alt Hacker NewsPeople have forgotten this, but he did the same with Windows Phone for a while at the very start of his time as CEO. His motto was "cloud first, mobile first" where cloud meant Azure and mobile meant Windows Phone. After some time he gave up and they pivoted into the direction he is now well known for, which was to focus on good developer tooling regardless of OS.
Replies
justsomehnguy • last Saturday at 9:31 PM
> "focus on good developer tooling"
So "developers, developers, developers"?
its-summertime • last Saturday at 11:19 PM
The ability to know that giving up might be the right path forwards, is very useful.
GitHub and VSCode were smart ways to quickly recapture developer mindshare. They felt distinctly un-Microsoft with how open and multiplatform they were.
The Azure Linux friendliness play was essential and smart. Again, Microsoft felt like they were opening up to the world.
But they've backslidden. They've ceded Windows and gaming to their cloud and AI infra ambitions. They're not being friendly anymore.
Microsoft spent a lot of energy making Windows more consumer friendly, only to piss it away with Windows 11.
One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.
They'll continue to win in enterprise, but they're losing consumer, gamer, and developer/IC support and mindshare. I've never seen so many people bitch about GitHub as in the last year. You'd swear it had became worse than Windows 7 at this point.