I lost all interest in reading the article after looking at the msdn.com domain.
EDIT: Downvoters, I don't see how this is wrong. Microsoft has a long history of spreading FUD about competitors (Florian Mueller/FOSSPatents, http://www.scroogled.com/ [when their own practices are very much the same], sponsoring fake studies that show that the TCO of Linux is much greater than that of Windows, and so on.) I certainly would be interested in an unbiased opinion on the topic, but I don't think anyone on Microsoft's payroll can give me that.
The article is all about the difference between the innovation being created by low level employees and the stupid decisions by top level management who want to shut it all down. The author is among the former and even says he doesn't like ads, so I think your proposition that he is a Microsoft shill working in an elaborate anti-Google marketing campaign is misguided.
There's not much excuse for not reading things and then complaining about them.
James Whittaker was not a "low level employee," he was a director of engineering. This is the same level as Kurzweil. At that level he was responsible for many management decisions, some of them probably "stupid."
A company the size of Google has 100's of "Director"s. There are probably 3 or 4 layers between a director and the CEO... if not more. I doubt he had much to do with the actual market direction of the company (ironically... since the word "Director" would lead you to believe that it had something to do with directing).
Fair enough. I may have read that incorrectly by focusing on him saying "shipping code", but he's still not the part of management at the very top making company wide decisions that have the power to crush large swaths of innovation (i.e. everything has to fit into google+) and that is more what I was referring to.
Guess what? Microsoft isn't being upfront about the costs of maintaining and providing a high quality email service. The bills have to be paid somehow, and that's why Google's ads are targeted using email keywords. Microsoft, on the other hand is using free Outlook accounts as a loss leader, and I can assure you with a great degree of certainty that they would do the same if they had as much of the market as Google does.
EDIT: Downvoters, I don't see how this is wrong. Microsoft has a long history of spreading FUD about competitors (Florian Mueller/FOSSPatents, http://www.scroogled.com/ [when their own practices are very much the same], sponsoring fake studies that show that the TCO of Linux is much greater than that of Windows, and so on.) I certainly would be interested in an unbiased opinion on the topic, but I don't think anyone on Microsoft's payroll can give me that.