Nadella: Apps must run on ALL WINDOWS – PCs, slabs and mobes

Phone egg, meet desktop chicken - your mother

Windows, yes, but other things, too

In fact, Nadella said, customers won't need to buy Microsoft devices or even Windows devices to take advantage of the new "experiences" the company plans to deliver. Future Microsoft products will instead be designed to work with whatever devices customers bring to the table – including iThings and Googlephones, as we've seen with the recent releases of Office apps for iOS and Android.

Redmond still profits in such a world because of the integration of Microsoft software with the company's cloud services, including Office 365 and Azure. Even much-maligned Bing figures into the mix – witness the low-cost Windows 8.1 with Bing version that Microsoft is now offering to OEMs – and in fact, Nadella said the company expects Bing to be profitable on a standalone basis by the 2016 fiscal year.

That said, Nadella feels these new Microsoft-built experiences should still "light up the very best on Windows devices," and to that end he's urging the company forward in a direction that will make the Microsoft platform experience more consistent, whether you're running Windows on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, or a Windows Phone.

One appy Windows family

He's not talking about a single Windows OS that runs on every kind of device – not really. But he does want to make it possible for developers to build a single "Modern" app that can run unmodified on Windows devices with screens of every size, something he began talking about early in his tenure as CEO. It's also something we heard during the run up to the launch of Win 8, but it never really came to fruition under then-Windows chief Steve Sinofsky.

In pushing this idea, Nadella hopes to get around the chicken-and-egg problem that has plagued Windows Phone: customers aren't sold on the OS because there aren't enough apps, and developers aren't sold on the OS because there aren't enough customers.

With Universal Windows Apps, Microsoft can make the case that developers are targeting not just Windows Phone customers with their apps, but the entire Windows installed base of 3.2 billion users.

Will it work? It's hard to say. But one thing is clear: Far from being the proxy for Steve Ballmer that many outsiders assumed he would be, Nadella is intent on driving real change in Redmond that could see the company veering far afield of where it was headed under Ballmer.

Here at Vulture Annex, that looks like a good thing. But it will take a few more quarterly earnings reports – and probably quite a few more – before we can tell whether Nadella's direction is the right one. ®