I admit it; I haven't been a Microsoft fanboy in about a year & a half. Before that, I was nuts about Windows (especially 8), Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, Kinect, Band, Zune hardware & software, etc.. What changed? The CEO. Granted, Microsoft went from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella in 2014, but it takes time for the new direction to take effect.
Nadella is making it clear with each passing day that anything consumer related is going to the wayside and enterprise is what Microsoft will concentrate on. Nadella comes in and writes off the Nokia acquisition that Ballmer oversaw & throws Windows Phone to the curb, along with over 30,000 employees. Stock owners are praising this man, because the stock priced jump as a result of killing everything Steve Ballmer enacted. If Nadella was CEO at the time of the Xbox red-ring-of-death, Xbox would not exist today. Ballmer, knowing Microsoft has money to burn, kept pushing it because he loved the Xbox vision and wants to stay in that market. Nadella is the type of guy who only sees the bottom line; doesn't care about anything fun. Let's be blunt about this; if it's boring, he's all about it, like Azure and cloud computing.
Ballmer, while far from perfect, was open to new ideas, especially towards the end of his tenure at Microsoft. He would have given the Microsoft Courier a shot if it ran Windows, but it didn't. It would have been a brand new operating system. He didn't hesitate to give Surface tablets a chance. While not the best thing around at first, by the time they reached Surface Pro 3, they were well-respected and sought-after. He pushed Windows Phone which was an original and gorgeous mobile operating system utilizing Metro-design elements. Now, Metro and Windows Phone is a thing of the past. What about Zune? Ballmer killed Zune! Yes, but only after giving it a chance, only after several years.
I lost my train of thought. Looks like I'm just venting, but let me summarize... Consumer products like Groove Music, formerly Xbox Music, formerly Zune is gone. Windows Phone is gone and Windows Mobile is pretty much gone too. Kinect, which had SOOooo much potential, has been kicked to the curb. Metro UI, which many called "the future" is now in the distant past. I have no desire to go to Apple, but Apple's main customers are people like you and me, not the enterprise. Google is in both areas, but I regard Google as the Microsoft of the late 1990s, early 2000s... Wasn't my favorite time to be a Microsoft user. I don't know. Maybe I'll go Linux.
