[manuellemos]

This article is just wishful thinking of Microsoft haters.

Microsoft does need to be so much innovative as long as users buy Windows and Office. Windows 7 has been selling at 15 million copies a month. This just proves that whether or not Microsoft is innovative these days, Windows and Office sells like hot-cakes.

Same goes with IBM and their mainframes. A lot of IBM haters kept predicting that IBM and mainframes would be extinct just because they are not innovative, but the reality is that it does not matter. What matters is that they have millions of loyal customers that other companies envy.

[megablast]

Well, this is the problem. Microsoft can fritter away billions of dollars on these projects that do not have to have a return. This is why there stock price has not been doing well, because people do not see them producing any more winners.

There attempts in search reek of desperation, paying people to use Bing. Xbox is just now starting to pay off. They have lost mobile. They are losing market share in their webserver and development tools.

[hga]

I don't think we can't judge the success of Microsoft by Windows 7 sales since it followed the Vista debacle.

This article said Microsoft wouldn't go extinct for decades, but it would still be pretty ugly in the meanwhile if it followed IBM's mainframe path. Especially since Windows is a lot less alien that that ecosystem, porting is much more of an option.

As a side note, IBM mainframes were massively innovative in their day. System 360 defined the 8 bit oriented CPU approach, there's virtualization (the real OSes haven't been able to boot on bare metal for a long time), there's something to be said for their channel IO architecture (although they regret not making them full fledged CPUs), etc. etc. And they're rock solid and generally responsible about that mission, something Sun notably stumbled on.