Comment by WWLink

Microsoft has never been an end-user-focused company. Almost every successful product they've ever made was to sell to a business for their employees to use. Everything else they seem to either half ass or screw up or lose their passion for at some point.

I think I first came to that realization with windows phone 7/8? The UI was cool looking, but functionality was half-baked and third party app availability was dismal. HOWEVER! You could sign a windows phone into an active directory/365 account and manage the bloody daylights out of it via group policy and the tools to do that were SUPER WELL MADE.

Same is/was true of Microsoft Teams - an utter abomination of a chat client, the search is garbage, the emoji and sticker variety sometimes weird, the client itself randomly uses up 100% CPU for no reason and is just generally buggy... but gosh darnit, MS made sure sysadmins could ban memes and use of certain emoji via policy and gave insane amounts of detail to auditing and record keeping. So sure it's a pile of shit to use, but awesome if you wanna spy on your employees and restrict their every move.

Windows is fun because with the enterprise version, they give all that control to the employers, but with the consumer version they give all that control to advertisers, developers, and themselves.

I think this is also why every consumer-focused product they make either fails instantly, or ends up rotting on the vine and failing after whoever evangelized that product leaves the company (possibly being forced out for not being a "culture fit"). Do I have to go on about zune/windows phone/xbox? Or surface? Or the way they randomly dumped their peripherals product line on another company? lol.