In what aspect of their business today do they offer a competitive product, other than Xbox?

When Vista landed, I went Mac and haven't looked back.

I do keep a couple XP boxes running for occasional use of legacy SW.

They haven't made a modern product that anyone really wants to use... unless you count the fact that theyare forced to use it at work or because that's what they get with the cheapest PC they are willing to buy.

I don't know a single soul who (like you) switched to Mac and regretted it.

In fact, I dare anyone to try to find a young adult attending college this year that is not buying a MacBook Pro.

Microsoft is done... except for gaming.

The 12 year old XP is not the same XP as now. It has had 3 service packs to up date it.
Also Windows 7 was released as a replacement, near the end of 2009, after Vista fissile. That is not 12 years.

Hundreds of millions of luddites may still use XP, but who is creating new innovative software for it nowadays? Nobody. Microsoft stopped selling XP in 2008. The user base is dwindling FAST, and Microsoft doesn't have a decent replacement OS at this point. This same thing happened with IE6... Gazillions of people were using it a few years ago, Microsoft folks insisted that web developers must continue to support it... Guess what, today no web developer worth their salt is programming for IE6 support today.

And nobody in their right mind uses Internet ExploDer as a browser in the first place.
If the OS does what people use it for, who care how old it is. I have a program that was originally written for Win 98, it works just fine on XP, Vista, 7 and 8. I don't need fancy eye candy in my OS. On of the reasons I got pissed at Ubuntu when they went to that gawdawful Unity.

In other words dont count MS out yet, after all look at how Apple made a comeback after people kept saying similar stuff about them in the 90s when their stock started its descent into toilet bowl land but now look at them?

...that can resurrect Microsoft... But, I doubt it's in the desktop, tablet, or phone market place.

Apple resurrected itself with a new business model in the laptop, iPod, iPhone company (plus iTunes music/video sales). Not what I would have predicted in the late 1990's.

However, I think there is one major exception to your dare--

"In fact, I dare anyone to try to find a young adult attending college this year that is not buying a MacBook Pro."

And that is the kids who really can't afford the $1300 when they can get a $400 Bloatware Toshiba at MallWart. I do sometimes hang out in campus-area coffee joints & about 1/2-2/3 of them seem to have Macs alright.

Personally, I have a 13" MBP (approx. 2009) in a docking station on my desk where it is hooked up to a 24" Samsung monitor, Fujitsu doc scanner, C-Pen line scanner, desk mike for Draggin' Dictate (one of my regrets with the Mac is that Nuance can't build a dictation program for it that works as well as DNS on Windoze) & a few other toys. That's my desktop substitute. The machine I drag around with me, and on which I'm writing this, is a 2011 11" Macbook Air w 120 SSD that is my constant companion except when I'm doing complicated reports, graphics & statistical analyses. Dropbox is a blessing for doing the same kind of work on the 2 machines. I can rough out a report on the MBA & then pick it up for finishing off on the desktop monster.

The only problems with a Mac are related to the availability of software. I don't run dual-boot for a variety of reasons mostly boiling down to a) my failure to get everything to work right and b) not wanting to use up that much precious disk/ssd real estate.

My major concession to MS is that I run Office '11.

installed desktop systems managed with Active Directory (26,000 users, 80,000 users - 150K - those kinds of numbers), mostly because one can manage them from their desk, pushing out things like Group Policy, etc. which I haven't seen as much with Linux. SQL is very popular and works well, and is certainly competitive across the database space.

In the ISP space Unix\Linux variants rule, of course, and IBM mainframes are big in Fortune 1000 cos.

For most users, Linux desktops would be just as good, but the big stores that sell computers have no one really marketing to them, so while not competitive in a head-to-head test, perhaps, they still provide a system which has the biggest features users want - "No Need To Read A Help File". But Linux isn't far away.

Windows 8, however, is going to cost them a lot, I think. They got greedy and thought everyone would buy a product that THEY convinced themselves was any kind of a needed upgrade.

I was working at the first ISP in Oklahoma City, we were running Solaris, and the owner would actually treat people as stupid for running Windows For Workgroups, and then 95, because it was so much less well-engineered than Redhat. I pointed out to him that Granny could throw the Windows disk in and it would install on most newer hardware, and that they would be the market. He didn't agree, because UNIX was so technologically superior.

Windows took over and that ISP is no longer there.

Micro$oft may have hurt themselves a bit with this one, but that isn't affecting a lot of businesses, who will simply continue on Win 7, for the most part.

If the Linux folks figure it out, they have a real opportunity right now, and new systems are coming on line every day, both users and businesses. We will see.

Oh yeah, Android is changing things as well.

After many years of doing Web development using Microsoft .NET with C++ and then C#, using Visual Studio as the Interactive Development Environment (IDE), running on Server 2003 to 2012, I recently got on a project using Java on Ubuntu (Linux) with Eclipse as an IDE. What I found was that people who claim that's a superior development environment are totally full of shit -- they must have formed their opinions more than a decade ago and haven't paid much attention since then. By any objective comparison to C# and Visual Studio, Java and Eclipse are like frustrating toys. Disagree if you will, but Microsoft's future for Web development is perfectly secure.

Break Microsoft into two separate companies. One for the operating systems and the other for programs, like their Office suites.

"microsoft" lost me years ago. They screwed me over after a hard drive crash, and one of the most rewarding decisions I've ever made was to switch to Ubuntu. I hate that I have to use MS at work because a necessary program only works on windows, but if an alternative comes up, ever, I'd go out of my way to switch.

They are much better as a PC and server O/S. The tablet misadventures are what make Windows 8 suck. Server 2012, though better than Win8, is hindered by far too much of the same look and feel.

Reinvent what? The most porous computer operating environment on the planet?

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!

with people who think just like him...

just how much reinventing do you think there'll be?

Maybe change the color of a product and pretend it's an advancement?

let me say this to that:
When the X-Box was being conceptualized,Ballmer was against Internet Connectivity just as he was at first with Win 95.

The new X-Box One must have internet connectivity or you get a whole hour to play a game that you leased a license on for $69.99.
There are three big selling points for the XB1:
1.Television
2.Sports
3.Call of Duty ver.xx

Think I'm playing? Here is a mashup:
[link: