In the day one keynote of its Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft was working hard to persuade its hardware and software partners of the opportunity that its platforms offered them. Key to that is convincing the assembled partners that its platform represented a growth opportunity. That means talking about the growth when products are doing well—and talking about the size of the potential market when they aren't.

Doing well, of course, are Windows and Office—a billion users of the pair—and perhaps more importantly, as it represents the future, Office 365. Microsoft calls it its fastest growing commercial product, claiming in January a 150 percent increase in the number of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) using it in the last year. This growth seems only likely to continue, with new pricing plans announced last week that should give SMBs a little more for their money.

Azure, too, is looking like a success story, with Microsoft claiming 250,000 customers, adding 1,000 more every day. Just as Microsoft is having to sell the cloud to IT departments, it's also having to sell it to its partners. Here, the pitch is one that the company has been making since the start of the year: being "cloud-oriented" boosts profit and growth, with the company claiming that companies doing at least 50 percent of their business "in the cloud" have 1.6 times the gross profit margin, and 2.4 times faster growth.

Assisting companies selling cloud solutions, Microsoft announced a new scheme of certification processes for cloud partners, putting a greater focus on actual Office 365 and Azure usage, and less on exams and assessments.

Less successful, however, is Windows Phone. Microsoft's message was "momentum." The company says that the operating system has grown 91 percent, year-on-year, to become the number two platform in 14 markets, with eight markets having at least a 10 percent market share. It even beats the iPhone in 24 markets. Much of this comes off the back of the cheap and cheerful Lumia 520, which Microsoft COO Kevin Turner trumpeted as the best-selling device in its price class. More than 12 million of the phones have been sold.

Turner also painted a picture of an increasingly healthy app ecosystem, with 270,000 apps, growing at 500 per day, more than 4 billion app downloads, and a 440 percent increase in monthly paid app revenue since the launch of Windows Phone 8—an encouraging sign that might give the company pause for thought before it enables the use of Android apps on the platform.

More broadly, Turner said that Microsoft has just a 14 percent share of all devices when one counts smartphones and tablets alongside PCs, and that this represents a huge opportunity for the company and its partners. It also requires a new mentality, a "challenger mindset" that requires three things: "disruption," "differentiation," and "speed."

This is a huge change in positioning. For the longest time, Microsoft has rested on the laurels of its 90-plus percent share of the desktop market. While that market is still important, with Microsoft promising continued improvements to make Windows a better enterprise desktop platform, the 14 percent number shows that Microsoft recognizes the new computing landscape and the fact that in some regards it now only plays a small role. It's trying to turn that lemon into lemonade: with only a 14 percent share, the potential for massive growth is there. It just hasn't happened quite yet.

One thing that may help grow that 14 percent share are some of the new devices that will take advantage of zero dollar Windows licenses. By the end of the year, HP should have a $199 Windows laptop and a $99 tablet. With these, Microsoft wants to take on Chromebooks and cites a number of advantages (primarily revolving around the ability to use regular Windows software, including Office) as reasons to go for the Windows machines.

The company will, however, have its work cut out if it wants to avoid a recreation of the netbook phenomenon, where a combination of poor quality, bad performance, and troublesome crapware left people frustrated with Windows and Microsoft, opening the door to the relief that the iPad provided.

Taking advantage of this opportunity is the point of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's long and unclear plan for the company. While Redmond seems well-placed on the cloud side of things—it has strong enterprise credentials, and Azure and Office 365 are both good products—the mobile market has never been the firm's forte. Microsoft may yet find success for itself and its partners, but so far it has done little concrete to show how that will happen.