Comment by Night_Thastus
11 days ago
Microsoft fired their QA because at the end of the day, they are beholden to shareholders. And those shareholders want higher profits. And if you want higher profits, you cut costs.
It's not a culture problem. It's a 'being a business' problem, which unfortunately affects all publicly-traded companies.
Shareholders are, on average, not this activist. A CEO can in fact run a public company with a long-term outlook instead of pumping the numbers for just the next quarter.
Is that true? I've heard both sides of this.
Here is a whole movement that I think believes otherwise:
https://votelabor.org/articles/overturning-dodge-v-ford-recl...
On the other hand, I've heard conflicting takes from attorneys in the corporate world.
Are businesses expected to boom and bust? Cost cutting is fine if you don't kill the company in the process.
They know MS isn't going anywhere. Windows is too entrenched, users don't care or have feasible alternatives, for a variety of reasons.
Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.
This isn't 2012 anymore, most businesses live in the browser, they couldn't care less what OS they're running. The only reason Windows is still so popular is due to inertia. Ever Excel-centric businesses can use Excel in the browser.
While it's true that Microsoft can live without Microsoft, it's still a huge channel. They already lost a whole very lucrative platform (mobile)
Windows has been losing market share for years now.
> Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.
Datadog is. And snowflake. Even Google is. But MS does not like it's centered around data/metrics.
That’s a cop-out though. Company boards are legally required to act in the best interests of shareholders, and plenty of shareholders would agree that running a business in a sustainable way that can deliver profits over the long term is more in their interests than a business trading its future for some short term profits.
It’s a cultural problem really, where too many people who study business and economics have been taught this idea that it’s a moral necessity that businesses maximise profit for shareholders (to the point where plenty of people even wrongly believe that’s a legal requirement!), but it’s an ideological position that has only caused once great companies to fail and huge damage to our economies.