Technology

I'll give them this much.

They did a brilliant job integrating Windows into every significant sphere of the globe. I had never even heard of LibreOffice until a couple of years ago when they rolled out Windows Recall and I got serious about learning and using Linux and open-source software more in order to protect my privacy.

It's wild to me that they have made a product that basically worked so incredibly buggy in the span of a few short years. It's actually a running joke at my work how basic things, that functioned for decades, no longer work as expected. We all just assume that Microsoft is passing along LLM-generated code into prod without any human verification, as a company may be wont to do when they've laid off tens of thousands of actual humans.

And now I haven't touched Windows except where I have to, usually for work.

I hate how the author frames Linux as "cheap". Just because it's open source and free does not mean people use it because it's cheap. They use it because they're tired of the shit. Windows is "free", too, if you never activate it.

This was sent around recently, on azure specifically. https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion

It reads a bit like one engineer with a grudge, and you never know what the interpersonal skills of people are like; but the overall impression is of a competent engineer face with total chaos.

The bit about each azure host having a webserver shared across all client vms for info query was gobsmacking tbh. Though i dont work in this area.

Windows has stopped being Microsoft't core business since Windows 8 (2015), and turned into an expensive liability. The core of Microsoft business now lies in selling cloud services, compute, and Office 365 subscriptions.

The problem is - users pay for Windows only once, and not each year like all other fancy rich companies like Adobe make their users do. And the market is saturated, because Microsoft became monopoly around 1995. Every PC sold has Windows installed, and since everyone on the planet already owns one PC per person (citation needed), the sales directly depend on the birth rate.

Trying to change to subscription model was met with violent pushback from users, so they started adding advertisements to taskbar starting in Windows 10, and created a shittiest app store ever to copy Apple.

They have been trying to kill Windows ever since, but they cannot due to numerous contract obligations.

Microsoft survived on inertia. Windows was the default. Office was the default. GitHub, after the acquisition, became the default forge for software teams. That kind of position lets a company coast for a long time.

That's how I remember it from before I switched to Linux.

Just one off-topic niggle: when Github went M$, Git was already a big thing, and other big Sourceforges supported it, maybe most notably GitLab (I considered moving from GH to GL but GL was already way too corporate). Sure, MS envisioned GH to be "the default", but it never really was. The biggest, probably, but never the default.

And if you think that all repositories are on GH, check how many of those are actually just mirrors.

AI, for the vast majority of users (and especially in the ways Microslop has pushed it) is completely useless at best and a malicious hindrance at worst. In order for Microslop to even begin to reverse course on their reputation they are going to have to accept the cold hard fact that AI is fetish for shareholders and is not actually what their customers want.

And once they do that then they are basically admitting that AI is overvalued and they overinvested in it and wildly overspent. The fragile house of cards might begin to wobble and the bubble might even pop, so naturally every tech company refuses to acknowledge the pushback against AI outside of rare cases of "We'll revaluate our approach" like Windows did recently. They're going to have to sink a lot lower before they'll even consider budging on major changes to their business strategies.

Citing Xitter posts as sources. Indefensible.