Microsoft is barely taking back its own declining market of non-phones -- while making a wild bet on augmented reality.
I feel like the media wants to paint a comeback story a la Apple a lot more than one actually exists.
In terms of an Apple come back story that's blatantly false. Microsoft was never in dire financial straights since practically the mid-80's.
The Benefit of the Doubt is more because of their attitude to the OSS community. For nearly its entire life Micro$oft has been seen as the prime enemy of the OSS community, a role which it willingly and almost happily embraced.
Today Microsoft has open sources it main .NET runtime. Opening up C#/F# 2 great languages. Its opening the JS Engine in Edge. Compared to Gates/Balmer area Microsoft it very much feels like a different company.
Companies don't have a DNA. Humans do. Companies change as employees come and go, as the environment changes, etc. Don't antropomorphize them.
Companies act in their financial interest. Very rarely not, but mostly yes. I don't know why is it so hard to accept that.
What then is this "company culture" I hear about all time on HN? Also, what percentage of employees have changed at Microsoft since the "old" Microsoft - 60, 75, 90%?
If companies don't have DNA/culture/behavioral momentum and can change at the drop of a pin, it implies all the work that has been done can be undone by Nadella's successor in short order.
FWIW, I would argue something similar wrt the Apple tv: abusive practices or not, I would not be happy to see one of the world's wealthiest corporation become a key player in yet another market (if anything because of Apple's sketchy history wrt to open formats).
And how exactly would other manufacturers compete with MS hardware anyway, while still offering MS's software on them? They'd be doomed to failure since MS can just jack up the price of Windows for them, so you'd be stuck with a single HW/SW maker, and back to a PC monopoly or something pretty close to it (since so much business software still requires Windows).
If you want healthy competition for PC hardware, it's never going to happen if MS takes over that space. Of course, it seems to be going downhill anyway, so I'm not sure what the solution is, but between the hardware makers throwing in the towel or crappifying their products, Windows becoming worse than ever with Metro and spyware and reported incompatibility with existing software, and lack of inroads for Linux into the OS space to provide some real competition (partly because of application compatibility, and partly because of too much fragmentation esp. for desktop environments; thanks a lot Gnome team), things are not looking good.