alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
> 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.
Foolish since a world where no one uses Windows at home will ve damaging for enterprise long term.
This is 100% true.
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.
> 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.
> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.
And all of the ERP vendors.
That said, most FOSS devs don't target those platforms for releases, so IMO the same approach should be taken with Microsoft products then.
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.
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.
I would have been suspicious of this until I saw a quote for an E5 license
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.
Is this a joke?
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...
That sentiment is characteristic of the Gates to Ballmer leadership change.
MS is the new IBM
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.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar...
seems like
microsoft = 1/apple[dead]
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.