Mind you, 300,000 * 3k per server is still only 900 million.
Now obviously MS saw this which is why we have things like Surface now but I am really surprised that they decided to kill off the Media Center Extender platform they had. They could have easily taken that and built a device similar to the Chomecast/Apple TV for dirt cheap and had a decent head start.
Their plans for Xbox One are interesting with all of the TV features and HDMI pass through but the Xbox One is seriously expensive so it still only really appeals to pretty committed console gamers.
With Ballmer leaving in the next year I hope Microsoft bring in a decent tech-oriented CEO although I have a feeling they will go for another business guy who will do similar to what Ballmer did. Not to say Ballmer did a bad job. Sure he had some duds but he wasn't an awful CEO. I am going pretty left field here but I would love to see J Allard come back but I don't know if he is really MS CEO material. He certainly has a good image though and is respected by most of the tech community and I could see him being a Steve Jobs type figure head for MS if they played it right.
Then again I am just some random guy on the internet who hacks code for fun so I am probably totally wrong about it all but you have to agree seeing Allard back would be pretty interesting :)
Skydrive and Hotmail are some of the services much larger than people realize. Hotmail gives you very large inboxes, like Gmail, and Skydrive backs cloud storage and backup for most Windows devices.