I have ideas, but they don’t return my calls.

Most of what is suggested here is pure nonsense in business terms. When a struggling company is “re-focussed” the point is to start with what they do well, not with what they do poorly.

To suggest that Microsoft, a company that really only does well in the business sphere and the “back rooms” of IT today, should re-focus itself on all the areas that it completely *sucks* at (consumer tech, education, etc.) is ridiculous.

Microsoft is really quite bad at “innovation” of any kind and always has been. The facts are plain. Microsoft was never “cool.” Microsoft has *never* really been good to the consumer or to education. People used their products because they had to and because there was no other alternative, not because they enjoyed them or thought Microsoft was cool or innovative.

“Saving” Microsoft will happen in the same way it happens in all businesses. The board will eventually fire Balmer and re-focus the company on what it does best. Business. The non-profitable sections that deviate from this core mandate will be sold off (X-Box, Kinnect, etc.), and Microsoft will again be a successful, money-making proposition.

What it won’t be (and never has been), is “cool” or “innovative.” It will be a smaller, but still vastly profitable company serving all those back room computers and calling centres that literally can’t survive without them.