"Microsoft Is Dead"

[drhayden1]

Microsoft might be in the center of many critics' sights for any number of reasons right now, but few serious, well-written detractors have made the leap to calling the company 'dead.' Sure, John C. Dvorak will say anything for a pageview, but Paul Graham, a partner in startup VC Y Combinator, just penned an intriguing essay titled Microsoft is Dead. Instead of trying to make some bizarre case that OpenOffice could destroy Microsoft Office (a - if not the - primary bread-winner for the company) in any near or realistic future, Paul more or less argues that the intimidating shadow Microsoft cast over the software world (carrying on IBM's torch) for the past 20 years is gone; that no one who matters or cares about the computing and web industries is afraid of Redmond anymore, nor are they interested in what the company is doing (case in point). http://www.live.com/

Paul lists four specific reasons and companies which brought us to this new era where Microsoft likely matters not, and instead of ruining a great, concise essay by summarizing them, you should probably check them out for your self.
http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
just posting this...opinions vary

[Lisandro]

I would have a company with the MS market share that the others think it's dyeing 

[drhayden1]

i'll take the cash valve

[.: Mac :.]

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.

And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and phones on the way.

i like this guy