Scoble links to a bunch of people commenting on Microsoft, Longhorn, .NET, and the general inability of the company to execute on their biggest plans:

Now, I'll be honest, most of them will say Microsoft is dead. That open source is where the action is.

Why do I know that? Because they've told me such. And, because most of them are looking at yesterday's money and assuming that tomorrow's money is gonna be made the same way. Google made some of them fantastic sums of money, but now the rest are chasing that dream.

This is where the analysts and pundits miss the real problems that MS has, and there are two of them:

• The strategy of tying everything together worked great at first, but has now tied them in knots that are well nigh inescapable. They can't deliver Longhorn (or anything else) on time because there are too many dependencies. They lost loose coupling along the way, and they are paying for it now
• Bill Gates lost interest. He's no longer really guiding MS, he's off enjoying life and charitable giving. More power to him for that, but that's Microsoft's loss. Ballmer is no Gates - he's a sales guy, not a marketing guy. What does that mean? It means that he'd do fine so long as someone gives him direction, but he's not really capable of setting direction himself

This doesn't mean that MS is "dead" - it means that their time as the dominant 800 lb gorilla is at an end (as IBM's ended 2 decades ago). You might notice that IBM is still around, still influential, and still very big. Don't think that MS is going anywhere either. Over the next five years, MS will "sink" to the level of IBM. The death watchers should look elsewhere. Over here, for instance, where Scott McNealy is acting like Bill Lyons, only with a larger pile of cash on hand to waste.