First a few months ago it was Paul Graham laying the slap down that Microsoft was dying a slow and ugly death which encouraged more than a few people to jump on the bandwagon - which is nothing new - or they were wondering what drugs Paul was on.

But then predicting the death of Microsoft is a popular past time when you want to grab some readers on a boring day on Techmeme and in some case as become almost an art form. So really it is no surprise that on the last day of the Labor Day long weekend we have another case of YACMID.

However if these are the only seven reason Rea Manor can come with then I think Microsoft is pretty save from the the grave diggers; but let’s take a look at a couple of them just for yuck’s.

The first one that their business model is dead is a really popular one in this day and age of business modeless Web 2.0 startups but as Dan Dodge so eloquently put it the last time around “Since when does growing $4 Billion a year = Dead“. I kinda think that a company growing like that has just a tad more going for it than a bunch of Web 2.0 companies whose only hope of making is to get bought up.

As for people hating Vista … yup .. there a lot of very dissatisfied users at this point in time but like one of the commenter’s to Rea’s post said any idiot can do a Google search and find ten pissed off people for any operating system or software package. That doesn’t equate to a failure for Microsoft. If that is the case then Windows 3.0 should never have made it past the first year or XP; which I can still remember the uproar and decries for that one, would have withered and died.

Now about this thing with OEM’s turning their backs on Microsoft - c’mon - didn’t you take economics in school or did you miss the part about the consumer being a part of market forces. All Dell and the others are doing is giving in to consumer demand for choice as Linux becomes more well known among the real world users - not just a geek’s software toy to play with. I bet you dollars to donuts that if OS X could run on the PC platform you would see even more people asking for it on OEM installs than you are seeing ask for Linux.

Will Microsoft’s power over the industry decline over the years … you betcha it will but decline doesn’t mean death and given it’s resources and the changes coming within the company (we can only pray that Baldy Ballmer would retire as well) I wouldn’t count Microsoft out of any software game yet.

Listening to: Orbital - Diversions - Lush 3-3

Conversation Tags: Microsoft, YACMID, Vista, Rea Manor