They keep fucking up, though. Like killing sales and content for lagging XBone sales. Like chasing iPad sales at any cost despite the fact that everyone who wants a tablet already has one. You can't lay that at the feet of Ballmer, much as we may want to.

My understanding of Microsoft is that they exist in a business world where all their installs are going to be their installs and they sell seats, not software. If you've got a 2500-person organization, you can count on a Windows license, an Office license, an Outlook license and an Access license for every single seat. Why, then, chase individual end users? Where things start to crumble is where organizations decide they don't want their own enterprise clouds, they'd like it over on the net somewhere that someone else has to chase five nines uptime. As soon as a critical mass starts to do that, all of a sudden your suite has to compete.

I'll say this: I've been using OneDrive or whatever Microsoft calls it lately 'cuz one of my wife's friends, whose husband is a MicroSerf, did some stuff in it. It works great. I have no complaints about it. Windows 8? Yeesh what a piece of shit. I get mad enough at OS X but then I contemplate the alternatives and holy cow I don't miss Windows.