In business, the “best” solution doesn’t win—the one that aligns with incentives does. You can argue Linux is technically better than Windows, but Windows wins in many orgs because of familiarity, vendor support, existing tooling, and lower perceived risk. Adoption beats superiority.
I recently had dinner in Bellevue with an individual who holds a relatively senior position within Microsoft’s executive leadership. During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products. According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.
Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities. While this may not be surprising to some, what stood out to me was how emphatically she underscored that the company’s strategic focus is squarely on enterprise customers rather than end users.
That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.
Windows' value is as a funnel to the Microsoft platform. Starving that funnel of attention might not have an immediate effect, but it's a slow death spiral for the company because it cannibalizes their long-term mind share. The 10-year-olds today who grow up using Chromebooks in school, Macbooks in college, and iPhones/Android phones in their daily lives, will end up investing in Google and Apple products as a working adult at home or at the office. The one remaining moat that Windows has over other operating systems is games and old software, but with Valve hard at work to get Steam games working on Linux, this last bastion of Microsoft's consumer presence is under attack as well.
> The 10-year-olds today who grow up using Chromebooks in school, Macbooks in college, and iPhones/Android phones in their daily lives, will end up investing in Google and Apple products as a working adult at home or at the office.
1. That's not how businesses work - the 10-year-old will be 28 when he becomes an IT manager, and their 40yo boss will say "LOL no, learn to use Active Directory, we're not switching the entire company to Chromebooks/MacBook Neos because you 'grew up with' them." They will then adapt and learn to use what the business has.
2. Even assuming charitably that our 10yo will be founding a company one day and making all purchasing decisions for themselves, it's worth pointing out that neither Google nor especially Apple has shown even slight interest in delivering "Enterprise" anything. Even MDM Apple farms out to third parties, likewise they have no realistic counterpart for Active Directory, nor business email or collaboration (at least Google has that though). A startup may be all-Mac. Eventually if it's successful though, it'll be too big to use 'consumer' tools only.
The MacBook Neo is a cute PC for a student or a grandma or indeed any casual user. But despite it giving Apple (for the first time in Apple's existence) a price point for an entire computer that's under the amount where you'd be embarrassed to propose adopting it for your whole fleet... the hardware is but one part of a larger ecosystem, and Apple has demonstrated that they have no interest into selling into "The Enterprise" except for tiny niches (relative to the whole PC market) such as "web and mobile" software engineers, video editors, VFX shops etc.
Their 40 yo boss will have never used anything other than a web browser (or a game) in their entire lives at that point. He will never have heard of AD. Windows is legacy at this point. Only the most old and obtuse businesses still use it and then only for Excel and maybe PowerPoint. Most of the staff today only uses a web browser. In 20 years, nobody will even know that AD existed except in some museum in SJ.
In the medium sized public sector organisation I do some work in (not tech), most of the business type systems we use are reached via Chrome and are subscription based. I can log into them all using Linux with Chrome installed from home and there is no difference compared to using an organisation PC in their premises. Yes, I am logging in via Microsoft 365 but very few of the applications apart from email and calendar/Teams are used. The business type systems could well be running on Azure but I suspect not, at least for some of them.
Contrast that with a decade ago. All systems accessed via networked PCs using Windows native clients. I had to use RDP to a desktop to access anything from outside the network.
One day someone is going to realise that the organisation does not have to spend £££ replacing every PC just to keep running a Web browser.
Their 40 year old boss the will be younger than many of the 20 something, 30 something, 40 something entrepreneurs who already, now, at this moment (me included) would find the idea of moving to Active Directory and stocking the company with Wintel laptops equally farcical.
> A startup may be all-Mac. Eventually if it's successful though, it'll be too big to use 'consumer' tools only... likewise they have no realistic counterpart for Active Directory, nor business email or collaboration (at least Google has that though).
Between the two, they have those needs pretty much completely covered (also, Apple does have increasingly good support for MDM now). To me this reads more as a complaint that neither of them is trying to execute the same bundling/business model as Microsoft, or selling the same kind of security model as what makes sense for an old school IT shop that literally could never leave Microsoft products if it even wanted to.
Every single mobile device in "Enterprise" is using MDM provided and supported by those two companies for business users at multiple layers of the stack required to provide that functionality, they just don't make a business out of selling it directly as a Serious Enterprise Product to IT departments (the least important part of the stack, ie where a guy in a collared shirt with a web app takes a middle manager out for a steak dinner).
I set up MDM for the first time while standing in line for a flight at the airport, on my iphone and for my iphone. My company uses an enterprise IdP with a zero trust security model, which I saw executed firsthand by both Microsoft and Google for their own companies, neither of which made a fuss about giving me a mac device to work with. Somehow, it worked.
> it's worth pointing out that neither Google nor especially Apple has shown even slight interest in delivering "Enterprise" anything
You make a bold claim and then kind of refute it yourself. Apple Business and School Manager, Managed Apple Ids, Google-managed Enterprises with the admin console. The thing that Microsoft has is Entra Conditional Access and it is powerful, but also this thing is actively crumbling under its own complexity weight. From my experience the future of Enterprise solutions does not belong to Microsoft.
Not OP, but I've got a friend of a friend in the Windows org that backs this up. Most engineers are teamed up by manufacturers. HP team, Lenovo team, etc. These are the primary drivers of feature development. If it won't sell grandma another $500 HP laptop, they're not interested.
I’ve included this here because it’s highly relevant to the discussion. That said, anything not closely tied to revenue will not be prioritized, which limits the impact of this microsoft post.
I noticed that, too. However, I will say that having a couple weeks to watch Microsoft through the lens of the original post, I am inclined to adopt it as my current model for Microsoft's actual agenda.
As a result, I do not currently think that Microsoft is consumer-oriented. They have reinforced my opinion by doing anti-consumer changes in XBOX and then saying that they were pro-gamer. Seems like a pattern.
Maybe they will prove me wrong; I am sun-setting my final host that's running their software soon.
Windows used to be built for the user. Now, Microsoft builds it for themselves, as a way to help hardware partners sell hardware which includes a windows license.
So if Microsoft makes Windows for their own benefit, and not for the users benefit, I see no reason to use it at all. I don’t like games that much.
MacOS has gone downhill in a hurry but it’s still very good. Far better than Windows for me in every way.
But probably the biggest reason why Windows became the enterprise OS of choice was that every worker already learned how to use Windows on their home PC.
Now that people have phones as their principal computing devices and 90% of enterprise software runs in a browser the biggest thing helping Microsoft keep their share is AD (or whatever it's called these days, Copilot Entra ID 365?).
If someone disrupts their business by releasing a stripped-down OS that you don't even need GPOs to lock tight and a companion comprehensive IAM solution that works with iOS/Android as well, I can see Windows quickly degrading to become the "we keep one Windows PC around to control this widget from 2022" OS.
This is actually true though. If you look at the revenue breakdown for Microsoft, windows is relatively small. It's Azure and Office that make up the lions share. Those are also the growth sectors. No matter how good you make Windows, you won't sell more licenses because everyone who wants a PC already has one. The only thing they need to do is prevent people moving to Mac, which historically hasn't been a huge risk.
The whole point of Azure is that it ties into Windows processes neatly. If everyone stops using Windows, then there won’t be any real point to use Azure.
This has been the case for 15-20 years at least. It’s only now that the horrible experience for regular users is so obvious compared to Linux becoming quite good, and Mac OS ranging from fine to meh.
The continual recall/ai push from Microsoft has not helped at all and is pretty gross. There is a way to do a “recall” style thing that some folks will really want if they can trust it. The msft approach has been the opposite of that.
When your hardware is in the physical custody of the attacker, the threat model changes significantly. Designing a console that takes years for attackers to crack is an impressive feat of engineering.
That game console isn't in a data center with CCTV coverage, mandatory access control, guards, and employees with background checks. If somone is soldering wires to your server and doing fault injection something has gone very wrong. Azure Government customers also don't have to worry about the NSA demanding access.
I don't believe servers actually have this level of hardware protection to be honest. Physical protection, as someone else pointed out, on the other hand.
If hacking the xbox goes wrong, the hacker will short out the console. If hacking Azure goes wrong, the hacker will get shot.
Azures physical servers actually use a similar technology apparently. They both have some kind of proprietary HSM module that stores keys on the device and is resistant to tampering. I've read that Azure servers actually break this protection when removed from the rack so the server is made entirely useless if it's removed.
I have even heard of a major cloud service mandating absurd earthquake-proofing (to prevent any movements inside the datacenter and triggering an HSM reset) but I cannot find any verification regarding this (maybe this is ultimately an urban legend).
The point of the gaming console is to get hacked, because that's how they develop the security techniques that metastasize over to strangle general-purpose computing, which is the real goal. Device attestation is a perfect example of this.
Quick summary for the impatient (the original looks like an extract from Orwell's 1984):
Bill C-22 (Canada, 2026) updates laws to give police and security agencies faster and clearer access to digital data during investigations. It expands authorities to obtain subscriber information, transmission data, and tracking data from telecom and online service providers and from foreign companies. The bill also creates a framework requiring electronic service providers to support access requests.
You missed 'warrentless' in your summary. It's sort of important.
The push by the government here is because Canada is the only one of the Five-Eyes countries that doesn't have these powers, and for the government that's a bad thing.
Notably, a single secret warrant authorized the surveillance of everyone on the Verizon network:
That warrant orders Verizon Business Network Services to provide a daily feed to the NSA containing "telephony metadata" – comprehensive call detail records, including location data – about all calls in its system, including those that occur "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
I know those are about the US and this law is Canada, but the same things can happen.
ArcaOS is great in its own ways, it doesn't phone home, doesn't spy on your files, it's very stable, works on modern hardware, has a working browser, okay, it's not cutting edge, but it's fun and brings some of the joys of old-school computing back.
I recently had dinner in Bellevue with an individual who holds a relatively senior position within Microsoft’s executive leadership. During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products. According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.
Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities. While this may not be surprising to some, what stood out to me was how emphatically she underscored that the company’s strategic focus is squarely on enterprise customers rather than end users.
That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.
> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.
It is until it isn't, but I think this is the same trap as not training up junior engineers. The consumer market is often where future engineers and professionals first interact with technology, being exposed to Windows early and being able to use it at school and at home have always been major drivers of adoption at work.
Linux is another perfect example - devs who wanted a unix-ish system landed on it early in their own work and education (partly due to the BSD licensing stuff too) - and over time it became one of the most commonly used server operating systems.
I think this is Microsoft optimizing for predictable growth, just like everyone else is doing right now, but this is shortsighted and ultimately a defensive posture, not one suited for the future.
What choice do they really have though? More and more consumers completely forgo owning a regular computer and only use a phone or a tablet now a days. And among the ones who do own a computer there's still a strong trend towards not paying for software, presumably a behavior taught to them by the overwhelming success of strictly ad-financed apps.
It's easy to forget that us here on HN are several standard deviations from the norm.
Windows 8 was supposed to dig into that mobile device/tablet market, as well as the Windows phone. You can argue about why Win8 was a titanic failure that pushed a backtrack in 8.1 (and Win10), but it seems like Microsoft didn't really know how to approach the space at the time and failed to commit to a trend they correctly identified early enough that they could have capitalized better on it.
I'm always astounded by the tendency to bet it all on core competencies and wind down every other effort that's profitable but not profitable _enough _
As if times don't change, innovation never happens, and your accessory plays of today are never the overtaking market of tomorrow.
Kodak comes to mind. They invented digital photography, but their film people deliberately kneecapped their digital people. Killed the company.
I worked for a camera company that made boatloads of cash from point-and-shoot cameras. That entire business was pretty much turned into chum by smartphones. I remember them refusing to even take the iPhone seriously, when it was announced. They took a serious hit, but seem to be recovering.
I have personal experience in the field (27 years), and met and worked with the folks involved, so I know it's good info. I'm not especially interested in hunting around for stuff that basically is a "lite" version of my personal experience.
It’s basically management 101. But I’ve gone through that phase and come out the other end believing that outsourcing any of the functions that aren’t commodified enough to switch at a moment’s notice is a terrible idea.
That's been obvious for years. It feels like they're extracting whatever remaining money they can get from the home PC market while it lasts but won't much miss it when it's gone.
I'm surprised they haven't given up on xbox and games but perhaps there's enough money there to keep it going.
Their new appointment of leader for their Xbox group suggests that they intend to wind down that business unit in time. The founder of the Xbox team has commented that he believes it’s the beginning of the end for Xbox, for the exact reasons of this thread.
Which is odd because the major reason Xbox is petering out is because it's been completely mismanaged. Sony and Nintendo are still doing just fine. Nintendo even had a dodgy console that no one bought within relatively recent memory. Xbox messed up with the One and then have just failed to get back on track. It's not like the industry is dying.
Tinfoil hat thought: Microsoft only focuses on B2B and not consumer market, because they make it so that consumers can only rent from Microsoft and other businesses, not actually own anything. That way, Microsoft can keep jacking up prices as they see fit.
If Microsoft wanted to be monopolistic, and it wouldn't be the first time, then why are they abandoning their strongest exclusives (Windows, Office) and instead enter a more competitive market, where Google, Amazon, etc... are well established and with no sign of letting go.
> why are they abandoning their strongest exclusives (Windows, Office)
They're abandoning the consumer versions of these, not the enterprise versions. The consumer versions are the competitive market, where they're competing against iPads and such. They're not abandoning Windows for businesses, Office for businesses, where there is still no established business end-user OS/office suite alternative.
Given Office 365 and day-one Game Pass release of all first-party titles, I don't think you need a tinfoil hat to imagine this.
I suspect lingering antitrust concerns are one of the few things standing in the way of locking consumer Windows updates behind a paywall, possibly alongside a "free with ads" version.
It's not fully clear yet but they definitely gave up on the current Xbox strategy, after firing both the CEO and the next-in-line and replacing them with people previously working on integrating AI around the entire product line. Sure they said they won't fill up Xbox with soulless AI slop, not sure I believe them.
Consoles are probably getting phased out, which makes financial sense at this point if they don't manage a massive comeback, and Xbox might try to go with a more Steam-based model (they've been trying for the last decade with not much success), maybe trying to make PCs more console-like with their new Xbox Windows changes, as well as putting AI everywhere, so that's going to be fun!
That's been obvious for decades. Everyone who worked in the 90's or 00's has stories about coming in one day to find that the VP has been conned into a $1m contract for MS office or development software everyone hates and now we all have to use it because if we don't then he made a huge mistake and VPs don't make huge mistakes.
So we have to eat shit or find open source software to work around MS's garbage check-box-driven software.
This is still happening. The org I work at was all-in on Google stuff, then just before I joined 5 years ago, some senior exec joined. Must have been in tight with Microsoft because suddenly the org was all in on Microsoft. The exec left, job well done, and the org suffered for years during the changeover; we still suffer because all the Microsoft stuff is total garbage these days.
I yearn for the Microsoft software of the 90s and 00s, pre-cloud, pre-webslop, pre-AI.
I think that this was somewhat obvious to many in the last 10 years or so. There's no reason to fault them for that and, in all fairness, there are few corporate clients on here - or even online, considering Microsoft's market share for certain products and services - that complain about the quality of Microsoft's services and products.
What I find difficult to understand is the amount of effort and money that Microsoft puts towards making life painful for the B2C user; if your focus is on B2B, let the fucking user create offline accounts and let them crack the license and let them do whatever they please, as that would likely be less of a burden to you than a way to ensure market domination. You take care of the security, the UX, and availability parts and let the general public carry on with whatever it does. I am, of course, oversimplifying things here for the sake of the argument, but surely I can't be part of a tiny minority of people who see things this way.
At the end of the day, there are multiple and interconnected rational, irrational, economic, legal, social, political, strategical etc. reasons for why a company emerges as the dominant player in their respective niche, it's never down to the quality or convenience of the system alone. Microsoft stands more to lose than gain from their toxic attitude towards users, especially in the context of US playing the bully, and the EU considering disentangling itself from what is perceived a dangerous relationship that could undermine its very existence.
As an enterprise admin of Microsoft services I think they're pretty mediocre. Their stuff is always behind the state of the art. It's just good enough to not go for a third party option that isn't included in their bundle pricing. But it never really satisfies, it's always got this 'make do' feeling about it.
The single pane of glass thing is nice but I don't think it's really something you can't do without. I think what really cements them in the enterprise market is their ability to deep discount their bundles.
It's very hard with third party vendors to compete with that. You're not gonna pay $10 per user per month for zoom or slack when you can have teams included in the bundle you're already paying, even if it's not quite as good.
It's like IKEA. It's cheap, it does the job and for that reason almost everyone has it, but I wouldn't call it quality.
> During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products.
Nowadays phones, tablets and game boxes are the consumer products. Currently they outnumber consumer windows desktops by about 6 or 7 to 1 [0]. 5 years ago, it was about 3.5 to 1.
Microsoft doesn't seem to have much control over this. They are executing a pivot in response.
> Mac OS X's market share in the US climbed from 12.17% in December 2022 to 22.08% in May 2023. The market share was consistent for the next few months until it dropped to 14.03% in December 2023.
What. MacOS doubled from December to the next may, then cut in half by the next December? I’m skeptical. It also talks about approval ratings for OS X Lion, from 14 years ago. I think that site is powered by a set of dice.
I think your overall point is correct, but I’m doubting that reference as an accurate data source.
It's interesting to me as well as an ex-microsofter who worked on surface devices. Leadership (at least below the VP level) knew they were getting killed by Chromebooks and tried a few times to get a low cost device (Surface Go 1/2 for example) that ran a slimmed down version of windows (Windows S?). It tries to be more like chrome OS (hard to mess up, easy to flatten and restore a fresh OS on) but kind of just throws away the things you would pick windows for in the first place (legacy app compatibility) to be not bad at the thing Chromebooks are good at.
That said, I don't believe the Chromebook lock-in. It's just chrome and the web, which you can get on literally almost every laptop/pc sold today. Should Microsoft be concerned that you don't need windows as more and more things move onto the web? Absolutely. They should be doubling down hard on the gaming ecosystem (which atm still requires windows for certain games) as their hold is eroding week by week.
There's a growing set of ARM windows laptops that might bite into the Chromebook market. The surface laptop 7 is pretty nice and comes in both large(ish) 15 inch and small 13.8 inch form factors.
All of the ARM laptops are priced as premium business models in the $900-1700 range and kind of fall down in that space - Qualcomm until recently even refused to release any drivers to anyone not a developer partner and it's honestly still not even close to consumer/business friendly. The hardware is capable of doing what people need the culture around it is just not aligned.
Also it's a joke to run OpenGL on Windows ARM (it fully works just no one makes it anything easy)
My x13s laptop can almost run A tier games without a fan which is impressive but it really feels disconnected and unsupported from all parties making these laptops.
> kind of just throws away the things you would pick windows for in the first place
I'd be interested to see a legacy-free Windows, stripped out like LTSC, with no 32-bit binary support. Especially an Arm64 version with no x86 binary support.
I think Windows was a pretty good desktop environment circa. Windows 7. Hardware compatability and just working are huge. If they can get an independent M4 competitor from AMD etc. you would have a compelling reason to switch from Mac (for Joe Average user).
> I think they (and even Apple) are going to get a walloping from mostly ceding the education market to chromebooks.
I think this is an Americentric view. As far as I can tell, the mass adoption of Chromebooks for education is just the US, which is 4% of the world population. And in this particular case there's little reason to believe it will suddenly propagate everywhere else - the US education ceding has been going on for years, and yet it's still confined. It's not like the iPhone which started in the US and within a few years rapidly gained ground in Japan, then Europe and so on.
If they aren't focused on consumer products they should stop shoving half baked features into them and let them coast. I can't imagine any enterprise solutions updating windows and being complacent that an LLMA was shoved into their OS overnight.
> According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.
> Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities.
This does not explain why Microsoft then does not consider the consumer products as "stable (somewhat 'legacy') platforms", i.e. no deep changes and improvements will happen anymore (mostly bugfixes, security fixes and smaller improvements) - at least for the next years.
Considering that
- many Windows users would rather prefer a Windows 7 with small iterative improvements to handle new hardware (including performance improvements for new hardware)
- by quite many Windows users even Windows 2000 is celebrated (and many users would still love to use it if it included support for more modern hardware features and some convenience features that were introduced with newer Windows versions)
I can easily imagine that that this development path for Windows and Office would actually be liked by quite a lot of users.
Instead what Microsoft provides is an enshitification of Windows (and Office) with spyware, telemetry, AI slop, ads, changes for the sake of change, ...: this is clearly not what most users want.
I even have a feeling that this development path would be much cheaper for Microsoft than the AI integrations for Windows and Office for which Microsoft has clearly spent an insane amount of money.
I set up a machine with Windows 2003 Server Datacentre Edition last year. That's the version of the XP codebase that has PAE support and can access >4 GB of RAM... and with all the junk turned off. No themes, for instance.
It was really pleasant to use.
Give me that, with MS Security Essentials and no IE, just Firefox, and I could happily work on it today.
After using agentic AI that can actually do things (like cursor or even GitHub Copilot) using the AI in Microsoft products feels like an absolute joke. People want it to do actual things like apply a template to their PowerPoint or fill out a spreadsheet etc. but it just copies the work and makes you a new file to download pulling you absolutely out of the workflow. I've seen users excited for it and then get a new file to download in the chat and just quit using it completely in disappointment.
Even the developer tools are clunky and slow to use (SSMS, Visual Studio, VSCode) or can't do simple things like make a new file and put code it generates in.
You might wonder why, if businesses are the target, why not just make Windows a no-frills, solid base for the other offerings? Why slop it up?
The answer there is cultural. Windows needs a large team just to keep supporting it at scale. All those engineers and PMs need career paths, and shiny things with which to sway their managers into promoting them. The strong, experienced, leaders have largely left because they know this isn't a company priority. So you end up with B players promoting C players for slop.
Time goes on and the Bs become Cs, and so on.
So the dynamic is that something that isn't a priority doesn't merely slop evolving, it devolves. We're now several iterations into this process, which will accelerate due to AI.
Well, both are happening. Those remaining want to justify their jobs (because new initiatives are not even being considered). And Microslop wants to become the next IBM and move most development into overseas maintenance instead of innovation, as the competition slow passes them by.
> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.
In some ways. Less so in others.
For products that get commoditized for home use, the "business focused" high-margin solutions generally lose out to the commoditized solutions focused on end consumers in the long term.
Not surprising, but it's sad to accept that the only major company building consumer-focused computing devices is Apple.
My hope is that LLMs allow linux to gain market share quickly. I know personally I've had a much smoother time moving to linux now that I can delegate a lot of the annoying troubleshooting/customization to claude.
Being able to say something like "I don't like the window colors make them more consistent with my terminal color scheme" and have it "just work" feels like a superpower. I've even gone as far as asking Claude to directly edit the icon pack svg files to whenever if I encounter something that feels out of place.
this is interesting because of how much it differs from my own hopes. I don't really have any personal need or want for the Linux desktop marketshare to increase. I like computers because I can program them to do something and it will do it. Ideally you have complete control over it. I've customized my desktop here and there in order to get some result, but while you care most about the _result_, for me the act of _making_ that result happen is as important if not more. I'm not looking to offload it to something else.
I don't really see the troubleshooting/customization as annoying. It's not much different than learning to program. At first you don't have any intuition for patterns or ways to solve problems, but given time, you start to identify them and know how to work on it unaided. For many distros or operating systems more broadly, it's the same thing. When in doubt, I head to the Arch wiki or more rarely the forums, then I'm good to go.
I'm not really after some integrated LLM or Copilot 365 for Linux experience when it comes to using my computer.
See where IBM is now though. Between some legacy hardware and random consulting services, they don't really have much of a strategy. They just exist because people still need them for old stuff and because older people trust their name. They used to lead the industry. Now they're not leading anything.
Of course their enterprise focus wasn't their only failure. But it was a factor in one of the biggest failures: their underestimation of the importance of the PC. They allowed Microsoft to market DOS to clones because they didn't see the potential.
So yeah I think their focus on enterprise was one of their biggest failures.
I am not sure if the average executive is dumb or just shortsighted. Imagine making decisions based solely on the optics of the Pareto principle when corporate history itself says that is fraught with risk.
I once worked for a retail computer repair shop that had an unbelievable amount of ethical concerns ( many things outright illegal). Among them was cracking Windows Vista or installing 7, cracking it and then rolling to Windows 10 get a license key from MS and then charging the customer for a license key.
I tried calling MS to report it and the guy on the other side said they didn't have a process for handling that and basically suggested I hang up.
I got the same info. Windows kernel is developed for B2B needs, if something might be useful to B2C, they might eventually get it, but they don’t affect the roadmap.
That's fine, they should still do a good job for moral reasons rather than economic ones, and they deserve to be dragged through the mud if they do not.
IBM market cap is 225B, Microsoft market cap is 2.9T. IBM literally lost its matket to Microsoft in 80s and 90s specifically because it was too focused on enterprise...
Microslop got a much bigger market capture before pivoting to B2B as its focus. It could shift because it feels its too entrenched in society, so not much is needed to maintain the safe revenue stream.
I've said this for years. The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error. What little they do make is from preinstalled systems, and, honestly, when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming? I don't need a quote from someone high up in the company to know they couldn't care less how upset people are by the decisions they make about it.
Literally every corporation and government in the world is slavishly devoted to running all of their end-user computers on it, because Microsoft will let them do unspeakable things to the OS, in the name of security, that wind up having next-to-nothing to do with actually making their data more secure, and only serve to infuriate and spy on the users. My company runs THREE different "end point" security packages on my machine. There are at least 35 scripts that run at all hours of the day to make sure I'm not doing anything I shouldn't. It takes 20 minutes to be usable after a boot up. And the VPN drops several times a day, even though my internet is rock solid. It's an entire, vibrant ecosystem of outsourced, bone-headed, second-and-third-party decision making so that no one in the company or the department or the management or the supply chain has any accountability in case something goes wrong. THAT'S what Microsoft is selling, and IT HAS NO COMPETITION IN THIS CAPACITY.
For years, I've begged people on every social network I've been on, including this one, to find a source of operating system market share that has corporate purchases broken out from personal purchases. This is the closest thing I can find. It shows abysmal numbers for Microsoft, and it's at least a decade out of date. I expect that Microsoft -- who obviously underwrote the entire IT press during the 90's and 00's -- has done quite a lot of work and paid quite a lot of money to make sure that nothing definitive in this regard ever sees the light of day. They have gotten to where they are making sure that Gartner never did anything resembling this.
>The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error.
Yes, if you analyse revenue (not profit), sales of Windows count 9% of the total. Microsoft makes around the same percentage from LinkedIn and Xbox as they do from Windows sales.
Cloud is by far the the biggest contributor to revenue.
Beverages and pet food combined make up almost half of Nestlé's sales, with chocolate at around 7.6%. But I certainly wouldn't consider almost $9 billion in chocolate sales per year a rounding error.
>when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming?
I'm sorry, what? I don't know if this is because of the developer-bubble mindset on HN (or the wealth gap that comes with that), but Windows adoption on the consumer level is around 70% and close to 90% on the business level.
This actually falls short from what I see anecdotically (I don't live in any North-American / European country), which is close to 95% of Windows adoption, in general.
I'm sorry, but what!? Right back atcha. If you'd have bothered to have looked at the chart in link I posted, you'd have seen that market share of "consumer compute" for Windows was 26% as of 10 years ago. You're going to have to do a lot better anecdata to find a 44% resurgence over the last 10 years, especially given the dismal things that have happened to it as a platform over that time.
Your 26% figure refers to the Total Consumer Compute Market 14 years ago (not 10, it's now 30% btw)... but that includes smartphones and tablets, not just PCs.
You specifically mentioned
> when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming?
Business users are totally fed up of poorly-function Co-Pilot buttons in every UI. The people who sign contracts are not the people forced to digest the cruft.
"We sell car tires, selling fruit is just a side business."
"The fact that our fruit is rotten and customers complain about that does not faze us as, again: we're primarily a car tire business and that's where our revenue comes from."
The 'reasoning' of the sociopath-level[1] of the corporate hierarchy never fails to entertain.
