Microsoft in 2016: Is there any point asking SatNad what's coming?

Looking Ahead Microsoft has never had to deal with a grumpy activist shareholder criticising the leadership – a grump activist who just happens to be its biggest shareholder ... and its former CEO.

Steve Ballmer won't let go. He thinks the cloud KPIs Microsoft gives out are "bullshit", and its mobile strategy is fatally flawed. If Ballmer is just getting started, then 2016 is going to be pretty interesting.

As if it wasn't interesting already. Microsoft is in its most turbulent phase for 25 years, unable to rest on the monopoly profits of Windows and Office, and at risk of becoming a legacy niche IT supplier, just like Wang.

And it's only fair to cut the CEO some slack. He's still relatively new. Some 20 years of in-fighting at Redmond, no matter how successfully you do it, doesn't really prepare you for dealing with reality, with investors, partners, and with the media. Even on his first day as CEO, angsty shareholders were calling on him to abandon Surface, Bing and Xbox.

Satya Nadella has shown himself to be admirably (or treacherously) agnostic. At times, brave too. Microsoft resisting the US government has far-reaching consequences (more below). Nadella responded to the Schrems bombshell by vowing to put data centres all over Europe. Perhaps like Atatürk (or พระบาทสมเด็จพระปรมินทรมหาจุฬาลงกรณ์ พระจุลจอมเกล้าเจ้าอยู่หัว) he'll turn out to be a great reforming leader.

But it's only fair to point out that Nadella is now coming up to two years in the job, and you can't call him a new boy. And some of Microsoft's problems are completely Nadella-inspired. Microsoft's mobile strategy remains a case of noble intentions, but awful execution. Here are a few examples.

Noble: keep Microsoft in the game by making sure its software is great on iOS and Android. Awful: make rotten acquisitions, at considerable cost. The result? Far and away the best Exchange client for Android is still made by an indie developer: 9Folders' Nine client. Meanwhile, Microsoft users on Android have been kneecapped. Acompli is a very poor second best. The M&A team did a terrible job. Who was paying attention?

And there's more.

Noble: fix the app gap by letting developers work for web, iOS and Android. Awful: lose control of the Android-on-Windows project, so it threatens the viability of your Universal Windows ("One Windows") strategy, by running Android apps unmodified. Then reverse course. Again, who was paying attention?

This year Microsoft released two unfinished platforms that might never be finished, now that "Windows is a service": both Windows 10. He hasn't formally abandoned anything, but Xbox now looks "non core".

It's great that Nadella trusts his engineering lieutenants so much. But perhaps he has a higher degree of tolerance for unfinished software than his customers, who have the choice of staying away. It's hard to imagine the CEO being happy with the quality of the software in the two Lumias released so far.

These products (such as Windows 10 for that matter) hark back to the bad old days of IBM. Big Blue would release something that was important to IBM, but that didn't move things along very much for the user. Watching a Continuum demo, you can see why Microsoft needs it, more than you can imagine why you'd want it.

In recent years Microsoft took the moral high ground to Google, advertising how "creepy" Google's obsessive and indiscriminate data collection was. Then it promptly jumped in the same Scroogly waters. Who was paying attention?

Then, there are the moments where Team Nadella's own verbiage causes problems. This is a CEO who actually approves sentences such as "In the longer term, Microsoft devices will spark innovation, create new categories and generate opportunity", none of which means anything. And he seems proud of them.

Nadella can take himself off message at any moment, offering a kaleidoscope of ambiguity. It caused a fiasco in the summer when he attempted to "clarify" Microsoft's mobile devices strategy. Within a few days more clarifications were rushed out, and we understood that the Lumia models that had been cancelled were being un-cancelled.

Why do so many of The Beast's historical problems remain? I've described Windows 10 as less of an operating system, and more of a Middle Eastern ceasefire – likely to be shot to pieces by warring factions at any moment.

Microsoft has been at war with itself ever since Windows and Office "won" twenty years ago. The general rule for the company has been that if something interesting emerges, it will get quashed, either by accident (the strategy is revised) or by design.

Perhaps that fate awaits really interesting new developments such as HoloLens, and the hypervoice acquisition, Ray Ozzie's Talko. You hope not. But then you remember it's Microsoft. So you adjust your expectations accordingly.

Microsoft's biggest innovation in 2016 might turn out to be legal. The case known as Microsoft vs the US in Dublin has received little attention, but just consider what's at stake. The US government is demanding Microsoft turn over personal information on an individual hosted in an Irish data centre.

Go get an Irish warrant then, Microsoft is telling Uncle Sam. We don't need to, says the US, because our warrants are good anywhere. We recognise no borders, no territoriality. Ending the US concept of no limits to US law could go a very long way, for everywhere becomes "offshore". And that includes tax.

You could say that with so much potential profit being made overseas, that the US wants to tax, Microsoft isn't entirely doing it for altruistic reasons. But the fact it's doing it at all is remarkable. ®