Not a sexy hire, but I think it is a good move to have a Cloud guy as the CEO. Gates is stepping down from chairman to personal technological advisor, I don't think it's a bad move for him either. Maybe they'll get competitive (atleast moreso) in mobile and video games
I think the company definitely needs new energy and ideas. In my opinion, Microsoft is kind of a victim of its own success: they printed money by the billions for nearly 20 years by doing the same things: update Windows, update Office, update enterprise programs. Yes, there has been innovation, but for some reason a lot of it didn't catch on (lets not forget Microsoft has been making tablet PCs since around 2000, 8 years before the iPad, but most people don't even know that). But these gigantic money makers have blinded them in a lot of ways. When the iPhone made a big splash in 2007, Microsoft was well positioned to jump right on it and be the #2 within months, and possibly #1 within a year or so. They had already been maintaining a smartphone platform for 7 years prior to the release of the iPhone! But instead their opinion rang along the lines of "this is a fad", and let Android drop on the scene in late 2008/early 2009 and soak up the market before deciding that this was a real opportunity and chucking Windows Phone out there to meander together a distant 3rd place in the marketshare.
It is the same story with tablets. I understand that Windows legacy tablets were all x86, and it wasn't until the last couple of years that processor technology has caught up to allow x86 tablets to compete with ARM tablet prices, but I am sure they could have done something before. And Windows 8 Metro UI is just not it. The split between a keyboard and mouse OS ("desktop") and touchscreen OS ("modern UI") doesn't do much more than make sure everyone is unhappy. Instead, how about leveraging the fact that pretty much every computer user knows how to operate Windows, and bring more touchscreen upgrades to the desktop? Make the new apps open directly in Windows for touch operation, and add more touch compatibility to legacy desktop applications. It took me about 10 minutes to think of a good way to operate desktop applications with touch: when you touch, a virtual mouse (pointer) appears with small buttons to the side. Drag the pointer where you want with touch, and then pick your finger up or use another finger to click the right- or left-click buttons. If you take your finger off the screen for more than a second or two (configurable delay), it disappears to allow you to see the content behind it. Simple. Why don't we have this? Why does Windows 8 feel like 2 operating systems shoehorned together?!
