this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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If you think about it: Microsoft owns XBox, that has been one of the three major consoles for decades now. They own Windows, the world's most popular operating system. They own Edge, one of the major browsers. And they still failed to create a movie and TV store and shut down their music streaming service. Which is totally insane - that shit was bundled with fucking windows and Xbox and they still made it suck so hard that it failed
Microsoft isn't popular by choice. They can't force people into shitty ecosystems if they have no reason to choose it to begin with. Microsoft was the only choice for decades, and will go down as the golden example of business monopoly.
Apple, amazon, google, all have their claws deeper in people because they make products people choose to use. They actually like the products, so the companies can slowly enshittify them and keep their users.
They're just a few years behind Microsoft. At one time, people chose Microsoft just like people chose Google.
What was the other choice back then? I dont recall microsoft ever needing to compete for end users. Even now they barely have to put in an effort and are the most popular OS.
Linux, MacOS, BeOs, NeXTOS, OS/2, FreeBSD, Solaris.
There were more choices than today.
Those were pre-installed on end user devices and were popular in workplaces? If you have any material to share I could read about that time period that would be helpful as well.
MacOS, NextOS, BeOS, OS/2 and Solaris were all pre installed on end user devices. All except MacOS also were or became available as end user installs if you didn't want to buy it pre installed.
They weren't popular in workplaces ( except MacOS) because they all sucked in important ways compared to Windows.
There were also many alternative Office suites. MS didn't even invent the idea- they copied Borland's $99 software cost in order to compete. But again the alternatives, even if they started better, eventually fell behind Microsoft. MS was extraordinarily customer focused in those days.
Windows Powertoy apps used to come with the emails of the person who wrote it in the readme.txt. I once emailed the Microsoft developer about a feature that I thought should work but didn't ( copying across network vs local copy). I got a working beta version 3 days after emailing the developer at Microsoft.
Interesting, thank you for sharing. I'll have to read more about how things changed over time.
Don’t forget that they didn’t succeed on mobile phones either. Despite it was very fine OS and devices were good too.
Good except for the critical features they didn't add. Like when the iPhone didn't have copy-paste, but on a Microsoft phone, way later.
I think it’s more that consumers didn’t know what the fuck it was.
Which is totally a failure of Microsoft. People have their Xbox connected to their TV. They have an account and they have their payment information maintained there. And Microsoft can't make the simple proposal of "Hey, this device you have connected to your TV and where you are playing games on, you can also use it to watch movies and series"
PS3 was a 1080p capable device connected to our (new in 2007) 1080p living room TV, the only 1080p device for almost a year. It played BluRay discs - they had the opportunity to cooperate with Netflix and other content providers like the Smart TVs that followed, but they didn't. When they rug-pulled the "otherOS" feature that I was using to stream live (still) photos from WebCams in the Caribbean, that earned a NetTop PC a place in the living room, and from there PC based content sourcing became the norm in our house. To this day, we have no "Smart" TVs. Our BluRay players are not internet connected (and they play 99% DVDs, less than 1% BluRay content...)
Consumer behavior gets ingrained, hard to change when they're happy where they are.
Their phones too