for as long as i can remember, people have been predicting the demise of microsoft, always based on one thing or another, that was supposed to do them in. the reality is that when it is claimed that under balmer, over the last 10 years microsoft has made over 100 billion dollars and when they claim that they have sold over 90 million win 7 licenses:

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2010/03/02/windows-7-more-than-90-mi...pies-sold.aspx

one has to conclude that only microsoft can stop themselves. well, it seems that the powers that be at microsoft have decided to do just that and thus it was announced that 70 percent of all microsoft employees currently have their heads in the cloud, er, they are working on cloud computing and that within a year it will be 90 percent:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Microsoft-Cloud-Computing-Steve-Ballmer,9801.html

Speaking yesterday at the University of Washington, Steve Ballmer told students that the cloud has always been a source of tension at Microsoft and there's a lot of unrealized potential. Ballmer revealed that at the moment, 70 percent of Microsoft employees are working on cloud-related project. In a year's time, that number will have jumped to 90 percent. “We’re all in,” PaidContent cites the CEO as saying. “This is the bet for our company.”
all the great empires in history eventually fell, the egyptians, babylonians, the greeks, the romans, the jews (there was an ancient large jewish kingdom), the ottoman, the french, the english, the chinese, the japanese, the mongolian, the russian, they all fell for one reason or another, likewise many corporate empires have fallen (the list is too large to even start making a dent in it here), i suppose it's only natural that even microsoft would one day fall, i just really never thought that it would be because of utter stupidity.

they are actually betting the company, to such an extend that 90% of employees will be working on it, on cloud computing? the honestly think people, no matter what country, will actually want to turn over total control of their apps and data to a corporate big brother? really?!?

i honestly can't imagine any scenario where pc oems, such as dell, even consider selling brand new pc's with a cloud based OS, they didn't want to sell vista based OSes, they'll stick with win 7 as long as they can and when it becomes evident that microsoft is hell bent on forcing all users to "upgrade" via termination of support for all current OSes, they'll most likely start marketing linux based pc's, or go out of business.

i personally can not imagine any scenario where i would even consider using a cloud based app, let alone a full blown OS.