I get the impression that he is looking to the future rather than the past, and that's convergence. Right now, we have 7-inch tablets and 7-inch phones. It's pr

I get the impression that he is looking to the future rather than the past, and that's convergence. Right now, we have 7-inch tablets and 7-inch phones. It's pretty easy to see that these are essentially the same thing. Windows 10 brings a unified operating system which adapts to form factors, but the centerpiece is Cortana. Many people are looking to the future of computing as cloud-based personal assistants which connect to the Internet of Things, and Microsoft is currently ahead of everyone in this area, with Google, Apple, and Amazon close behnd. The form factor of the device a person uses becomes less important as interconnected, data-driven services become the platform. People keep misinterpreting the Nokia layoffs as giving up on phones. What actually happened was that the phone department was rolled into the Windows department. Windows Phone is dead, but Windows Mobile has replaced it as a transition into just Windows, the platform-agnostic, cloud-based, Cortana-driven operating system. The future Internet will not be phone-based. Phones will be a convenient form-factor for the near future, but they are just nodes in the cloud. There's plenty of time for everyone to catch up to Microsoft, but I think everyone should be paying attention to what they're doing. Remember when the iPod was the most important thing that Apple had? Microsoft is betting that its future as a company is not dependent on building a better Zune. It's about thinking about where the iPhone is going, not where the iPhone is.