Actually, He's Right. And I'm, not an apple ****** for saying this either. With regards to Nokia, they had symbian for too long and wouldn't have even had to consider wp if they got their act together sooner and came out with a competitive OS to iOS, but they didn't. They let iOS slowly eat away at their market share year after year and act like nothing was going to happen and then they had to bring in Elop to salvage what left they had of the company and change platforms for them to become profitable again. Same thing happened to BB, they kept the same stale OS for years and only came out with BBOS10 after it was too late, IMHO.
Another thing, MS is moving towards the apple business model, and it makes sense: It worked brilliantly for apple, why won't it work for MS? The problem android has is that you have this disconnect between the hardware and software, same problem with traditional PCs. The biggest issue (I believe) that plague PCs is driver compatibility. Usually when you have problems, its some kind of graphics driver, or chipset driver not working correctly. This is why macs work very well, its much easier to write 10 drivers for 10 different standard pcs(macs) than to write drivers for millions of different types of pcs on the market. MS knows this, why else were they so strict on the WP hardware guidelines, like making sure that all WP hardware had to use only qualcomm processors, for example. The surface is another example, I believe that its the tablet that OEMs failed to make. The surface pro and RT are fantastic devices for being first gen. They have some problems, but look at the pro, for example, its probably the smallest computer on the market running a full intel core i5 in it and even had to have a custom cooling solution engineered specially for that product. The surface pro could have had all sorts of overheating issues, driver problems, digitizer problems, wireless problems, but it didn't. Sure the battery life isn't great, but that, to me, seems to be the only glaring flaw with it which I'm sure they will fix on the second gen anyways. Point is, MS is turning into a devices and services company, like apple, and I think their first-party hardware is much better than OEM hardware at the moment, maybe save for some of the lenovo thinkpads or other business grade computers.
The other thing MS is doing is services, as stated above. Bing, Xbox music, xbox live, office, skydrive, I could go on and on, but thats where the money is. Sure, with apple, they do make great margins on their products, but itunes is really their cash cow and the know it, they make a huge profit on all of the apps and songs sold through their store. MS is doing the same thing because thats where the money is. So yes, Tim cook did take a nice shot MS, but I think he's right, MS is turning themselves into an apple-esque business model, maybe not quite as locked down as apple, but very close and I think its good for them, this is where the technology industry is heading in the future. Google and amazon also do this too.