"Microsoft has changed as a company"

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Sounds nice, but will it stick?

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nope.

MSFT is changing but it might be too late. They tried to produce an expensive closed ecosystem, and failed. Its now problematic for them, as we move to the cloud.

Too little, too late.

What is really funny is that msft benefited from an open ecosystem from its beginning. But they somehow lost sight of that and just thought $$$.

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Too little, too late.

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They may have lost the home PC market, but that was probably happening anyway the way they missed the boat on mobile. There's a ton of inertia in the business market, stopping support on a 15 year old operating system should not be a major news story, but it is because so many companies are using it. And companies that have upgraded want Windows 7, not Windows 8, and if they don't want Windows 8, they don't want Mac or Linux either. I don't know what "one experience across devices" means, but if Windows 9 looks like Windows 7 on the desktop version, I think Microsoft will be just fine.

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There's a ton of inertia in the business market,

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Oh definitely. They aren't dead, but they won't suddenly be IBM, SAP or Oracle when it comes to supporting multiple platforms/interoperability.

They have had a lot of success b.c their products are cheap to start with, and are easier to set up than competing products. When you look at lifetime costs of ownership, they don't match too well for business tasks. But so much of IT is not really looking at long term ownership costs.

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How in earth did they lose the home pc market?

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Aliens?

Maybe the corporate culture has changed internally, but will that translate in any way to the products they're putting out?

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LINK ?

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This is more of a forward looking macro view that mobile is killing the need for home PCs, or at least the need for one PC per household member.

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Seems pretty obvious. They want the operating system on your PC, Phone, Tablet, Console, etc... to be as similar as possible so when you use one for the first time it feels just as familiar as all of your other devices.

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Right, but does that mean continuing to shove Metro down desktop users throats, a strategy that has met with quite a bit of resistance, or making it easy to develop apps that work well the old way and the new way?

Microsoft as a whole previously was in my mind a dying company not willing to adapt to a changing world.

However, they have had change at the top and then down. Their new ceo is more forward thinking and they have actively went out and gotten talent to fill in their technical positions.

They are changing and want to be an all in one solution with pc, mobile, xbox, and tablet market. Their surface pro 3 or whatever the new one is seems to be a great product and if windows 8 or whatever the new one will be does well, it will change the course of microsoft in both the short and long term. They have large cash reserves and they seem to be wanting to get back into the fray rather than just pump out a different form of windows every couple of years.

Microsoft is going to be a major player going forward in my opinion. And this is coming from someone who was very down on them in the past and thought google was going to destroy them.

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Microsoft is going to be a major player going forward in my opinion. And this is coming from someone who was very down on them in the past and thought google was going to destroy them.

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not sticking your head out there. msft is the largest software company in the world, and their revenues are higher than googles.

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Metro is more of a UI style than just simply the Metro start screen.

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Right, in addition to the start screen issue, you have one system built around a touchscreen interface and one is built around a mouse and keyboard. With touch you lose the right click but you gain things like multi-finger swipes and gestures. I'm sure they do this to a certain extent already but presumably the goal is for the app builders to call something like "Contextual Menu" and Microsoft handles the "on right click" or "on finger hold" part. That's at least what I hope they are talking about rather than trying to force everyone to a touch screen interface like they've been doing.

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They didn't, my statement that people are reacting to wasn't sufficiently clear. I didn't mean they lost the market as in a competitor beat them, I meant they lost the market as in mobile is in the process of killing it.

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Oh ok, I misread the poster's statement that I quoted.