I'm sure the board is behind Nadella's strategy. It was pretty obvious what they were going to get when they appointed him, and no-one could say he hasn't follo

I'm sure the board is behind Nadella's strategy. It was pretty obvious what they were going to get when they appointed him, and no-one could say he hasn't followed through on the vision. It's the investors that will force the issue if anyone does, IMHO. Yes, often investors just follow the patterns and trends because that's where the money usually goes as well, but if Microsoft have any major institutional investors that are looking a bit deeper, I could see meaningful concerns being raised if the picture isn't looking a bit more healthy by 2-3 years before the Win 7 "deadline" arrives. If those concerns aren't then robustly addressed, I could see shareholders forcing through a change of leadership and strategy. As for what constitutes success for 10, it's hard to say objectively, but I suspect it will always be held back as long as the telemetry and forced update concerns persist. There's a certain part of the market -- apparently quite a substantial part, though it's hard to gauge exactly how much -- that really, really doesn't like those things. Given that 10 seems decent enough in most other respects and it does have some potentially useful incremental improvements over its predecessors even if it lacks any really compelling selling points, it seems like Microsoft could make the bad PR go away almost overnight if they just reverted to their traditional strategy by giving control back to their customers and being transparent and less greedy about the data collection. However, this brings me back to the question of the new business strategy, because it seems shifting control and data back to Microsoft's hands are basically the things Nadella is all about. If customer resistance to that strategy is what is holding back more widespread adoption of 10 and limiting Microsoft's future potential, that doesn't look good for the current leadership team.