New
#1
Sorry, I can buy only about half of that.
The Nokia acquisition was a colossal mistake. There was a reason Nokia was going under (poor products and poor customer service, for starters). Even though much of the money used to buy this turkey was "trapped money", it was still good money being thrown after bad. If Nokia's resources and talent were so good, why was it failing? I have a hard time seeing how M$ can turn a failing company around just a few months considering its past hardware track record.
Bing is a money-losing flop. I don't know anyone who uses Bing, let alone likes it. I've tried it off and on ever since it came out and I still don't like it. It's also probably just nosey as Google so I really don't give the north end of a southbound furry little rodent if Bing is Google's "counterweight", especially since I rarely use Google. There are too many safer alternatives almost as effective as Google and far more effective than Bing, such as Ixquick.
Xbox should be spun off into a separate business. Actually, unless it starts showing an actual profit soon, such as this year (I'm not holding my breath), M$ should just get rid of it, not spin it off, for the reasons given in the article.
The ‘One Microsoft’ reorg is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Just how is this not true? Ballsmore was Gates fair-haired boy. Nadella is no different. Ballsmore was pushing cloud computing; Nadella was the one who was in charge of making it happen. This vision, along with it's first cousin, subscription computing, is one reason why people are sticking with Win 7 to its bitter end and could very well leave M$ after that if M$ doesn't open its eyes and see how faulty that vision is. M$ really needed to bring someone in from the outside to break up the Good Ole Boys club in upper management. M$ has been conveniently ignoring the fact that affordable, reliable broadband is not available to everyone since all M$ can see are the $$$ it believes is associated with that vision. It has forgotten that one of the main reasons for its success was the lack of the closed environment that had been holding Apple back.
Windows Phone is a failed experiment. Yes it is. So M$ is going to use the user base of another failed phone company to bolster its own failure? Good luck with that. A more likely scenario is Nokia users will bail and go to Samsung, etc.
Windows RT is dead. True, it's far from dead but it should be. By not designing it to use Windows Office programs and having access only to the apps, many of them less than stellar, in the very limited Windows Store, it has limited it to trying to compete with an Android base that has pretty much unlimited access to a much, much larger app selection and even Apple's closed system, which has a far, far better selection than Windows' pathetic store. "But the basic concept of a touch-first platform that runs modern apps from a curated store in a highly secure environment? That's not a dead end; it's the future." Right. If that is the future, I hope I die first (at my age, I might get lucky).