Is Microsoft getting phased out?

There is a lot of material on the net which talks of Microsoft being dead. But is that the truth?
What is it that makes people think in that manner? Four things, I think, all of them occurring simultaneously in the mid 2000s.
1. The most obvious is Google. Google is the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. There can only be one big man in town, and day by day it is being felt that they're clearly it.
2. Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the second cause of why people started thinking of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.
3. The third cause is broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the desktop.
4. Last but not the least is Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology

But is that the end of the road.

Of course, as an entrepreneur I can't help thinking about how something broken could not be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? I think, yes.

To see how, envision two things:
(a) The amount of cash Microsoft now has on hand, they can do almost anything
(b) The Windows Mobile technology which was rated much lower in the early part of this century is something to reckon with in today’s date. As the mobile population grows this can be the next big thing for Microsoft which can turn things around.

and there are many more...