The cloud stuff, especially Azure, is Microsoft at their best - and Nadella having come from that part of the business is what preserves hope for the long run.
The reason for this is MS are on the backfoot, but instead of playing defensively they've gone all out to hit every selling point their competition have, and then add their own stuff too, while leveraging what is quite a lot of existing small and medium business lockin to migrate over to the cloud as appropriate. Many people (myself included) thought Amazon, Rackspace etc. would prevent this from working, but they've done it really well.
I've also seen a lot of companies move to Office 365, when previously they'd have gone with Google Docs. They seem to have prevented that threat from getting much further too.
Does Nadella really deserve credit for Azure though, or Scott Guthrie? Azure was a joke until Guthrie took over, even MS employees couldn't figure out how to use it, and he turned it around in a matter of months.
Nadella does deserve at least some credit for Azure. During my time at Microsoft, I was quite pleased to hear that Nadella had said something like: "We can either sell the 'One Microsoft' vision, or we can make money" - which I understood was how he explained why Azure was adding support for Linux.
As someone who has been using Windows Azure since '09 I have to really congratulate Scott Gu and others involved for turning things around. It was a serious hot mess back then. Deploying your code took way too much work to configure and 20 min to wait for it to deploy. The Visual Studio integration is pretty slick now.
The latest management portal though? I'm not so sure about that...
Scott Guthrie abandoned Silverlight after giving speeches about how it is the best technology. Soon enough he will ruin Azure despite Nadella's efforts.
Let's say $1000 each (though this skews low and makes the units moved a generous number)
$1000 x 1000 = $1M
900 x 1000 = 900,000 units moved
Since I'm going to guess they include SP3 accessories in this and that can increase average cost something like 20%, let's drop that sales number down a load and say 500k-700k, likely closer to 700k.
Apple moved >12M iPads last quarter for context.
I really like my SP3 as a main daily machine and think many people will slide into usage of such a device if they start acclimating to cloud storage and/or more enterprise orgs start doing private cloud.
If MS can ride the "private" cloud story into the enterprises where they already have servers, etc. they could provide the better end-to-end story in the next 2-4 years for power tablets that most people from admin staff to executives could use well within the sweet spot of existing infrastructure.
Even if they can't move hardware units, they are already firming up the enterprise software story by going more strongly into multi-platform support for Office, etc.
Out here in the D.C. area I see Surfaces all over the place. They seem to be a favorite of the business crowd that likes to do sales pitches in coffee shops since I usually see them in the context of a powerpoint presentation.
I'd like to get one as a "second machine". The big selling point for me is the OneNote integration. Just click the button on the stylus and you're ready to take notes & sketch. What's preventing me from buying one is the price.
A few weeks ago, I bought a new Lumia 2520 for very cheap. It's a Windows RT tablet like the Surface 2, but with a Nokia design.
It's actually quite lovely. Windows RT is much better than I had assumed -- I've used x86 Windows 8 tablets before, but Internet talk had given me the impression that the ARM version is pretty bad. In reality it's fast and fluid on the Lumia hardware. Word runs great (and yes, I like using desktop Word on a 10" touch screen).
It's a bit of a shame that the Lumia 2520 will probably be the last Windows RT device ever. Nobody but Microsoft is making them any more, and they're clearly seeing more success from the x86-based Surface Pro line.
The reason for this is MS are on the backfoot, but instead of playing defensively they've gone all out to hit every selling point their competition have, and then add their own stuff too, while leveraging what is quite a lot of existing small and medium business lockin to migrate over to the cloud as appropriate. Many people (myself included) thought Amazon, Rackspace etc. would prevent this from working, but they've done it really well.
I've also seen a lot of companies move to Office 365, when previously they'd have gone with Google Docs. They seem to have prevented that threat from getting much further too.