I don't think this is an accurate view at all. How can you say they aren't innovating when you've got Microsoft Research still going strong with the fruits of its labor becoming visible in commercial applications such as speech, augmented reality, etc.
Not to mention the open source efforts they've put forth with .NET -- which admittedly is still in rough shape but certainly seems to have a future.
I don't think it's quite right to discount Microsoft entirely and see them as the next IBM.
I have a fair bit of respect for Microsoft research lab's and it has also done a fair bit of interesting work in hardware, I was talking about Microsoft as a company in it's totality.
I always viewed Microsoft research labs as a spot of bright light in an otherwise relatively dark company, perhaps that is slightly schizophrenic of me.
This. I've made comments like this more then once on HN: people see 'microsoft' and they think it is just the company selling an OS and office suite and forget or don't know there's more to it. The research for one, which has indeed been going strong for decades, but now also the hardware side which does have at least some innovation to it imo.
Not to mention the open source efforts they've put forth with .NET -- which admittedly is still in rough shape but certainly seems to have a future.
I don't think it's quite right to discount Microsoft entirely and see them as the next IBM.