How Microsoft emerged from the darkness to embrace the Cloud

In the cloud: Microsoft Corp is introducing a complete set of cloud services from data centres in Britain as demand for data localisation spreads across Europe and around the world. — Reuters

SEATTLE: The winter of 2010 brought some of Microsoft's darkest days. 

Bing, the search engine Microsoft built to challenge Google, was burning cash with little to show for it. Smartphones for the first time surpassed the personal computer, Microsoft's comfort zone, as the world's most popular computing device. The must-have tech gadget that holiday season was Apple's new iPad.