Today BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl published a lengthy open letter to Steve Ballmer, urging him to borrow a trick from Steve Jobs’ playbook and guide Microsoft down a more focused path (i.e. software and software only).

Quoth Hesseldahl:

So who has focus? That other Steve. You know, the turtle-necked guy in California who keeps annoying you by selling iPods and computers that typically don’t run on Windows. You could learn a lot from him. Focus saved his company from oblivion.

Hesseldahl also highlights a litany of tech mega-mergers (Lucent-Ascend, AOL-Time Warner, Compaq-Digital, etc...) to highlight how such large undertakings often lead to failure.

It’s a very good read, and I agree completely. Microsoft is a jack of all trades, and outside of their software business (and some success with gaming), they haven’t shown mastery in any of the markets they’ve jumped into. Web services? They’re a distant third. Digital media players? They’re a distant second. Microsoft has become a reactive company, trying to jump onto the latest tech trend or product segment without much success. I agree that Microsoft needs to re-focus on their strengths, and when they expand into new markets, they need to be proactive, not merely reactive. They need to innovate instead of merely developing a product to simply respond to Apple or Google or whoever their competition may be. The Yahoo merger would do nothing to improve Microsoft in this regard.