Microsoft Names New Chief as Gates Steps Down

[Xithras]

6. Yep.

The Internet as we know it is going to change dramatically over the coming years. Cloud applications have already started changing the way people work, store, and share their data, but upcoming changes to the underlying technologies like SPDY and WebRTC (among others) are going to blur the lines between "local program" and "web application", while drastically improving security and privacy and accelerating web performance. Microsoft knows that, a decade from now, the web will be THE application platform that everyone is running, and that the desktop operating system will be little more than a glorified thin client that puts a pretty UI onto everything and provides a handful of local apps. That's why they are investing so much of their time and money into things like Azure and CloudOS. For them, it's the future. Nadella is a champion of those technologies, and that line of thinking.

Windows is a legacy platform for them. They keep it because they have to, and because they really would prefer that your thin client UI be Microsoft branded. But they're certainly not investing a lot of development resources in Windows anymore. It has no future, and it makes them no money.