That's a pretty massive fumble. He was effectively trying to convert Microsoft into a hardware company; Satya marked the return to pure software, and Microsoft is now the biggest SaaS company in the world.
Rather than think of it as a pivot to hardware, I looked at it as MS trying to corner their share in the consumer market. Mobile and Social were the hot things back then and mobile threatened MS's dominance of the OS market. MS ultimately failed but they still owned the enterprise market and continue to keep their lead in desktop market share.
