But advertising revenue is down at the minute, and will be one of the first things to go should we fall into recession (cf Google's lower than expected profits released a day or two ago.) Also, there's a level of saturation online ad-wise that means that as people get more fed up of adverts and more tech-savvy, those adverts will get blocked and ignored a whole lot more. Not that advertising companies won't come up with other ways of getting their message across, but a business that focuses solely on making money through having ad space might start to feel the pinch.

Frankly, we're still not in a position where a economy 2.0 non-bricks and mortar company can ever be considered 'not-doomed'. MS at least has the advantage that it has physical product that still has massive monopoly on the market. What we haven't seen in the last 25 years is a viable challenger to MS software dominance (And that's from a committed Linux user), whereas Google was virtually unheard of ten years ago and may well be unheard of again in another ten years.

Don't expect MS to die anytime soon - they're still here after the paradigm shift that was the boom of home computing, so they've already shown they can adapt to a new model of working. Maybe we don't even know what the next one is, but the biggest company on the planet isn't going to disappear overnight regardless what happens.