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> According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions. > H
by aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
> 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.
- MrDrMcCoy 8mo agoIf Windows 2000 still had security updates and modern hardware support, I'd sure as heck still be using it. Every version since has been a regression.
- lproven 8mo ago> Every version since has been a regression. So very true. 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.
- hypercube33 8mo agoAfter 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.