These three legs are:
1) Developer tools (the original business!) to allow developers to create high-value offerings for lower-volume markets and thus secure the value of the Microsoft ecosystem.
2) A platform on which the developers can use the tools to create apps. Each platform establishes a broad uniform market for developers to sell their wares.
3) Horizontal apps to make the platform worthwhile, provide design examples for developers, and provide a higher-level platform for end-users to create solutions.
If you understand this, you understand why Microsoft invests in more portable technologies (maybe not IE, but Office Apps on the web and Silverlight) even though those technologies might seem competitive to "pure Windows". It's all about establishing productive platforms, tools, and anchoring apps.
Windows is "a" platform. As the market continues to grow from millions to billions of devices, it also ramifies (since niches can become significant markets in their own right). Microsoft wants to apply the same tools+platform+apps strategy in adjacent emerging ecosystems where Windows isn't the answer.
Whether it's Azure (a new platform for scalable SaaS/Grid), Silverlight, Office Web Apps, XBox, you should think of these as replicating the original *strategy* horizontally (not the same as scaling Windows).
Within each sub-ecosystem, Microsoft has recognized the need for a rich-to-reach continuum. If the company wants its products in front of as many folks as possible (to secure the ecosystem value as much as possible) it needs solutions which have some interoperability across the spectrum. Hence Office Apps for the Web (including a "free" ad-supported version) makes a lot of sense.
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