Comment by xswhiskey
1 day ago
How can a company this big fail so hard in what one would consider their main* product still baffles me.
*Yes, they probably make more revenue in Azure or Office365 licenses but at least when I think “Microsoft” I immediately think Windows.
Because they no longer see windows as anything more than a delivery platform for their subscription services, IMO
You're entirely right, but they need to maintain Windows in order to promote those services. The OS and their various applications have a symbiotic relationship where they prioritize each other.
If Microsoft discontinued Windows and switched to just providing web apps, the competition would be a lot stiffer.
"maintain" meaning keeping it somewhat workable or actually improving it?
ATM windows still has enough of a moat that they can comfortably do the former.
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If this is the case, Windows seems like it should be very important. Otherwise they can't deliver their subscription services. I'm not going to subscribe to cable TV if my TV is broken.
It just has to be good enough to be able to deliver the service.
Their moat, for now, makes this possible.
True but it is still their moat. Without windows they will lose a lot of appeal to their cloud products like Intune, Azure AD, M365 etc
Yup. The same thing is happening with Apple. With software mostly moving to the cloud, operating systems are getting short shrift.
There's no realistic competition because the amount of work to switch your OS ecosystem, especially for businesses, is huge. So the product doesn't have to be good, you can just slam ads in the Start menu or whatever.
At one point the product is getting so bad that the cost of switching becomes a real consideration. It seems that every other year I hear about businesses and governments making the move.
If you're good enough at killing lighthouse projects you can defer that.
https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Munich-Plans-to-D...
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The switching cost keeps decreasing, because more and more stuff is being migrated to the browser and/or cloud.
Combined with some digital independence movements outside the US, I have some hopes that Windows monopoly starts to crumble.
Monopolies destroy everything. This isn't a binary it's a spectrum. You don't even need total control of the market, just extreme dominance of it, to see this effect begin.
The business version of Windows doesn't have ads in the start menu. That's the consumer/home version. The "Pro" flavors of Windows are quite a bit more pleasant and I don't think there is any downside even on a home computer.
Yes it wasn't until recently that I understood why people ran Windows Server as their home operating system.
The competition is more fierce than it has been since before Windows 95 started the complete domination of the desktop market.
Apple doubled their marketshare since the M1 chip came out.
You can just go out and buy laptops from multiple OEMs with Linux preinstalled, and it’ll run all your business apps (Slack, Google Workspaces, Zoom, Spotify, etc, everything works). That would have been unheard of in 2010.
You can even play a huge number of Windows games on Linux, and the most popular PC “console” is a Linux system from Valve (with another releasing this year). Microsoft has no control over the PC gaming market like it did back in the heyday of DirectX.
I think Microsoft should be all-hands-on-deck trying to build reasons for customers to use Windows.
I personally think Windows 11 is pretty good and is the most “going in the right direction” version we’ve seen in a long time, but it could be better. Yeah there have been missteps but the windows team does seem more free to just add stuff they wish had been in Windows for years but never got approval to go for.
Apple prices are out of reach in many world regions.
OEM laptops with Linux distributions pre-installed are only available on online shops known to HN/Reddit demographics.
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The largest Microsoft subscription account is the United States federal government. Windows/office/whatever else for every federal employee pays the company enough to continue development and offer it to the masses. I’m certain that the ability to collect habitual data on users is valuable to both Microsoft and the powers that be, for advertising and criminal investigation.
The only thing that surprises me is the lack of any additional cost to end users. It’s almost as if the majority shareholder is Blackrock.
Because they know everyone who's still using Windows has no choices to switch to. They won't use Linux or Mac.
No, they have choices, but many people just want to turn on their computer, watch a few videos, read some emails, pay some bills and then go do something else.
Those people won't fuss with installing linux and getting rid of Microsoft even though Windows is doing nothing for them that Linux cannot do just as easily.
If there are people in your life that do not use computers to make money or play video games or edit photos and videos but they do use computers, swap them to linux and let them get on with their lives.
Those people don't even have Windows–compatible computers. They have phones and tablets.
Why does it matter (from the company's ability to fail perspective) what you immediately think of? (yeah, Windows isn't their main product, quick search says it's 10% revenue vs 40% for servers, 22% office, and 9% gaming, so wouldn't that decline be relevant in explaining why it's neglected and fail?)
Windows for personal computers and Office are the only products that make Microsoft relevant. No one on god's green earth is choosing Windows Server on its own merits: They're picking it for software compatibility reasons stemming from software being written on, and exclusively targeting, Windows Desktop. Hell, most of the office suite is chosen because it's easier to buy more stuff from somebody you're already buying stuff from than to find someone new. No one has ever chosen Teams as the best product in its space.
Very few products Microsoft sells would be worth buying by themselves. They exclusively make mediocre products that are merely the default choice once you've been hoodwinked into buying into Windows or XBOX. If the break Windows, all the money disappears.
I think you’re missing Active Directory, that’s a major reason why corporations stick with Windows.
Windows server compared to any linux server os is extraordinarily inferior in every regard except for the AD Domain services interface, which is a leftover from probably Windows NT that they haven't screwed with in the interim so it still functions.
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If you aren't running Windows, you probably aren't using Office. Half the reason for Office is Exchange, and half the reason is the integration of Exchange with Active Directory.
Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?
Correct. IT departments want Active Directory.
Create a user, apportion a 365 licence and boom, they have email, Teams, OneDrive etc. Add them to some groups and they have all the files they need.
Excel is better than Sheets in ways which are important for 0.01% of users, but that is all.
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I’m mostly not running Windows, but I dislike web apps, so GSuite is out. I could use Numbers, but I need cloud file storage that works on Android, and Office 365 vs Google One are roughly the same price for the storage I need, so I don’t see any particular reason to put the effort in to migrate from Excel/OneDrive to Numbers/Google Drive.
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Yea. Even if you are all MacOS shop, Office has Desktop Applications that run on MacOS.
I find so many companies that use GSuite still buy Office licenses for select employees. There is plenty of places that will just go all in 365 for that reason alone.
Ok, so it's an important dependency, but the fact that it's a small product line can still explain the neglect. For example, is it baffling that companies don't invest time/money in open source libraries they use even though those might be important for their main products?
I was thinking about this very thing today. Personally, I see the Windows OS as a core competency of Microsoft. If the OS is bad, then the company is being run badly. In the same as when you go to a fine restaurant and the kitchen have the polished pots and pans you can see, generally things are going to be great. Its the attention to detail, If those small details are right, then the whole meal will be good. And currently the whole meal is crap with windows.
Realistically it's because a good chunk of their work is outsourced abroad who then in turn outsource their thinking to ChatGPT.
Ask anyone who was a power user of dBase or Lotus 1-2-3 back in the '80's.
I always see articles like this and have never had it happen to me. It's definitely something that affects specific hardware and/or software combinations instead of just poor QA.