STEWART ALSOP ON INFOTECH Alas, Poor Microsoft ... You Used to Be So Interesting These guys are no longer the zeitgeist-setting titans we loved to hate. It makes a polemicist like me sad.
By Stewart Alsop
[Editor's note: This is Stewart Alsop's final column for FORTUNE.]
A tech-savvy friend of mine casually said something the other day that's been bothering me ever since. "Microsoft is in trouble," he said. It's not unusual to hear people in Silicon Valley flip Microsoft the bird, saying stuff like "Microsoft is evil incarnate" or "Microsoft must be neutered." But "Microsoft is in trouble"? That's a new one. How could my buddy possibly believe that Microsoft—Microsoft!—is in trouble?
Right after that, I noticed in some magazine that Microsoft's total shareholder return has actually been negative over the...
