So, let me get this straight...
Microsoft's strategy with the cutbacks seems to be "cut all departments, divisions, and marketing expenditures that our customers, partners and staff actually enjoy or which might make life easier for individuals who fall into one of those three groups." They are in turn going to reinvest in products, technologies and services that are of dubious value to the mass market, to non-Americans and to the channel that has built their empire for the past 30 years.
That says to me that Microsoft is trying for an Oracle-like high-margin play, preferably with recurring revenue (SA, Cloud), and to hell with popularity, mass market, etc. I see a few problems.
1) They historically suck at high margin plays.
2) Everyone in the entire tech industry, from startups to megaliths is trying for the exact same areas. Most of them have a head start, better tech, more evangelists and marketing that knows how to convince fortune 2000 companies that low value for dollar is actually high value for dollar.
3) Because everyone on the planet is trying to drain the high-margin money out of the fortune 2000 there is a massive opportunity in the midmarket that noone else is trying to exploit. This is where Microsoft made it's billions. It's also the very segment that Microsoft is busy alienating.
4) The SMB market has been entirely abandoned, and they aren't buying this "cloud" bullshit, because the value for dollar is basically nonexistant. Microsoft used to at least play here in a token fashion, and it earned them happy joy-joy fuzzies from the proletariat. Those goodfeels are now going elsewhere.
5) Unlike the SMB market, Microsoft hasn't abandoned the consumer market...they're just really, really bad at it. They aren't getting any of the required goodfeels from here.
3, 4 and 5 basically mean that mass market public opinion is doing a PlaysForSure(TM) on Microsoft; if their high -margin-or-bust play fails, they are utterly fucked. They've nothing to fall back on, because they're actively working to drive away customers in all other segments. I don't get it. It looks to me like Microsoft is making a hell of a gamble that they can do "high margin" better than those with decades of experience playing that game...and systematically annihilating any possible backup plans in the meantime.
I wrote a while ago that Microsoft will be hard to kill because it's got so many different segments on the go that it could afford to have several of them not work out. What I didn't count on would be that Microsoft would actively go out of it's way to start killing off as many of these segments as possible.
Microsoft looks hellbent on going from "strongly diversified damned-near unkillable colossus" to "desperately gambling one-trick cloudpony". It's absolutely irrational.