Well I think the synergy that Windows was developing (Phone, Desktop, XBox, Kinect, etc. unified APIs) had a lot of potential to provide developer lock-in and a

Well I think the synergy that Windows was developing (Phone, Desktop, XBox, Kinect, etc. unified APIs) had a lot of potential to provide developer lock-in and a very compelling alternative to the hardware lock-in of Apple and the spaghetti of half baked alternatives in the OSS world. Unfortunately the quality has been a complete disaster. Instead of focusing on what open-source fails to deliver - quality and polish (b/c people who work for free want to work on fancy shiny new things, or do complete rewrites instead of polishing old code bases) they just kept pumping out more half baked features. Now Nadella has gone for some strange short-term populist plan of giving away all their intellectual property, eliminating lock in, and banking the whole enterprise on the cloud (which has almost no lock in!). I think he's going to Microsoft into an early grave