Microsoft might be in the center of many critics’ sights for any number of reasons right now, but few serious, well-written detractors have made the leap to calling the company ‘dead.’ Sure, John C. Dvorak will say anything for a pageview, but Paul Graham, a partner in startup VC Y Combinator, just penned an intriguing essay titled Microsoft is Dead. Instead of trying to make some bizarre case that OpenOffice could destroy Microsoft Office (a - if not the - primary bread-winner for the company) in any near or realistic future, Paul more or less argues that the intimidating shadow Microsoft cast over the software world (carrying on IBM’s torch) for the past 20 years is gone; that no one who matters or cares about the computing and web industries is afraid of Redmond anymore, nor are they interested in what the company is doing (case in point).