[Kuytu]

It is hard to imagine anything is too late for a company that made over 20 billion profit last year. Even if Windows has done worse aren't Office sales increasing on OS X for example. Microsoft is a company that sells Office first and foremost.

[shmerl]

No, that's actually quite easy to imagine. MS reputation is severely ruined by years of crooked behavior (which still continues into the present really). They are now seen as a dangerous thug which can not be trusted. To change that perception they'll have to work really hard. So these new developments are steps in the right direction but they are way not sufficient yet.

[danieltillett]

I think that Microsoft realise this and they will be going out of their way over the next few years to be on really good behavior.

[latch]

Two different thoughts:

First, It'll take me a while before trusting MS again (people often forget or don't know the depth of what the anti trust case revealed). But I can't even _start_ to consider it as they continue to be a part of the patent-problem. (I'd say a big part, but big or small, it's old MS as usual as far as I'm concerned).

Second, when I was closer to MS, it really felt like there was company wide blindness. I'm not sure that's gone yet. I especially look at Xbox and Azure and I can't believe the cheerleading that's going into these massive money losing projects. Azure in particular..there was a Gartner report that showed Microsoft spending 5x more than Amazon yet having relatively no market share. It's like Bing all over again. Absolutely and totally disillusioned. (the report could have been wrong I guess).

[shmerl]

Besides patents problem, MS is still into lock-in and sabotaging open standards where possible. Until that behavior ceases, all these new developments won't even start looking sincere.

[shmerl]

Let's wait and see. From the recent events like MS fighting to revert uncopyrightability of APIs, or trying to sabotage patent reform which would cut software patents, it doesn't look like they seriously want to change. But may be more things are coming.

[acchow]

The high tech industry moves fast, and the giants fall fast.

RIM had $3.4bn net income on $20bn revenue in 2011. Now they are hemorrhaging.

[jmartinpetersen]

Microsoft has a large client base that does not move fast. Even if all the consumers goes the way of the interwebs, Microsoft is making huge amounts of money from enterprises that have no easy migration paths. I certainly can't imagine a measurable number of their enterprise customers ditching them in three years.