I'm genuinely a little worried for Microsoft's future at this point. I've said before that I thought they would recover from Vista and 8 because XP and 7 were solid, but I wasn't sure they'd be able to recover from two turkeys in a row. If 10 turns out to be that second turkey, commercially speaking, I don't see how they come back unless the board have the stones to replace Nadella, the top man they themselves appointed surely expecting just this sort of corporate strategy.

I haven't seen enough to make a firm prediction yet, but I do think if MS can't get a handle on these update and privacy issues very soon and they increasingly become the story instead of any of the new features, the writing may be on the wall. Microsoft seem to have attracted some overall positive reviews at launch for Win10 in the general press and non-geek PC sites/magazines, but a lot of that positive early coverage is getting drowned out by concerns about reliability, privacy, and whether the relatively few big new features (Cortana, Edge, DirectX 12) are actually worth much anyway (with, respectively, questionable effectiveness, lack of plug-ins, and few if any games available that take advantage of it any time soon, among other challenges). "It's not as bad as Win8" is not a pitch that is going to support sales for the next several years, particularly when so many of their business customers are still on 7 anyway and have nearly 5 more years before they're going to run into end-of-support issues and be forced to act one way or another.

Microsoft seem to be throwing everything into cloud and services and mobile-friendly software and new devices, at the expense of solid server/desktop/laptop software that until recently has generally just worked and aside from the occasional blip stayed just working for a long time. Which of these areas has historically yielded Microsoft's more successful offerings, and which has had a string of disappointing results? Exactly.