Stephen Elop doesn't mince his words. "How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved?" he asked staff in a memo, commenting that "We had a series of misses. We haven't been delivering innovation fast enough. We're not collaborating internally."

Elop was talking about Nokia, not Microsoft, but the former Microsoft man could easily have been talking about his previous employer.

While Microsoft remains a big player in the enterprise market, in the consumer market it increasingly looks like an also-ran. Its core business is still Windows, but that's looking increasingly threatened as the world moves to mobile - a market where Apple and Google dominate and Microsoft is far behind.