Want a good case of whiplash? First read Robert Scoble’s blog entry about curing Microsoft of its corporate “angst.” Then read John Dvorak’s new PC Magazine column about the company.

Scoble’s long post, built around a bizarro riff on Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, lays out a five-point plan for ” tun[ing] up Microsoft’s economic engine and get[ting] ready for the 2010’s.” One of his five recommendations is that the company should buy every employee a top-of-the-line Dell box with two or three screens (one of which could be used to play Second Life). The others are somewhat less silly.

Dvorak provides a terse, contrarian view. He says that Microsoft’s angst isn’t a symptom of a problem; it is the problem:

It must have some of the lowest corporate self-esteem for any dominant company in the history of modern business. The company is like the panicky old woman wondering how she lost a penny in her purse while giving exact change in the express line at the grocery store. Hey lady, you are holding things up!

Microsoft’s seemingly permanent state of fear about its impending doom, argues Dvorak, leads it to reflexively pursue defensive projects that end up backfiring. His main example: the seemingly successful launch of Internet Explorer in response to Mark Andreessen’s trash-talking about how Netscape was going to take over the world. By bundling the free browser with Windows, Dvorak says, Microsoft opened the door to endless legal hassles, security nightmares, and PR imbroglios: “If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column – billions.”

His radical prescription for the company:

It needs to face the fact that this entire preoccupation with the browser business is bad for the company and bad for the user. Microsoft should pull the browser out of the OS and discontinue all IE development immediately. It should then bless the Mozilla.org folks with a cash endowment and take an investment stake in Opera, to influence the future direction of browser technology from the outside in. Then, Microsoft can worry about security issues that are OS-only in nature, rather than problems compounded by Internet Explorer.

Of this I can assure you. People will not stop buying Microsoft Windows if there is no built-in browser. Opera and/or Firefox can be bundled with the OS as a courtesy, and all the defaults can lead to Microsoft.com if need be.

I’m not completely convinced by Dvorak’s argument, but there’s definitely something to what he’s saying. His article forces you to think about Microsoft and its strategy in new ways. And, more broadly, it forces you to reconsider the truism that corporate paranoia is always a good thing. Too much paranoia can, it seems, be as dangerous as too little.