Why shouldn't we think MS is gonna abandon Surface within the next five years, considering all of the abandoned projects, reboots, failures, and overall let downs of this decade?
It's a billion dollar buisness rodneyej lol... and if Satya Nadella was in charge when the write down occured then yes they would have left the hardware business there and then.
Which would have been mistake as they would have lost a billion dollar business all for the sake of short term profits. As Surface didn't become a billion dollar business over night - it took time.
, Windows Mobile? Why would they want to keep that old pda OS alive lol.
Concerning Windows Phone, it makes sense they dropped it (coming from a WP user), what doesn't make much sense is how they did it (regarding UWP apps / Windows Store and Windows on Arm).
Offtopic: What I hope for is that they take this as an opportunity to expand UWP so UWP apps can also be released on shops like Steam etc (since that was/is one the main complains to UWP and somewhat halts it from growing).