[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.