Windows is doomed

 new Microsoft is nearly unrecognizable. Years ago, when Windows was dominant and the smartphone era had yet to arrive, Microsoft was often the epitome of all that is wrong with a powerful company: They were accused of monopolistic tendencies, their arrogance made them miss the mobile era, and they stagnated for years while coasting on their most lucrative products.

But Microsoft is now born again, adaptive, forward-looking, and with products like its augmented reality HoloLens, occasionally almost cool. So when it was recently announced that Microsoft is entering into a deal to make its Cortana voice assistant work with Amazon's Alexa, barely an eye was batted. Once famously closed off, Microsoft now tries to be as open as possible, putting Office on the iPad, its Outlook email app on iPhones and Androids, and making its storage and note-taking services, OneDrive and OneNote, available on basically everything. Coupled with a growing cloud business, record highs for its stock, and still-growing revenues and profits, you might think things were on the up and up for the Redmond giant.