Microsoft isn't dead. ------ . They aren't big players on the web, start up space, mobile nor hardware.
A bit contradictory, no?
A bit contradictory, no?
On top of that, Azure is competitive and is gaining more and more traction, and the person who headed the Azure department is now the new CEO. Their gaming division (Xbox) is profitable, which is mostly a hardware field, and they're slowly getting a foothold in mobile and have purchased a big mobile hardware manufacturer.
Their development tools (Visual Studio and .NET) are immensely popular and they've managed to capitalize on the whole JavaScript thing by making it easy to develop with VS.
They're anything but dead.
Of course things like Bing aren't a success yet but if MSFT figures out what do with that they'll have something other than people just Google stuff on.
Not being large players in the areas mentioned doesn't imply that they are somehow "dead".
When PG wrote this, that's what Microsoft was. They were irrelevant in all the areas where interesting things were happening. Are they more relevant now? They seem like they might be, but it's hard to say. The essay is not about profit, it's about mindshare.