I posted something on another thread that - in passing - really sums up Microsoft's position nowadays. It's comments on the book "The Victorian Web" and how the growth of the telegraph and telephone in the 19th century closely parallels the growth of the modern Internet (which was and still is largely based on telegraphy and copper wire etc etc and yup where was Unix developed? in a phone lab of course but I digress)
Snippet:
The Victorian Internet (that patchwork of telegrams, pneumatic tubes, messenger boys, and so on) was new in the 1800s. There had been nothing like it before. It was based on electricity, which was invented at the same time. Previous communication took weeks or months, which suddenly collapsed into minutes. People only dealt with other known persons; now they dealt with people whom they may never meet. Society had been slow and local, now it became hyper-accelerated and global. Information overload has been a feature of modern life for 150 years now.
Much of today's hype will not happen because it has already been tried. Many current business models failed over 100 years ago. The successful ones are not new.
What's next? The Pony Express, telegrams, pneumatic tubes, messenger boys, carrier pigeons, email, the web: all of these are communications, ever faster, ever more flexible, more global, more personal. The next step is smart phones with email and web with you anytime, anywhere.
Microsoft, Macintosh, Linux, and Java seemed so important several years ago; we now realize that they were just parts of a particular device, the desktop computer. Who remembers the Vibroplex or any of the telegraph key manufacturers? When the underlying technology changes, the surface tools also change.
The future of computing is ubiquitous communications, delivering email, news, shopping, and business, in your hand, anytime, anywhere. When the Palm Pilot (an early smart phone) was introduced, its designers figured that the desktop computer was the primary computer and the Palm was the secondary computer. Now, it's the other way around: the Palm is the primary computer and the desktop computer is a backup device.
Guy's nailed it IMHO. Windows will most likely join the ranks of operating systems such as Atari, BEOS, that IBM thing that I forget the name, not to mention Amiga. Or maybe still have a place as an office OS, for example the company I've just left ran the entire office on XP with UNIX on the servers because it was cheap and worked.
