Does Microsoft Matter?

Aside from Will Kelley, nobody seems to be that interested in Microsoft these days.  Increasingly the race for the future of tech involves Apple and Google - with Samsung and some other manufacturers scattered across the field.



Microsoft is everywhere with it's advertising lately.  Redmond has apparently set aside over 1bn dollars for marketing windows 8 and Surface.  Microsoft has years of financial success behind it, so the money is something the company can afford.  The interesting part is that they've fallen so far since Gate's departure - a billion dollar ad budget is necessary.

Wired posted some brief statistics from their recent liveblogs covering Microsoft and Apple.  Microsoft's most recent big event featured the Surface, Windows 8, and most importantly Winphone 8.  These are Microsoft's major new products.  The surface represents the company's first real foray into the mobile hardware space (Zune obviously doesn't count).  How many people tuned in to Wired's liveblog of the event?  11,000.

Contrast this to Apple's most recent phone event where Wired reports that 360,000 web surfers tuned in to follow the announcements.  Even Apple's most recent iPad event, an event with little reason to watch a liveblog as Apple was streaming live video itself - even here Wired saw seven times more viewers than for Microsoft's shindig.

With the future of computing being driven by mobile, does Microsoft matter anymore?