I don't think so, especially because Nadella specifically mentioned that D&S is not the governing principle (well, he didn't say that exactly, but almost). What Mobile-First means to me is that mobile is _the_ platform, and being present on portable devices is the key to survival for Microsoft (and don't forget, almost every end-user device is portable, including dockable mobile workstations). That means that MS cannot afford risking not being present on dominant mobile operating systems, for example -- it would be stupid to risk the survival of the company and only push stuff on Windows Phone, for example.
Other than that, I disagree with the article on a many points.
> Microsoft’s tradition of innovation is hard to even detect, much less celebrate or revive.
The tradition of innovation is there -- see Microsoft Research, one of the best funded institutes. The tradition of polish is not there. Microsoft has produced tablet PCs, smartphones, voice and handwriting recognition, mapping, and so on. It has a bad record of taking stuff out from R&D departments and delivering them to end users in a neat and easy-to-use way.
> I don’t mean to be a pedant but which is it — mobile first or cloud first? Only one thing can be first.
I think the opposite: the two goes together hand in hand, and cannot really live without each other. That's the big problem of Apple: they are not that good in cloud services, and a phone (or a tablet) increasingly relies on cloud services. Google is mostly winning the mobile war because it's cloud services. It's the cloud services why Google can release Android for free, it's them why many iOS users slowly gravitate towards Android ('because Google stuff works better'), it's them why many people don't want Windows Phone ('I don't use too many apps but I need Google Maps and GMail').
> The tradition of innovation is there -- see Microsoft Research, one of the best funded institutes... Microsoft has produced tablet PCs, smartphones, voice and handwriting recognition, mapping, and so on.
I don't see how you can claim Microsoft has been innovative, ever. Windows was a reaction to the Macintosh, the Zune was a reaction to the iPod, C# was a reaction to Java, IIS to Apache, Surface to iPad, MSN to AOL, MS Money to Quicken, XBox to PlayStation, Bing to Google, Internet Explorer to Netscape Navigator, Excel to Lotus 1-2-3, DOS to CP/M, Windows Phone to iPhone, Azure to AWS, etc., etc.
Microsoft's history is a long list of occasionally successful (but mostly not) efforts at me-too-ing the competition. In the 90s this worked -- occasionally -- because they were able to enter those markets and dominate from their sheer size. Now, however, it does not. In any case, I cannot think of a market that Microsoft created or a product that they introduced that has seen success since the 1990's.
> Google is mostly winning the mobile war because it's cloud services.
I don't understand this at all. Apple is making the lion's share of profit in mobile. Last time I checked, Google wasn't making much money form Android at all.
By this standard, who is innovative? Wasn't the Macintosh a reaction to the work at Xerox PARC? Wasn't the iPod a reaction to the existing MP3 players on the market? Wasn't Google a reaction to AltaVista et al.? Everyone takes inspiration from the products that have come before.
In some ways, yes. But, in the case of the Macintosh, Apple took what was available and made it successful in the consumer space. They helped to usher in a new market. The same can be said of the iPod, although not to as dramatic an extent as with the 512K Mac. For Google, their innovation was AdSense. You could say that this "innovation" was just a natural evolution of the banner ads of the era, but only in hindsight.
Contrast both Google and Apple with Microsoft and you will be hard pressed to find a time when Microsoft had the foresight to see where the market is going, or what the potential is. They react to established players, embrace & extend, and (occasionally) profit. They have never been able to successfully create new markets.
You put your finger right on the danger there. It could mean anything from "We're, selling off all the hardware, replacing Windows Phone with an AOSP-based system, like Amazon's, and implementing all our mobile apps for iOS and Android, and doubling the resources on our Azure/Bing ecosystem" to "We're keeping everything, laying off a few people to get another bump-up from Wall St., and muddling through."
I dunno. I see this as "devices and services" rephrased.