> If, say, Microsoft is on a path towards decreasing relevance/marketshare/profitability

That’s a big if. I see a lot of people in big enterprises who would never even consider anything other than Microsoft and Azure.

C# and .NET have a bigger market share than what gets talked about in trendy circles

C#/.NET are nice. Azure/Microsoft Cloud not so nice. Idk, maybe I have some bias due to familiarity, but I find the GCP admin and tools to be so much more intuitive than the Azure (and AWS too, for that matter) counterparts.

Oh dear lord, GCP could be the intuitive one?! I have not used anything else but, dear lord, that's shocking and not at all surprising at the same time.

Yeah this is not the case at all lol. I actually find Azure to be far more intuitive after suffering through AWS and a little GCP. It certainly seems more stable in US regions than AWS.

One thing I will say is the Azure documentation is some of the most cumbersome to navigate I've ever experienced, there is a dearth of information in there, you just have to know how to find it.

Doesn't a dearth mean a lack of?

Probably. I guess I meant a shit ton, but written in a series of confusing "choose your own adventure" style bursts of 40 new browser tabs to figure anything out.

Any speculation on why none of them can make a UI and UX that is not 100% completely shit and makes you feel miserable and stressed out?

Couldn’t they just throw money at the problem? Or fire the criminals who designed it?

All the cloud platforms do not care about UI/UX at all. Although GCP gets honorable mention for being pretty consistent and I have to admit not too bad. But anyway none of them care because it’s expected that 90% of the usage of the platform will be via a CLI or some abstraction (k8s, terraform, etc etc). So, they put minimum effort into UI quality, usefulness, consistency, appearance. That’s my understanding anyway

a) Design is super hard when your product MUST do a lot (and GCP definitely has to do a lot)

b) You design for the audience. The complexity that person-who-would-ever-use-GCP will deal with is far beyond what the average internet user would ever endure.

Yeah, agreed. I love C# & the .NET platform; I do not feel the same way about Azure. It’s still way better than GCP, though.

The big question is if we are finally in a moment when big enterprises will be allowed to fail due to the infinite number of bad choices they make.

Because things are going to change soon. What nobody know is what things exactly, and in what direction.

yeah, this is a take I see by people who work in unix like environments (including macs). If anything Microsoft will grow much bigger. People are consolidating in Azure and away from GCP. easier to manage costs and integrate with their fleet.

Windows workstations and servers are now "joined" to Azure instead, where they used to be joined to domain controller servers. Microsoft will soon enough stop supporting that older domain controller design (soon as in a decade).

Entra (formerly Azure Active Directory) is definitely a huge enterprise Azure driver, and MS knows it.

And it’s crap.

Doesn't matter. It just needs to work well enough and Microsoft needs to be willing to use it as a point of leverage.

Both of which seem to be true.

Hell, I'm still amazed they got away with the Office-licenses-only-usable-on-Azure bullshit, but here we are.

compared to what? it isn't amazing but it's alright in my experience. it works and it seems like it's designed to give lots of people job security and lots of revenue streams for Microsoft though.

Reminds me of how Yahoo had a valuation in the negative billions with their Alibaba holdings taken into account:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wall-street-says-yahoos-worth-l...

Huh? Windows itself might have had it's heyday but MS is solidly at #2 for clouds only behind AWS with enterprise Windows shops that will be hard pressed to not use MS options if they go to the cloud (Google really has continued to fumble their cloud positions with their reputation for "killedbygoogle.com" nagging on everyones mind).

The biggest real threat to MS position is the Trump administration pushing foreign customers away with stuff like shutting down the ICJ Microsoft accounts, but that'll hurt AWS and Google equally much (The winners of that will be Alibaba and other foregin providers that can't compete in full enterprise stacks today).

Watch this week. Amazon cloud growth has been terrible (Google and Microsoft remains >30%). Amazon have basically no good offerings for AI which is where gcp is bringing to eat their lunch. Anthropic moving to TPU for inference is a big big signal.

100% this. The AWS of today is going to be the Hetzner or Digital Ocean of the future. They'll still have hyperscale, but will not be seen as innovating on first party products or a leader in the AI managed services industry. And frankly, they are currently doing a shit job of even this, because Oracle is in the same category and OCI has been eating everyone's lunch (for the past two years!).

Is OCI really eating everyone lunch? Sure, it's showing massive growth but that's because Oracle has been running around offering insane discounts.

We were cloud shopping, and they came by as well with REALLY good discount. Luckily our CTO was massively afraid of what would happen after that discount ran out.

You're making the roundabout argument that MSFT/OpenAI will one day go the way of Yahoo/Alibaba, which is wild.

I didn't make a prediction. I was pointing out factors to be aware of. Hence the use of "If, say" to denote a hypothetical.

Some people's convictions and lack of reading comprehension skills are certainly wild.