Back in October, Ballmer’s annual letter to Microsoft shareholders explained that the company, moving forward, saw itself as being in the “devices and services” business. He wrote that this move was a “significant shift,” and if anything, that’s understating matters. For several decades, Microsoft has been synonymous with PC software–the sort you install on your hard disk, not the type that lives in the cloud. Even as it’s retooled itself for the web era, it’s often described its vision as involving “software + services,” indicating that it still saw itself as a software company.
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