[hunterwerlla]

1. The phone line that was losing a ton of money

2. This is being worked on, there is cortana for cars, pc's and phones, so it would make sense for it to expand to even more devices in the future.

3. This is the point of windows 10 cloud, which recently leaked.

4. Windows is really not the cash cow of Microsoft, getting more people into the ecosystem is better for buisiness.

5. Free alternatives have existed forever, alternatives that you could argue are the same or better, recently SQL Server was ported to linux which actually should shore up its market share, and even possibly increase it.

6. True but does this actually matter that much?

[starik36]

You are kind of proving my point that Microsoft, in fact, was not "revived" by Nadella.

2. Maybe it is being worked on and maybe it'll even be great. The problem is that people don't replace personal assistants every 2 years. They lost the first mover advantage.

4. Windows for enterprises, specifically server versions are cash cows. I fail to see the value (to Microsoft) of a developer getting into the .NET ecosystem if they intend to run your code on Linux.

5. It's true that free alternatives have always been around. But now, they are reasonably good. And more importantly, good enough.

6. Yes, it does. It's actually one of the few places where they could monetize people getting into their ecosystem.

[ConceptJunkie]

hunterwerlia, I find it amusing that your response, which came in while I was writing mine, says pretty much the same thing. :-)