As most people seem to right now, until the past few months I thought of Microsoft as sort of an aging giant. They had gotten lax during their monopoly, and ins

As most people seem to right now, until the past few months I thought of Microsoft as sort of an aging giant. They had gotten lax during their monopoly, and instead of keeping up with the times they're struggling to keep up with more "hip" companies like Google and Apple. And in the public space, this is true -- the average consumer (or the small business/startup rather than the large corporation) these days is more likely to buy an Apple product or a Google product if they can. The average consumer has a better mental image of Apple or Google than Microsoft. And then I started my job at a large hospital system assisting the guys who do financial analytics, and saw the other side of the industry. Microsoft is still the giant in corporate-level big data analytics and providing solutions for large server farms. Their B.I. stack (SQL Server, reporting software, Sharepoint, and other data analytics software I won't go into right now) is worlds ahead of its competition (and from what I understand can be used interchangably with the other software -- for example you can hook Tableau into SQL Server and use it as a front-end for an SSAS cube). I would have never thought about any of this if I hadn't been at this job, but Microsoft is still a giant in providing software and systems for hospitals, insurance companies, big banks and others in the financial sector -- big companies that need to procsess big data. In addition, as the article states, Microsoft is a leading competitor in providing cloud hosting solutions -- I went to a Microsoft thing to learn about and test Windows Azure, and it's incredibly powerful and so easy to use. The article kind of hints at this stuff -- that, under Ballmer, Microsoft has actually been successful despite their stock falling and how the general public perceives them. They're not failing, it's just that the people who buy the stock are typically the average consumer who see Microsoft in the light I mentioned above. The stock market isn't always the best indication of a company's success, just an indication of what the people who buy stock think. This doesn't mean I like Microsoft. I just wanted to point out something I don't think many people pay attention to -- they're still wildly successful, just in a different market segment, and people might not have noticed that if they weren't actually in that market segment. I still prefer not to use their products when I can help it, and I think they could do things much better, and maybe trying to actually compete with Apple and Google and earn the general public's respect back would be a good thing. Maybe their "next era" will do this. But then again, I'm the individual consumer, too.