[Devan Hammack]

First day:
"Consumers... we are sorry. We have failed you several times with products we dropped, and that has caused an understandable lack of faith in us. For those who have proven their loyalty to MS with multiple products that we have subsequently cancelled, and have taken part in our insider programs, we'd like to invite you to a special event where you will be thanked and rewarded for your loyalty."

They need to do that, or give us a damn token of appreciation... whatever it is. Apologize. Make it better. You failed and you know it, Microsoft.. Make it better. Go ahead and try to make us trust you again. I dare you.

[Deamion]

It wouldn't matter what I did on day one. The company will never recover from buying Nokia when it should have bought BlackBerry. That was the point of no return. Everything that has happened since then is the domino effect from that decision.

BlackBerry was offering everything that Nokia was (except the camera tech, but that didn't save them either), it was cheap at that time, and it would have giving Microsoft a huge, already established, footprint into the secure enterprise mobile space, which would in turn boosted it's cloud and server products, setting up the Surface line for even better sales, etc... etc...

I think history will show that buying Nokia was the final blow that killed Microsoft.

[DontBeEvil10]

We created the Armchair CEO forum to provide everyone with a place to enter their thoughts, suggestions and opinions on what Microsoft should do next. What would you do if you were in charge!? Share your thoughts, plans and opinions right here!

Please: Keep all threads productive, respectful and on-topic to the original post!

1- fire nadella
2- build a mobile device and bring top apps (paying them or developing for them)
3- bring windows 10 to cars and smart tvs
4- buy/commercial agreements with spotify, netflix, vimeo, viber, dropbox, twitter, foursquare, here ecc... or similar to use ms account and join the ecosystem

[vEEP pEEP]

Next, Build a Mobile phone, who gives a crap about how many units are sold, when trying to break into the market you have to be consistent when it comes to releasing new models, When Microsoft released the 950 and 950XL I thought it was on the right path but then Microsoft failed to stand behind the product in both advertising and the future of the mobile platform. Offering two sized phones is all Microsoft needed. offering phone like the 550 and 650 was just too much and it dumbed down the product. If Microsoft wants to be in the market it has to be done with a flagship product. Look at Apple, they never invented anything, they just take others ideas and sell them better.

Agreed.

I also thought when HP put the Elite x3 there would be hope and MS would back this with a lot of gusto...but no...

At work - being able to carry our device around and go form workstation to workstation (especially meeting rooms) would be a great idea. I thought for 90% of our organization - the Elite did exactly what PC did - and portable.

MS & HP should have been promoting Continuum....even giving it away - having some real business pilots...maybe they did and it failed miserably?

Oh well...look where we are...

MS is giving signals about leaving the consumer product market...but not being straight forward.

[hans-martijn]

I wouldn't fire Nadella, since I'd be CEO, he wouldn't be. He could help with short term strategies.

For long term strategies: I still would focus on the enterprise, but different. I'm a bit older, so I do remember the older days when we all used WordPerfect in the Netherlands. Why was everyone using WP? Well, you could copy it to three floppies and take it home, install it and work with it. Since everyone used it at home, everyone wanted to use it at the office too. That's how it became really popular.

I'd make it easy (and cheap) to use a lot of MS products on a lot of platforms for the home user. Whatever people use at home, they feel comfortable with at the office. Currently MS makes good products, but -for instance- Outlook is not part of Office Home edition. Home users don't get used to Outlook, prefer other mail clients, ask for them at work, etc. I don't think the strict segregation of enterprise and home users works.