Is Microsoft dead? Paul Graham has an interesting essay with the title Microsoft is Dead.
Well, certainly not in the sense that a T. Rex that's been out of action for the last 65 million years is dead.
I went from HP to Microsoft late in the 1990s. The two corporate cultures were very different.
At HP, I worked on a project that required close contact with HP engineers all over the world. I had a Unix work station on my desk. I installed Apache, wrote some web pages, announced the web page to the people I was working with, and I was in business. Internally, that is. This was not visible outside the HP network, but that's all I needed. Key: I just did it. I didn't ask permission, I didn't have to ask some sysadmin to do it for me. I just did it. Because of that web page, with the help of email and phone calls, I could bypass HP's horrendous corporate bureaucracy and communicate directly, engineer to engineer. We got things done.
At Microsoft, I wanted to do the same thing. Nope. I had to have the department web person do the work. OK. I asked politely. More than once. I forget now, ten years on, what the response was when I got one, but I do remember that it was a lame excuse to cover up sloth or incompetence or both. I never did get my internal web server. I got things done. But the web server would have made some of them a lot easier, and other things possible.
HP "got" the Internet, informally if not officially. Microsoft didn't.
If Microsoft is dead, it is it dead in the sense that an apatosaurus may be bleeding its life blood out into the sand, and it's too stupid to know it. And the bigger they are, the harder they fall. It may kill off a few of its smaller, nimbler competitors as it thrashes about. But as long as you stay out of range of that thrashing, it's no longer to be feared.