It is not dead yet
Microsoft is not dead yet. But I'll agree it is weakening and with Vista looks like a company flailing around a once strong product in a desperate attempt to maintain their position.
As for why Microsoft is declining? I think the real reason is that the company has failed at the task of evolving into a big corporate power. Their core projects are all turning into huge programmer death marches, where most of the effort is spent simply trying to keep the process going and keep up with the bugs the other programmers have created. This causes the teams to need to hire more programmers to get anything done, and creates a spiral of more and more effort being spent to produce less and less.
Jay
