Re: Just can't fathom what Microsoft is trying to do
I agree with your diagnosis, but I'm not sure firing Satya is a cure. Most of what he's doing was started by Ballmer.
The real problem is that without a strong Gates in charge, whoever runs Microsoft is at the mercy of the quarterly stock report. Everything MS does these days is meant to look brilliant in the short term, because the long term simply doesn't matter to a CEO who'll be gone and spending his bonuses before it starts to matter.
A secondary problem is that Microsoft has fired (or otherwise lost) a lot of its best, long-time people over the past decade or so. (I used to visit the Redmond 'campus' regularly. Up till the early 2000s, even their marketing dweebs spoke fluent C code. The current crop can't speak coherently about product features, let alone the underlying technologies.) The corporate culture has become fragmented, and there's longer any ability to execute the increasingly complex strategies that managers like Satya dream up.
In short, Microsoft has become just another soul-less, amoral corporation - but, luckily, also an incompetent one.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
