[spr93]

A "group of people ... collectively making decisions" doesn't help make sense of anything. A company is itself a group collectively making decisions. Where you draw the "group" line is arbitrary unless you understand the decision-making structure. From the outside you can only make assumptions about which teams or management layers define the "the group."

I also used to believe that personifying companies was silly, but now that I've worked closely with the C-suites of various companies, I've come to understand that companies do have unique cultures and company culture matters. It's the culture that guides decision-making--does customer service and long-term investment matter more than next quarter's goals? Do we want to do thing that's most profitable in the short term because we're cavalier about staying dominant in the long run or are we cautiously managed?

As others have pointed out, MSFT's execs grew up in the Gates-Ballmer culture. MSFT's current actions are consistent with its past actions and attitudes under that regime. I think it's therefore totally legitimate for the parent poster to be concerned about Microsoft, and express that concern by personifying the entity.

[wvenable]

This swift reversal is consistent with Microsoft's past actions and attitudes? I don't feel that's the case.

These days we seem to be unprecedented access to the internal workings of companies; from exactly which execs are making decisions to the opinions of individual managers and developers. It used to be that you'd have to talk about Microsoft as a monolith because this level of information wasn't available.

But I don't think saying "this is just Microsoft being Microsoft" is a very useful or interesting comment. If anything, this is just the start of defining what Microsoft will be in the future. We haven't really seen the conclusion yet and it's definitely not assured that things are going regress to the 90s.