My gut response to his thought of MS pivoting to consulting a la IBM was way off but after thinking about it for a minute you could kind of make a case that Azure is a form of "self-serve operationalized consulting", he was just off on it's impact and success by a factor of 50 or 100.

I heard someone recently describe the value proposition of enterprise cloud like IBM and Azure as “not having to talk to a sales guy as a service”.

Well then every SaaS is just consulting. That’s pretty pointless then.

There was one comment in the thread about what Steve Jobs will do at the end of the decade. As a ghost I suppose? (Another says he will step down due to his health, which is closer.)

My favorite is the joke that Zuck will buy Portugal.

Saying he'll step down due to his health isn't just closer. It's what happened. He resigned a bit over a month before his death.

Jobs was alive in 2010.

Yes I know.

As in the saying. Hindsight is 20/20.

You have to remember that in 2010, Windows was still saving its reputation from Vista, Office was stale, and OneDrive didn’t exist. I don’t think Azure did, and if so it was more enterprise focused.

Nadella’s excellent pivoting of MS into a cloud and services focused company saved Microsoft from a stagnant or declining state.

I don’t disagree that was the situation at the time - but it doesn’t change how incorrect the prediction was :-)