I'm pretty frank about not being a fan of microsoft. I actually tell people that if you absolutely must use windows, the only acceptable way to do it is on a virtual machine on a mac. I was just at the bitly hackathon night earlier this week and virtually to a person everyone was sporting some flavor of macbook, not to mention that the office is kitted out in imacs. I routinely stop by my local coffee shop hangout just to do a laptop head count, which you should already know consistently hovers in the 70-80% range in favor of apple.

It is not just that apple is better on virtually every measurable metric that consumers care about but it is that microsoft's offering is so piss poor. Virtually the only reason people still buy windows machines is price nowadays. I have personally 'converted' dozens of long time windows users to apple after converting myself back in 2003. Those that have not followed my advice only do so based on price and price alone. Even still, those are just a small percentage of most who seek my opinion.

In the interest of being useful and not simply telling microsoft to pack it in because they have already lost (because they have) I will try to contribute something...

Dear Microsoft,

Speaking from a developers point of view you should really take a look at where the action is nowadays. Now I don't know what you consider to be the current 'hotness' in general computer development today but I think it is fair to say that this very forum, HN, is where it is at. The slashdot of it's day, as it were. If you were to crunch the articles that have made the front page on any given day through your bing search tool over the lifespan of this site I would certainly wager a morning coffee and even a donut that you would be hard pressed to come up with a measly handfull of relevant microsoft related technology articles. If you were to run a sentiment analysis on all the articles and all the posts contained herein you would not have to have a phd level implementation to ascertain that the general sentiment towards microsoft is low in the extreme. Beyond sentiment there is simply asymptotically zero mindshare amongst todays developers in microsoft technology.

But bashing aside, lets just look at what people are playing with. Nodejs, NoSql, various jvm languages, cloud infrastructure and the like. Virtually none of those things are even remotely connected to microsoft and its technology stack in any way. Some of them (if not most) are not even available on windows. Bottom line is that the new breed of developers do not use and do not care about microsoft technologies, except for one small piece: IE. Every developer developing for the web concerns him or herself with the performance of their bit of code on IE. Thankfully this is becoming less and less of a concern through the use of cross-browser libraries like jQuery and it's brethren.

Having just watched the Pope give sermon upon lecture in the UK live on the BBC I feel compeled to say to you: Repent. For the current crop of developers worldwide do not heed your vision of the computing future. I would echo a lot of JunkDNA's comment[1] in the sense that if you are even concerned with getting a second look from developers you need to make your tools available to them where they live, namely unix based os's. You need to have all in one prepackaged virtual machines that will run under parallels and vmware on the mac. Pure and simple. Developers who are not already windows adherents use the mac to develop their wares or some flavor of unix, in which case my recommendation of a virtual stack still holds true in regards to vmware.

As a consumer I would not even consider buying any offering from microsoft as it stands. Neither the zune or a winmobile device. The former being an utter failure and the later being an utter failure in its previous incarnations and if not changed drastically will continue to be in its most recent incarnation. Again, look to apple. What are they doing? Do some of that and then add in your "added-value" flavoring. To second JunkDNA[1] yet again, two versions of windows please. One server, one desktop. I'm a computer professional for over a dozen years and I have no idea why there are so many versions of windows. Honestly, I don't know what to tell people when they ask other than you are out of your mind and there is no one running the ship over there in Redmond.

In closing, I would like to wish you the best and honestly hope that you get it together. I strongly believe that the apple phoenix rose from the ashes due to their epic defeat at your hands. If you can mount a comeback the competition will fuel the space to the benefit of consumers everywhere. Good luck.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1701083