I don't think so, especially because Nadella specifically mentioned that D&S is not the governing principle (well, he didn't say that exactly, but almost). What Mobile-First means to me is that mobile is _the_ platform, and being present on portable devices is the key to survival for Microsoft (and don't forget, almost every end-user device is portable, including dockable mobile workstations). That means that MS cannot afford risking not being present on dominant mobile operating systems, for example -- it would be stupid to risk the survival of the company and only push stuff on Windows Phone, for example.

Other than that, I disagree with the article on a many points.

> Microsoft’s tradition of innovation is hard to even detect, much less celebrate or revive.

The tradition of innovation is there -- see Microsoft Research, one of the best funded institutes. The tradition of polish is not there. Microsoft has produced tablet PCs, smartphones, voice and handwriting recognition, mapping, and so on. It has a bad record of taking stuff out from R&D departments and delivering them to end users in a neat and easy-to-use way.

> I don’t mean to be a pedant but which is it — mobile first or cloud first? Only one thing can be first.

I think the opposite: the two goes together hand in hand, and cannot really live without each other. That's the big problem of Apple: they are not that good in cloud services, and a phone (or a tablet) increasingly relies on cloud services. Google is mostly winning the mobile war because it's cloud services. It's the cloud services why Google can release Android for free, it's them why many iOS users slowly gravitate towards Android ('because Google stuff works better'), it's them why many people don't want Windows Phone ('I don't use too many apps but I need Google Maps and GMail').