Time for Microsoft to give up the throne?Don Dodge was the start-up guru for Microsoft until he got laid off in November. Within a week he was hired at Google. (And thus able to play with all the fun new toys he’d been denied in Redmond.) Now, in an interview with Nick Eaton at the Microsoft Blog, Dodge says that Microsoft reminds him of IBM, and not in a good way:I think Microsoft today is a lot like IBM was in 1985. When I started my career IBM dominated the tech world…Microsoft is still a powerful company – $60 billion in revenue and very profitable – but I think after 20 years they are losing the innovation edge. The most innovative companies today are Google, Apple and Facebook. Very few companies can dominate an industry for more than 20 years. It is just the natural competitive cycle.I think I speak for most non-tech savvy readers who were still in diapers in 1985 when I say, “IBM dominated what now?”