> The best thing Microsoft could do is to innovate and do something no one's done.

The last time they did so was when Allen and Gates decided there must be a market for BASIC on Altair and microcomputers in general. Maybe Traf-o-matic was an innovation, too. However none of their significant products afterwards was anything new :

  * common programming languages for different systems
  * MS-DOS, built from a borrowed clone of CP/M
  * Xenix, an AT&T licensed Unix
  * Windows, a pale copy of existing GUIs of the time
  * Word, a Wordstar rip-off
  * Multiplan, a VisiCalc rip-off
  * Excel, a Lotus 1-2-3 rip-off
  <snip some years>
  * C# and .Net, an enhanced java

The list goes on and on. I really can't see any innovating product ever coming from Microsoft (there are excellent products, but these are incremental enhancements). Apple, on the contrary, has a long history of earth-shaking innovations (brought to the masses the personal computer, the GUI, the graphic printer, the IDE, the mp3 player, the touchscreen devices...) . It's simply not comparable.