alt Hacker NewsI think the biggest revelation of the last 3 years or so is that Microsoft does not have either the will or the talent (or both) to effectively execute anymore. Everything it currently stands on is a legacy product with roots in the Ballmer or Gates eras. They owe their Azure footprint and "success" today to Ballmer.
Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the largest example of this, but there are others. They are getting lapped by a ~300 person software company in the race to consumer-ize an x86 PC a into turnkey gaming platform, even with $100 billion in game studios and owning the API that every major game is developed against. Their footprint in education is gone, completely replaced by Google who not only produced an operating system that could be effectively run and managed on commodity hardware, but also developed the centralized functions for school administrations to use to manage classrooms at scale.
The consumer situation for Microsoft right now might be even worse than it was when Nadella took over.
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We've been hearing empty punditry like that for the last several decades all while they've been a poster child for "number go up": https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/rev...
These predictions about the decline of Microsoft are like the Year of Linux on the Desktop; neither is going to happen anytime soon. Y'all can start predicting doom when there's a multi-year trend of declining revenue for MSFT and then maybe there's something to discuss.
I don't have data to support it and I know AD was a gamechanger but I feel like Microsoft pumping free software to educational institutions was the main driver for it's adoption in the corporate world. When every person who kind of knows how to use the computer, can use MS windows and office and has to be retrained to use anything else, it's a no brainer to just give users what they know.
Another example: the complete surrender of the Xbox platform. They spent the last 10 years buying up game studios and then closing them, failing to develop any good exclusive titles, and letting Sony eat their lunch. Now they are officially giving up and will just let Sony own the console space altogether.
Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago. Playstation was always a contender but Xbox Live was synonymous with the online console gaming experience. Halo was an untouchable juggernaut of a series for the first 3 titles.
It's mind boggling that Microsoft just let all that die without a fight. Worse, they seem to have actively shot themselves in the foot and then given up.