It looks like I wasn't the only one who thought that the Windows 8 price cut to OEMs was not a good idea.
They point out the importance of the ecosystem in choosing devices, which is something that I missed in my own analysis, and a very good point -- when you are buying into the device, you are also buying into all of the company's other products, all the third-party apps that can run on it, etc.
I think the article only goes part way: it describes the capabilities of their web products like SkyDrive, Office 365, etc. But these aren't really Windows desktop's ecosystem, but pale extensions of their real apps. It wants Microsoft to have competitive cloud offerings to win users over from Google's products, which of course is the right way to go since the market is shifting to all-cloud and users are using multiple types of mobile devices. However, All of Microsoft's best offerings, and core competencies, are native Windows apps.
Going "all in on cloud", as strategically logical as it may be, isn't going to help Windows 8, or low-end PC notebooks today. Their operating system is designed to run "heavy apps" locally, not be a lightweight web-centric OS. So even if they have really amazing web versions of their apps, why do they need all the power of Windows? Wouldn't all of that work perfectly well and fine on a Chromebook, obviating the need for Windows at all?
Like I said before, this puts Microsoft in a tough spot. They need users to need Windows to run heavy native apps, so moving to all cloud products only hurts them. But heavy apps on "weaker" machines run terribly. Is the best move for Microsoft to offer a stripped-down, web-centric OS, and only offer it on the low end?
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