So, Microsoft has missed mobile. Consumer PCs, slowly, will be a shrinking platform. Meanwhile weakness in mobile also bleeds back to the desktop and undermines Office. The shift away from the PC will be slower in the enterprise than in consumer internet, and so will the rise of alternative software models. But as I discussed here, the rise of SaaS services and new productivity models on one hand and more and more capable mobile devices on the other means that Office, and hence desktop Windows in the enterprise, is also probably a declining model. You may need a PC to run Office, but you can no longer assume you'll be running Office at all.

This brings us to capitulation. The new CEO is acknowledging the end of 'Windows Everywhere' as the driving strategic engine for Microsoft, and also acknowledging the decline of Microsoft Office as the monolithic, universal experience for productivity. Windows Phone is no longer the centre of the strategy (if it survives at all as anything more than a Nexus-like niche). Microsoft is also suggesting that Xbox is not strategically core either, reflecting the reality that it will be the smartphone, not the TV or a box plugged into it, that will be the hub of the digital experience for most people. The smartphone is the sun and everything else orbits it.

This is a little like Google's transition away from the plain-text web search as the centre of everything, and indeed Facebook's tentative shifts away from the Newsfeed. Microsoft has two huge, profitable businesses in Windows and Office: they will slowly go away, so how do you use them to create something new? Instead of every new project having in some way to support Office and Windows, how do you use Office and Windows to support the future? You must distinguish between things that prop up the legacy Office and Windows businesses (and Microsoft is doing plenty to do that), while using them to drive the new things.

But you also need to work out what that 'new' would look like. Google's mission is generalizable beyond 'web search' - really, (as I wrote here) it's a machine learning company whose mission is to understand everything and help you find it, and that doesn't have to mean a text search box. For Microsoft it's less clear. It delivered 'a PC on every home and on every desk', which once seemed like a crazy goal, but now mobile means 'a computer in every pocket' and Microsoft has little role to play in delivering that, so what does it do? Again, as I suggested here, enterprise platforms and productivity are going to change fundamentally, and that in turn will enable and feed off a shift away from PCs. Sharing document files (or copying them as web apps) is not the future - rather, the connective tissue of work needs to be rebuilt. By someone. I don't have a complete sense of what that looks like, but admitting defeat is the first step to working it out.