No argument about IBM, even before this guy they were cool:
[Image: http://www.funnyphotos.net.au/images/old-computer-picture-ibm-305-ramac-1.jpg]
By end-user I mean aspects of the technology that affect how users do things every day, be it directly via services like what google has to offer, or stuff behind the scenes that makes everything run smoothly for the users.
Yahoo was one of the first (if not the first) huge search engines, before google dominated, everyone would "yahoo it" (though it doesn't sound as cool), so while they might not be doing anything cool anymore, having them there is like having the old wise man present.
Oracle is boring but due to their acquisition of Sun, they can have a major impact on heavily used technologies like MySQL and Java. Cisco is also boring, and I no longer consider it the undisputed champion of network equipment, but they have a huge history in that department and it's vital to technological innovation in a world dominated by networking.
Hate saying good things about apple but there certainly is a lot of "innovation" in their mobile devices, they didn't invent any of it for the first time but they certainly put different technologies together in ways others hadn't done yet, forcing all the other mobile device manufacturers to scramble to compete. Thanks to that, since the release of the first iphone, mobile technology has changed. I'm sure anyone else could have done it too, but they're the ones who did.
With MS though, I don't feel anything special there. Their last big thing for end-users was windows XP. That changed desktop computing for many people and is still considered a solid OS even today. Vista and then 7 are basically upgrades to that, nicer interface, more features, but the same stuff under the hood. Doesn't mean it's bad, windows 7 is great, but it hasn't changed anything. Even windows XP can't be considered too special, since it's an improvement on windows 98 (I like to pretend the mistakes between 98 and XP never happened), which is an improvement of 95. Last time I checked some of the same executables are still found in 7 that were in XP/98, wouldn't be surprised if they were just copy+pasted over.
Windows phone is just like any other mobile device, trying to get a share of the apple pie. Glad their doing it, competition is the key to innovation, but again it's insignificant.
Xbox? late to the playing field, also trying to grab some slices of pie from a growing market.
Hotmail and MSN would fall into my category of increasing end-user's experiences like other products such as google's, but hotmail and MSN has been the same thing for 10+ years, all they did when you look at it closer is increase mailbox capacity and revamp the interface every now and then. Other services like google's are always adding new features and allowing users to combine an array of services together.
Microsoft is huge, powerful, and doing very well, but I don't see them trying to do anything different, they go after what's already there and try to take a slice of those pies. Even their Azure cloud platform and BPOS is trying to catch up to things like amazon web services and google docs.