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Re:Microsoft Office 2019 will only work on Windows 10 by Silhouette on Saturday February 03, 2018 @03:49PM (#16299558)
They're a multi-billion dollar corporation that has launched several train wrecks, including two from within the very same team that we're talking about here, in recent years. Of course there are parallels with whether they could produce Windows Vista that a lot of people didn't want, Windows 8 that a lot of people didn't want, and Windows 10 that a lot of people don't want now. Your argument that they have lots of smart people who wouldn't get a basic business strategy wrong just doesn't hold water, at all.
Re:Microsoft Office 2019 will only work on Windows 10 by BoorishBears on Saturday February 03, 2018 @04:10PM (#16299664)
My argument that a company that has managed to manuver 42 years of changing successfully enough to become a 700 Billion dollar company might have some people with businesses acumen and more insight than a random HN commenter is clearly torpedoed because of your 20/20 hindsight review of 2 products based on no actual hard data because ... a random HN commentor wouldn’t have that...

Sure.

I’d love to see the crew you run with that would have managed to keep MS relevant for this long.

I should add, if you really think MS is building products no one wants, you really should put your money where your mouth is and short them. (but please, no cliched response about how the market is just irrational about them)

Re:Microsoft Office 2019 will only work on Windows 10 by Silhouette on Sunday February 04, 2018 @08:17AM (#16302623)
Your ad hominem attacks, appeals to authority and straw men aren't going to get us anywhere constructive, so let's ignore those.

I didn't say I thought MS was building products no-one wants. My original suggestion was that their current strategy seems to be pushing towards big, enterprise-scale customers and the low-end home user market, at the expense of the middle ground, and that time would tell whether this was working out well for them.

Clearly they have had some missteps with their OS strategy before -- there's plenty of evidence around about the poor reception and low adoption rates -- so I still don't understand what point you're trying to make here or how anything I've written is at all controversial. Your original reply suggested that they might consider driving a large group of customers away to be beneficial, but it's hard to see how that would be the case here, and you don't seem to have offered any further argument to support your position.