alt Hacker NewsAt this point one must ask if Microsoft is still a software platform company - whether their products form a substrate where an ecosystem can form and build a coherent software environment for the users of their platform.
Microsoft used to be the Windows company (after being the BASIC company, then the DOS company). Then it became the Office company. Now it’s SharePoint and Office365 and Azure, a utility. Windows is a relatively small part. Office is both desktop and web (and spacecraft, where they have two versions of Outlook and none of them works). If you are confused at this point, so am I. There is no vision as to what Microsoft is. If Satya Nadella knows what Microsoft is, he isn’t communicating it properly. It’s not Azure, because there is also Office and Windows. And on-prem server products. And a line of hardware products. And stores (do they still exist?).
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Microsoft has always had a broad vision of itself as a technology company; I feel it's perfectly fine to not be able to describe Microsoft in one sentence without using platitudes like "empower every person on Earth to achieve more" or "put a computer in every home and every office" (both paraphrases of actual MSFT company mission statements), and I suspect many other current and former Microsoft employees would feel the same way.
IMO Microsoft's best long-lived products have always been both finished solutions to your problems and platforms to help you develop more solutions, and Microsoft leadership has always recognized this. Examples: Windows. Office. Dynamics (their Salesforce competitor).
But even if a product doesn't meet that "why not both?" ideal, there is always going to be room for it at Microsoft, as long as it is not only a good or at least mediocre product by itself, but also works to sell you on the whole Microsoft ecosystem. Sometimes that is a bad thing (see all the Windows adware for Bing, Copilot, and M365). But that at least is where Microsoft remains consistent.
Nadella thought he could take the reins and start yelling “Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!” and that would be successful. He doesn’t have a strategy and now that’s becoming apparent.
MS has never been a software platform company. That's the fundamental reason behind the issue the article talks about.
MS has always been a software application company. Windows was never anything more than a way to sell MS applications--and Windows 3.0 and later wouldn't even have existed in the first place if IBM hadn't dawdled so long over OS/2. Even in the MS-DOS days, when MS was reaping the benefits of IBM's previous bonehead decision to hand the PC OS market to them, MS was selling Office applications--on the Macintosh.
The basic Windows API, in all of its many incarnations, has always been a second-class citizen; MS Office applications have always done their own things that other Windows applications couldn't do without using undocumented features that MS could change at any time (and often did). One could argue that the only reason MS even allowed third-party Windows developers to exist was so that they would, in the words of one of PG's essays, do market research for MS. When a third-party dev came up with something that got enough traction, MS would simply incorporate it into their apps.