Comment by DrewADesign
6 hours ago
Absolute contempt for their users at every level. It’s so transparent. This is the end game of anticompetitive practices for decades— they just don’t have to try anymore… for now. Some day they’ll either have to compete in good faith or sink. I doubt that will happen soon, but someday.
It's hard to argue against contempt but... I'm gonna try. It feels like at the end of the line it's just a checkbox someone gets without having to consider the consequences of the changes. Either it's too big or there's too many levels where decisions get made and handed down to drones (or AI), but the people who decide seem to have no concept of what their products are used for and the people who implement features seem to have accepted that the system is so big that they can't understand all the impacts of their changes and have to rely on trusting commands from above - who may expect them to challenge from the POV of users or question things but never do. Anyway, this feels like what happens when managerial overhead and marketing KPIs smash into a complex product ecosystem. It all smells of IBM to be honest
Microsoft was always afraid of being IBM. They are more IBM than IBM.
When they started flying people in the beg that I buy 100 Surface Laptops, that was the confirmation of everything I had been thinking. All I could think of was IBM flying a dude from Italy in to talk for 15 minutes about their version of TeamViewer back in the day. We ended up talking about shoes.
It's a shame. In the late 2010s there was a lot of hope for Satya Nadella, but it seems like the organization has regressed back to the mean.
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I don’t perceive benign neglect when they disregard UX for a product they’ve positioned so people essentially have to pay for and use it, while force-feeding them features they actively and vocally hate. Treating your customers as cash cows is fundamentally contemptful.
If not contempt, at least disregard or indifference
They have to compete in good faith for developers, which is why VS Code does not suck.
But yes, normal Office users, where the company pays the bills, pay the price.
I agree that VSC is solid for web dev or other script language workflows, and VS is fine, if a bit heavy-handed. That said, Windows native development is a freaking mess. Try figuring out what their recommended native UI kit is these days. Everything is half-assed and half-supported at best. Unless it’s going to either feed them a ton of marketing telemetry or let them bump up their supposed copilot adoption statistics, you’re yesterday’s news to MS.
VS Code is also open source and forkable, the Windows kernel or Azure tech stack not so much