> The tradition of innovation is there -- see Microsoft Research, one of the best funded institutes... Microsoft has produced tablet PCs, smartphones, voice and handwriting recognition, mapping, and so on.

I don't see how you can claim Microsoft has been innovative, ever. Windows was a reaction to the Macintosh, the Zune was a reaction to the iPod, C# was a reaction to Java, IIS to Apache, Surface to iPad, MSN to AOL, MS Money to Quicken, XBox to PlayStation, Bing to Google, Internet Explorer to Netscape Navigator, Excel to Lotus 1-2-3, DOS to CP/M, Windows Phone to iPhone, Azure to AWS, etc., etc.

Microsoft's history is a long list of occasionally successful (but mostly not) efforts at me-too-ing the competition. In the 90s this worked -- occasionally -- because they were able to enter those markets and dominate from their sheer size. Now, however, it does not. In any case, I cannot think of a market that Microsoft created or a product that they introduced that has seen success since the 1990's.

> Google is mostly winning the mobile war because it's cloud services.

I don't understand this at all. Apple is making the lion's share of profit in mobile. Last time I checked, Google wasn't making much money form Android at all.