Microsoft should stay with Surface.
Several problems with this article:
1) The blame for the relatively weak PC (and Mac) sales over the last half decade rests squarely on Intel's shoulders. Outside of gaming and some corner-case multicore-happy professional applications there simply isn't a good reason to upgrade. My current desktop device is six years old, and if I were to go out and buy a top-of-the-line replacement I get maybe 25% more single-threaded performance absent any other bottlenecks. It used to be that you upgraded for a serious performance boost. Now you just replace machines that break.
2) Yes, Apple has low single-digit percentage of unit sales. They have a much higher percentage of industry profits. I recall some time ago that while their market share in laptops was small, their market share in laptops over a price threshold like $1000 or $1500 so was absurdly high (I forget the exact numbers, but something like 90%). Their philosophy remains "Why should we dilute our brand fighting over a tiny amount of additional profit and a huge amount of additional support costs?" It's a spectacular place to be if you can pull it off, and they have.
3) Microsoft needs a similar halo, even at a loss. Not just for their own brand, but to show they can actually commit to something outside of Windows/Office/XBox. What killed Microsoft in mobile is that nobody believes them anymore. They switched strategies every few years, breaking compatibility and screwing over their customers and partners at every turn. Now they're pushing into the cloud big time, and we still eye their new ventures a bit warily because of their long history of abandoning projects and product lines and leaving big piles of wreckage in their wake.
For my own devices, I live in the Apple ecosystem because I can get away with it. But a world with one top-tier vendor is not a stable world. Similarly, we need better competition in Mobile. Ideally, this would be Microsoft but they simply committed market suicide there. Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to be competitive in the high-end mobile market on an anti-privacy platform like Android.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
