Whither Microsoft? This should be the year of Windows 7, as consumers and businesses embrace the third big upgrade in a decade to the world’s most popular PC operating system. Fat profits are guaranteed. Yet the share price of the second-largest technology company by market capitalisation languishes at the same level at which it has bumped along since 2001. In the big technological battle for hearts, minds and market share, Microsoft is notable mainly by its absence.

The company that practically invented smartphone software will have the first iteration of Windows 7 for mobiles ready only in the autumn. Even then it will be playing catch-up, and has already been overtaken in market share for new device sales by Android, Google’s open-source alternative. Early designs of touchscreen tablets using Windows are finally arriving, but not before Hewlett-Packard felt it necessary to buy Palm for the phone maker’s software.

In media, Microsoft plugs away at a battle everyone else accepts is lost to Google: search. The fight is moving into display advertising – a $17bn market in the US alone – and from there into the broader TV landscape. Microsoft has had some success with the Xbox as a media centre, and the new motion sensing device due in November might start to narrow the formidable lead built by Nintendo in gaming. But this is another market Microsoft has failed to define, with Apple and Google racing ahead in connecting the digital living room. The company’s online arm, meanwhile, remains a serial lossmaker.