Microsoft has granted Mary-Jo Foley exclusive access to CEO Steve Ballmer. _She recently published a discussion with Ballmer about the Surface in which he admitted:_“Nobody ever buys Windows. They buy Windows PCs.” _A pretty profound statement in it of itself. “One of the things tech companies really do terribly is build new capability,” Ballmer said. _Unfortunately, when the industry changes, if you haven’t built any new capability, you can become less relevant because the thing you were good at becomes less relevant and you didn’t built capability in a new area.” “We’ve had to do it a couple of times, in fact, from platforms to apps, from now software to services, from OS (operating system) royalties, to OS royalties and devices,” he said. Ballmer called_Xbox _”sort of a signature about building new capability in hardware and devices.” _Microsoft staffed up its supply-chain-team after getting into the Xbox business. _Some of this was helpful when Ballmer approved the decision to create Surfaces. “We still need to upgrade and we still need...

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