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?

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.

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

1. That was good. At some point you need to cut your losses.

2. Yet. Microsoft has a tremendous research department. They could still come out with something game-changing.

3. This is also good. We don't need a bunch of kids who are brought up on software designed in the 1980s and hasn't advanced since.

4. I think MS has decided that they need to open up to certain degree despite the loss of revenue that it can cost because of the other less tangible benefits.

5. It's a good thing that MariaDB has been forked from MySQL because Oracle has had a tendency to kill every open source project they've acquired, or let them die.

6. The problem with Windows 8 was that aside from the improvements under the hood, every single thing that changed was for Microsoft's benefit, and not for the benefit of the users. Windows 10 backed off on this arrogance, but only a little. Microsoft has clearly made the commitment that when it comes to PC operating systems, that the user, and not the software is now the product, and that from now on, in order to get the marginal improvements in their products, you will have to sacrifice a lot in terms of privacy, usability and convenience. And that's assuming that their QA is up to snuff, which it clearly isn't.

You aren't really refuting the parent comment's point that Microsoft has not been revived. You're just arguing that Microsoft's descent is good for society overall. While I agree, the parent just argued that Microsoft hadn't been revived.