Comment Shame they've given up on their strengths (Score 4, Insightful) 151
It's a bit ironic to me that in trying to aim for the future, Microsoft is taking for granted and ultimately risking the core audience on which they've had a solid lock for the past twenty years.
That was my big take away from the article as well.
There are exactly two major Microsoft product lines I have any interest in, either professionally or personally: Windows and Office. One remains by far the most flexible platform for a general purpose computing device today. The other remains the standard for word processing and spreadsheets. All of these are useful to me almost every day.
However, I really have no interest in "the cloud" for everyday computing needs. As I've suggested many times, I think Microsoft really missed a trick by chasing the cloud hype instead of pushing "private clouds" -- a model with very practical arguments in its favour and where their breadth of products would have given them a distinct advantage over any other major tech firm today. But storing all my personal stuff or my sensitive business documents off-site, accessed over inherently unreliable and slow connections, with unknown security and privacy implications? I assumed that was a joke until I realised big businesses weren't laughing.
Similarly, I have no interest in paying recurring revenues for software that isn't either constantly adding significant value or dramatically better than anything I can get as a one-off purchase. For me personally, no software has ever met that benchmark so far. I do use properly licensed copies of things like MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite, and I would and did happily pay for major upgrades that added significant value from time to time. But a rental model for everyday software that is so stagnant they couldn't get people to upgrade any other way? No thanks. There were and are many things these software companies could do that would be worth a lot of money to me, but why would they bother when they can just phone it in and rely on the lock-in lemmings to keep their bank account topped up anyway?
And I have even less interest in half-baked devices with ambiguous use cases. I'm typing this on a real keyboard, with a real mouse next to me, and a set of monitors that would make your puny 300+dpi tabletconvertiblenettopsurface with its physically small screen cry. Every now and then I have to suffer using a laptop in a meeting, and even the good ones are so pathetic compared to real workstations in every possible respect except portability that I cry. Nadella is welcome to promote a word processor running on a device with no keyboard. I'll take my 100ish error-free wpm typing speed and punctuation I can input with fewer than three not-real-key presses, thanks.
I think all of the above are basically hype-driven rather than benefit-driven. The cloud has some advantages, but they are oversold. Recurring revenues will be great until the benefits almost inevitably start to tail off compared to what people got before, the bean counters start protesting, and some young upstart company becomes the next Microsoft by adopting the radical policy of making useful software and selling it without a rental EULA full of catches. And these multi-purpose tablet/laptop hybrids are just Jacks of all trades so far: they lack the convenience of a phone or small tablet, and they cost significantly more than a proper laptop of otherwise similar spec with little practical advantage unless you really need touch-based input (which almost nothing running on such hardware today actually does).
So a strategy based on this will probably be very successful in the short term, when purchasing decisions made by suits at Fortune 500 companies are still driven by the hype, but if^Wwhen the correction happens -- and in some cases there are already signs that the hype is fading, and with hybrid devices it's not clear they will ever really take off in the first place -- Microsoft is going to be a mighty big ship to steer on a radically different course, with its two biggest engines poorly maintained and running well below capacity.