The Windows Azure guy, best choice in my opinion. Windows everywhere, Azure everywhere. Yummy, yummy, so sweet is the feeling in my tummy.

Going cloud-first and mobile-first as well as being a services-and-devices company is their goal for the future. Would be interesting to say what the future holds, especially now with Build 2014 coming in the next few months.

Oh, and Azure is the new sexy!

On a personal note, I'd love for them to merge Windows Phone with Windows RT, and provide on-the-go option for people on ARM devices to change between shells.

Excuse me while I look up what the heck Windows Azure is and Sa---whoever that is, is.

As it stands, I'm in the crowd who thinks they should probably stop chasing the 'Windows Phone' fantasy, as its damaging the rest of their environment. As for the cloud service, why should I care? There's a literal buttload more of services that don't sound as tacky/evil.

On one hand, I think he's actually the most reasonable choice of the many that I saw proposed. But it doesn't give me hope that MS is going to back off from always-online functionality, so this probably means that I'm going to have to move to Linux in the long run.

Awful choice.

Maybe it's good for people who love "the cloud", and dream of putting their whole lives in "the cloud". Really convenient for the NSA and the surveillance state too.

Cloud services & smart devices company? No thanks.

Would you say that managing your own on-the-premise solution is cheaper and more reliable than using state-of-the-art data centers? What always-online functionality? Every service has an offline fallback. SkyDrive works when you're offline, Office 365 works when you're offline... It and the competition (in this case, Amazon's solutions) are quickly becoming the backends of the Internet, sort of. Most of Microsoft's services are now running on Azure, iCloud is spread over Azure and AWS, millions of employees' work-related data and services based on Dynamics are running on Azure and/or Oracle's cloud solutions...

Of course, not that much interesting from a gamer's point of view, if you were referring to that.

EDIT: Strange that I was downrepped, did I say something bad?

You've missed the bigger news, which was suggested (don't know if confirmed). Apparently Bill (of the Gates variety) is part of that deal, and will be returning to the design level (albeit only 1 day a week, but still... someone with a plan might be back).

Rather see Bill back. Ballmer was....not really very good

As somebody who likes FreeBSD and prefers to use Linux over Windows, I approve. Choosing somebody that's going to continue damaging their reputation was a good idea. Thumbs up. As evil as Bill's business tactics were, he at least could envision the wow. The idea that an OS could be something more than just the mundane. There were serious issues with the OS when he was still there, but at least they were trying to blaze new ground rather than copying everybody else with little regard for how it fit their strategy.

Sell Xbox please I want to watch it buuuuuurrrrrrn.

That is all.

I would say it is NOT cheaper, never will be.
BUT ANY COMPANY IT MANAGER SAYING LETS GO CLOUD SHOULD BE FIRED ON THE SPOT!!!!!!!!!!
Heck, check under their keyboard to make sure they do not keep their passwords there.

Why dear lord would you be stupid enough to allow your business IP and confidential information be held by a third party.
Especially one that you know will, sorry, it HAS given data over to others without your express permission.
I know that internal IT is expensive and difficult to handle, but you cannot tell anyone you deal with that you are holding their data safely, when you do not even have the only keys to your locks.
You know what, save me the time of bothering and just give me the bloody passwords to your PayPal would you. I promise to keep the data safe on my remote server, it does not even directly interface the internet, so unless it becomes irrecoverable you will be safe. I promise to treat your data like my own :)

Having the capability baked into the OS is a huge problem. Even the ideal world where no security issues exist, there's the potential for major bugs and user confusion. In the real world, it's a tremendous security problem for an OS that already has massive structural security issues.

With even a chance of Mr. Gates returning to MicroSoft we should all ask "Why did you name your company after your dick?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njos57IJf-0

Thanks for posting that link. I've never heard of these silly rap battles before but after watching a few just now I must admit I find them ludicrously entertaining.

I thought they wanted to recruit Adam Orth back as their CEO. Oh well... :-P

How does this affect the Start Menu and Metro.