Microsoft

Stability. Microsoft isn't going anywhere for a quite a while, and as long as you don't totally screw up, if they do close down your division or restructure, they are good about placing you somewhere else within the company.

Working conditions are generally good. It's really hard to get fired from Microsoft, which is great for the employee.

Microsoft is made up of so much bureaucracy and red tape that it's difficult to really feel like you make a difference until you're higher up the chain.

There are so many layers of management and so many silos that it's very difficult to get anything beyond trivial tasks done in a decent length of time.

This leads to huge investments of time and money that probably aren't truly necessary.

Sr. Management needs to pick a direction and go there. The age of being everything to everybody (mom & pop as well as huge enterprises) is very different now, particularly with the rapid growth of competing platforms and browsers.

Instead of having a clear, concise mission statement, Microsoft's only goal appears to be to identify a market that already exists, spend truck loads of money getting into the market, try to change that market to their own favor (rather than adapt to the market), and then squeeze everybody else out.

While this proved quite successful for them in the past, consumers are much smarter now. And as NPD numbers show, they're starting to vote with their wallets. And the Vista debacle was a huge contributor to that.