Comment by Root_Denied
1 month ago
It seems like that decline will continue until it affects their stock prices. There's effectively a bunch of perverse incentives at the decision making level in all major companies right now that disconnects them from customer/end users. Until that fundamental issue is fixed the enshittification will continue.
According to their latest annual report, Windows earns them less than half as much as Office and less than a quarter of what they make by selling server products.
They haven't made their money from selling Windows for a very long time, these types of mistakes are gonna have precisely 0 impact on their stock price.
That is true in the short term but most of the rest of their business rests on the fact that windows is the default OS.
If windows ever gets so bad that people actually do defect to macos/linux en masse that absolutely will affect their stock price, but so far it hasn't happened
Corporate users are the only users they even pretend they care about and they know they have pretty good lock in with Windows and office.
Also obviously this is someone else's problem some other quarter.. so.. like who cares?
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I think that transition, from OS/Desktop company to a Cloud Services Provider, is where the rot comes from.
The financial incentives are to upsell incompetent IT departments onto forever subscriptions. The poor products lead to fat over-engineering in the cloud and huge running bills that are very hard to undo. Sloppy LLM integrations, and sloppy LLM advice about IT needs, would seem to feed into that same strategy.
By the time the decline affects the stock prices — it won't, since dollars will devalue faster than Microsoft shares — it will be too late as all institutional memory of how to make good products will have been lost.