Microsoft excels at a vary specific type of marketing.
While they suck at the traditional approaches, (Jerry Seinfeld / Bill Gates etc) they are willing to spend insane amounts of money so they can leverage what works. Buying Halo / Bungie sacrificing all that cross platform money so they could "buy" hype. Buying Hotmail for far more than it was ever going to be worth so they could change the backend to use MS server. The problem for MS is they don't know how to scale back to less profitable industries.
Edit: It could be argued that MS simply understands the value of creating a monopoly and is willing to spend to create new ones. They seem to make money selling MS branded mice without those tactics just fine, but I don't know how profitable that is.
While they suck at the traditional approaches, (Jerry Seinfeld / Bill Gates etc) they are willing to spend insane amounts of money so they can leverage what works. Buying Halo / Bungie sacrificing all that cross platform money so they could "buy" hype. Buying Hotmail for far more than it was ever going to be worth so they could change the backend to use MS server. The problem for MS is they don't know how to scale back to less profitable industries.
Edit: It could be argued that MS simply understands the value of creating a monopoly and is willing to spend to create new ones. They seem to make money selling MS branded mice without those tactics just fine, but I don't know how profitable that is.