The whole piece is worth a read but to me this paragraph sums it all up:

“Who even knows what would please these people? They say they’re focusing their resources on bigger games, then they say they need smaller games. They say they love your games, then they shut your studio down. They make more money than they’ve ever made before, then they cut costs repeatedly, drastically, and cruelly. They buy more studios than they can manage, so the answer is not to use that aforementioned money to hire more (or perhaps better) managers, but to have fewer studios so management’s job can be easier.”

I hesitate to attribute it to accidental mismanagement. Surely Microsoft has enough experience by now to be pretty good at acquiring firms they think of as competition only to find some excuse to shut them down.

Microsoft has so many spinning plates up in the air right now and they have no idea how to handle them all. Eventually they’re all going to come crashing down and smash on the floor and it’s not going to be pretty.

Why are people so confused? Microsoft wanted monopoly by acquiring a bunch of companies, to consolidate their intellectual property and shaft it’s employees, the people who created the software in the first place.

Classic Microsoft.