publishing).

Basically, make your content generating tools generate content for each other, do it really well, and then open the APIs so other people can play in this new productivity ecosystem.

You know what I routinely need? I need a best in class OCR tool to mass OCR lots of scanned documents. That would make me super productive. Why isn't that part of Office? Why am I stuck with an absolutely unusable and ancient format designed for digital faxes?

You know what I would have given a left foot for in High School and College and Grad School? A decent, highly integrated CAS (not Excel), at least on par (and preferably compatible with) with my TI-89, but at better resolution with more features and functionality, and that let me copy and paste equations and such from-to the tool.

Microsoft already owns this area, they should be looking for more ways to monetize on it. I just gave them 3 or 4 new products they could sell as part of a bonus back for Office and make some cash off of it. Instead, we get Bing, Zune, Windows Phone, Songsmith, Streets, WorldWide Telescope, Autocollage and other useless, aborted or otherwise DOA products.

Why the hell does Microsoft still have Works? Even the webpage for Works https://www.microsoft.com/products/works/default.mspx looks like an abortion. Seriously, who is the target for that? Just sell a cheaper Office and keep everybody in your one software ecosystem.