As for Microsoft, it still is dead in the sense that he articulated in that essay; it doesn't offer any novel/powerful/ubiquitous platforms that new companies could or should build new products/companies on. It barely exists as a mobile platform, nobody has built significant new companies out of Windows desktop software in years, and its cloud platform is just one of several, and far from the biggest/best. He never said it would go out of business, just that it would become a generic BigCo, which is exactly what it is.
He also built a new type of investment company that invested in Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitch, Stripe and many other new startups, before any other VC would look at them, and at a tiny fraction of the valuation that other VCs would invest at. That investment model he pioneered has since been imitated countless times around the world - unsuccessfully, in most cases, because he did such a good job that others couldn't seriously compete.
With all that said, I think there's plenty he's been wrong about, but he's been right about the most important stuff, and deserves admiration for that.
Azure is popular due to all the corporates moving their application hosting and data storage off on-premise servers to the cloud.
Neither of these products/platforms has led/is leading to whole new categories of products/companies being created, which is the specific context in which PG was suggesting MS was "dead".
FWIW, arguably the biggest game-changing innovation in gaming in the past 10 years has been Twitch, which was a YC company.
> smuglord
> ignormaous
You don't need insults if you have solid points.