Other than another profitable quarter, Microsoft has little to celebrate these days. The company is falling sadly behind, serving fewer ads, video clips, search results, or personal Web pages than rival Google. Microsoft's $300 million ad campaign humanized Bill Gates but left consumers wondering, Where's the beef? The company can't even seem to buy up competitors [Yahoo!, anyone?].
And the world is moving away from the kind of desktop-based software that makes up Microsoft's bread and butter, shifting toward a more distributed form of computing that exists in the so-called cloud, where the operating system [OS] disappears into a fog of user-friendly online applications and servers, scattered across the Internet.
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