Re:Put it together (Score 1)

You bring up a great point and one that needs to be taken into account. If you think back a couple of decades, companies that had a whole lot of excess cash lying around, the default action was to start empire-building by acquiring other companies that may or may not be considered within the arena of their core competency. However, Microsoft is actually doing (Cringe as the Troll mods come flying down) something very intelligent. Instead of going out and trying to do everything under the sun, they are beginning to consolidate their operations to do the one thing that they are really good at which is selling lots and lots of products that are mediocre at best. Furthermore, I would not be at all surprised to see that they start to really concentrate on further increasing their market share by differentiating their products, pricing models, and increasing their overall quality.
I must admit that I am very interested to see how the recent stock buyback and now divestiture plans will affect the near-ish future of Microsoft.