Why did Microsoft do it?

Microsoft has got a lot of catching up to do.

An article in The Economist last week referred to "The four giants of the internet age—Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon". Each leads on their own part of Internet activity. Microsoft got barely a mention, except in the past tense, or a runner-up to one of the top 4 in one activity or another.

Microsoft thinks it can out-Apple Apple by becoming the computing client platform of choice again (this time hardware as well as software). The idea is presumably to provide much tighter integration across all clients, benefiting from the move to small, hand-held clients.  And of course, move into the business where they take a cut from all software running on Windows.

The danger is that they lose every which way; customers decide:

1. that the Apple or Android interface is better than Metro/Windows on a hand-held,
   
2. that Metro/Windows interface is not very good on a large screen keyboard/mouse interface,
   
3. and that there’s no benefit in a common interface anyway.
   

The jury's out on (1), (2) is a racing certainty, and I reckon (3) is a pretty good bet. After all, people have been pretty happy with different interfaces on their phones/tablets and laptops/desktops for the last few years. A common platform makes it a bit easier for developers, but what the heck – they’ll cope with what they’re given. Most developers want their apps to be multi-platform anyway.

It doesn't look like a smart move to me, but let's see where their stock price goes over the next couple of years. I'm not sure Microsoft can afford to lose. Not and survive, anyway.

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Simon