HA ha ha ha. No way. Don't discount M$. They have a very solid track record of coming late to the game, failing, flailing over and over... and once a market matures they move in hard and take it over.
Microsoft bought the Kinect teck from PrimeSense to prop up there XBox division which has yet to outpreform a simple stock buyback and is this a failure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrimeSense
Xbox is brought up a lot in these threads although it has been a total business failure. Even after losing billions over many quarters, making a quarterly profit only recently, it's still in a virtual 3-way tie for the tiny gaming console market.
They had a solid track record of crushing their opposition, by starving them of money (vs. Netscape), depriving them of critical applications (Apple with Office), or by throwing mountains of money at the problem (vs. Sony PS3).
Now they utterly own a few key markets, but have consistently failed to gain traction in others. Their online division is a disaster. Their console is set up for an apocalyptic flame-out. Their phone and tablet sales are already costing them billions in partnership deals and write-downs with almost nothing to show for it.
At this point Microsoft would be hard pressed to beat out Blackberry in the phone space.
MS got its initial strength primarily from IBM signing something extremely stupid. I don't see anyone signing anything like that with MS today and there isn't the same monolithic business entrenchment that there was with IBM back then, so I don't see how they are going to get back their leverage.
It wasn't just IBM. Everyone except Microsoft made a mess of the 80s and 90s. On the whole, computers sucked. A few didn't and those companies made a terrible mess of the business side.
Think of the hapless operating system efforts, or the terrible application ports from DOS to win16, or from win16 to win32. Platforms or products that were just unusable. And the web was awful.
Even the capable unix companies managed to run themselves into the ground - vast resources wasted in fights over nothing. Not one of them made a sustained or convincing appeal to this emerging market of consumers.
The main change is in the competition. Being boring-but-adequate used to be enough to win. But these days Google and Apple create exciting, affordable, responsive things that work.
Apple's iPhone business alone is larger and more profitable than all of Microsoft combined. Take out the iPhone and Apple is still bigger.