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This is the best written, best argued, and most relevant of the Nadella "advice" articles. Not the ones in the major tech news, from the big commentator names, this.

The problems the post outlines are the ones behind the decline in Microsoft's desktop business and increasing irrelevance. And they are correctable. Two examples:

  * Sticking the word “Windows” at the end of things that weren’t Windows wasn’t a good idea.


  * Sticking the word “Live” to things that are poor online services, or that are so-so desktop programs that you choose not to ship with Windows and that you end up cancelling wasn’t a good idea.
Thanks, that's very kind. As you say, it all hinges on every single one of their big mistakes being correctable now and avoidable in the future. Microsoft doesn't have to figure out how to be Apple or Google or what have you; it has to figure out what products they're missing and what the products they already do have has to do in the year 2014 to be relevant. That's not completely different from what they did in the year 2004, but it won't be solved by serving up what they had in 2004 either, nor by skipping to what they think is the endgame.