We are a Apple/Linux shop here with a couple of hundred employees. We use Active Directory (switched from LDAP) and we have the Macs on load sets. We recently outsourced our email to Google. It is not as easy as with Windows.

Microsoft has a good thing going in enterprise as their boxes are much easier to manage en masse and it works well together. I do not think they are threatened as much by cloud services like Gmail, Google Docs as much as people think. They simply say to their entrenched enterprise customers in which things are working for them "We offer cloud Exchange and cloud Office" I think MS has the enterprise community on lock and they are moving in the direction to transition them to online services.

I know everyone here wants to believe that but their percentage of penetration in enterprises continues to rise and the breadth of their offerings as well.

They are growing more cows and expanding their offerings to other herds (see Java support, node.js support, Linux support, ...).

But will it? The value of enterprise solutions are often times validated by consistency: it's nice to have a megalithic company with a proven track record of hitting their SLA. Personally, I don't use Microsoft (or Apple for that matter) products at all. However, I would be hard pressed to come up with alternative company which provides practically all the necessities for the technological infrastructure of a company. Google is certainly trying but hasn't quite gotten there yet. There's something very comforting knowing that a product purchased to day will be supported the full length of its contract.

Businesses will stop needing software to make them more productive? When will this happen?

Or are you saying that Microsoft's products will be overtaken by others?