I have no idea why you think that (paid, subscription-based) cloud computing offerings threaten Microsoft's revenues. In fact they've been trying to get people

I have no idea why you think that (paid, subscription-based) cloud computing offerings threaten Microsoft's revenues. In fact they've been trying to get people to move to a subscription model for like a decade now - which is understandable, since competition with their own previous versions and keeping people on the upgrade cycle has always been one of their biggest problems - and they are definitely aggressively promoting it (considering that this year's and the last two years' PDCs are largely focused around it). They are threatened in the consumer space by the trend towards web applications, they're not threatened in the enterprise space by the trend towards subscription-based cloud services (which is overhyped - including by Microsoft! anyway, but that's another story) - they welcome it. I guess people are conflating the two. (Since you posted a version of this article in another HN thread, I've reposted my response from that thread here.)