When banksters and sales guys run the country, the only innovation is new ways to steal

........Microsoft's technological decline since Bill Gates left in 2000.

The speculation is that the changeover from having a manager who was an actual technology person, to having a manager who has no technology background (Steve Ballmer, who came up through the business office, not through engineering), meant that Microsoft's upper management lost the ability to actually evaluate the technology proposals and projects and manage their development, and the result is a series of products which are increasingly late, bloated, slow, and buggy, if they manage to ship at all.

This is, this is true of most big companies today in the United States. They're run by salesmen, cronies of the oligarchs who control half the wealth of the US, and salesmen are not by nature reflective souls and are chosen for loyalty, not for intelligence. They arrogantly believe it is not necessary to understand technical details of what they're selling in order to make proper judgements about its content and scope, all they have to do is sell, sell, sell and it all works out in the end. The problem is that since they don't understand the technology and worse yet have no desire to understand the technology, they're ill equipped to make critical decisions about product direction and feasibility. They fall prey to yes men, fads, and scams, and pour company resources into directions that are not productive. Furthermore, if it's not a product they can sell they aren't interested in it. Pure R&D is not something that they can sell, so they don't spend any money on it. This produces better quarterly profits for a while, but eventually their product line gets stale because it's just bigger/faster/smaller variants on the same old same old, not anything new and fundamentally different (see: Cisco Systems). And that's the state of the economy in the US today -- not competitive because it's been starved of core R&D. What innovation is being done is being done by foreigners, or by leftover relics of the 80's, and even that is just rehashing of old concepts that we had in the late 70's/early 80's. We basically have created nothing (zero) new in the past thirty years -- all we've done is implement things that we had already designed thirty years ago.

http://blog.badtux.net/2009/10/end-of-innovation.html