Microsoft is enormously profitable! And though their growth may have stalled, that simply means that their growth stopped accelerating - not that they stopped growing. Being a Microsoft is pretty great!

That said, Microsoft did decline. Not in revenues (which grew), but in relevance. Their new products were perceived as chasing market leaders: Zune, Bing, Windows Live etc. Their strategy for their most popular products seemed ill-defined: remember Windows.NET and Office .NET? And this was reflected in their P/E, which did decline, from the 40s to the low teens. Most tellingly, at some point, people stopped being afraid of Microsoft, which may be the most telling. Microsoft competes with everyone, but its competitors don't worry about Microsoft any more.

This would not be a terrible fate for Google, but it's not ideal and far less than they're capable of. For that matter, it's less than what Microsoft is capable of!

The article talks about a decline in growth, and towards stabilization - not a decline towards vanishing.

Yup. Entire article seemed hinged on a false premise about Microsoft. I stopped reading as soon as that became clear.