"Some of us have long memories", but some of us have also moved on. I say this as someone that has been through the System 5 days, PC Dos 1.0, CPM, DR DOS, Novell, Borland, Word Perfect, etc.
In mobile, gaming, and SAAS/PAAS, Microsoft has been open and experimenting. As others have mentioned, they've contributed to the Linux kernel, after some stumbles on Kinnect they embraced the hacker community, etc. Microsoft, for all its failings, is still willing to try developing and creating new products and services. Not all succeed, Zune was just retired (for instance).
That said, comparing them to IBM? Really? The IBM that has basically gone out of it's way to cut research labs, decommission most projects, and become a purely services company that is in the process of outsourcing as much as it can? I will take one that is still trying to innovate and create products from consumer to the enterprise over a company hell bent on becoming mostly an outsourced enterprise services company (we already have EDS and others for that).
Personally, I am not a huge MSFT fan. My house runs pretty much all Apple (or Linux). Windows is confined to VMs (or the wife's corporate laptop). The two things that were "aha" for me with MSFT and how they were Windows Phone 7/Metro and Azure -- specifically the original post on anodjs.org with the title "We work at Microsoft and we use node.js". Five years ago, we would not have seen that.
Returning to my original gripe - yes, MSFT has lots of the old guard around; yes, parts of MSFT still think like they used to (or are in the Redmond cacoon) - overall the company is doing a lot to foster innovation and new platforms, you'd benefit by letting go of old grudges. The industry is small enough where some of the "bad people" have moved to "good companies" as well as the reverse.
That said, it is certainly useful to be watchful and see what future moves are made.