Coolness and attention not correlated with importance We live in a world where we pay more attention to an app that adds a fake nostalgia to our photos than the builders of the roads we travel, electricity we consume and food we eat.
We live in a world where a Lady Gaga gets as many media mentions in a day as all the Nobel laureates put together, in a year. That should alone disabuse you of the notion: “cool = valuable, cool=important or cool = good”.
The way we perceive cool is biased against the old, big & expected. We have already taken granted our infrastructure.Now we are taking granted stuff such as quick/relevant information & smart mobile interfaces. Thus, even Apple & Google are seen a lot less cooler today than they were 10 years ago. 5 years ago, your iPhone would have generated an “Oh wow” reaction. Now, it is just “Oh”. Public moves on really quickly. That means it is a losing game to chase the “cool”.
For Microsoft, enterprise is its main revenue generator and its customers find the products valuable before writing their checks. That is the only thing that matters.