Microsoft takes earnest shots at hardware, it might not always work out but I appreciate the effort.

Long live the Zune!

I love my microsoft natural ergonomic keyboard 4000

The Phone OS is still my favourite UI and was incredibly unique when first introduced. Live tiles in an era of pages of icons was way ahead of it's time. The phone hardware was/is great too; the lack of apps destroyed them though

My secondary phone is still a Lumia.

I like my Microsoft mice too.

I'm super loyal to the Microsoft Basic mouse. It lasts forever whereas all the Logitech M100's that I've purchased (and I've purchased a lot of them) don't last more than 6 months. Sad!

+1, had a Microsoft Mouse 5000 for the last ~5 years. Good for larger hands, love the smooth scrolling having got used to it. Needs the odd teardown to remove fluff from the optical wheel sensor, I can live with that fine :)

Surface book 2!

Yeah, those products don't pan out, but ya have to believe they're learning something of value in the process.

Actually, most of Microsoft is still a huge sales organization. Any technical role that is part of a subsidiary and isn’t in support is under sales, and they have been relentlessly driving Azure because that’s their top priority.

I'm not really seeing software, more services including Azure and online versions of apps and even Windows as a subscription. I'm sure there's lots of consulting in there too.

Microsoft doesn't do consulting but has an enormous partner ecosystem.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-CA/enterprise/services?activeta... we kinda do? Microsoft Consulting Services is directly from us, though the extensive partner ecosystem is also important for smaller customers.

Well, there is Microsoft Consulting Services, so it isn’t quite such a simple picture. But it is true that they haven’t gone down the IBM path.

It's a drop in the ocean though, I'm aware there's is a little of that but if you look at revenues you can say that without being too wrong. The in-house stuff is mostly a function designed to enable customers better more than a way to squeeze money out of it. It doesn't even crack the billion dollars (it's around 300M last time I checked).

But yeah, I should have known that given the crowd on hacker news I should have protected my statement from the "actually..." crowd.

They do. Usually to very large corporate customers.