IDG reports here that Microsoft will spend $9.5 billion on R&D this year.

What the heck are they going to spend it on? Bill Gates, quite notoriously, told me at a Berlin Etre quite some years ago that the cost of developing Longhorn was more than the US government spent putting a man on the moon.

Well, that was quite a waste of money, wasn't it?

IDG quotes Kevin Turner, he's Microsoft's COO, asHampi Coracles - pic Mike Magee saying that most of the money would be spent on cloud services. He also apparently said that Redmond will re-invent the company based on cloud services.

Well, the first thing he should maybe do is not waste quite as much money on R&D and buy a really great "cloud" service called Dropbox - it's so much better than anything those Google people do.

The second thing he should maybe think about is wonder how the heck Microsoft is going to compete with IBM on these so-called cloud services.

Thirdly, perhaps he should spend $3 billion on a fabrication plant and hire loads of bunny people because Jerry Sanders III was quite right, only real men have fabs.

Fourthly, he should shout at Steve Ballmer a lot and say don't waste time competing with Apple and abandon any ideas of developing a uPad or a uPhone.

Fifthly, er that's it.