It seems like everyone except MS themselves knows why: they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.

Hell they even burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name. The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.

The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.

or, everyone has career aspirations for which they need to demonstrate impact, relevance and in shipping products. Since the current hype is AI, making and being part of the AI hype means career advancement (at the time).

They harmed massively their own company, and failed at the most core reason why they were hired - add long term value to the company.

Its a bit the equivalent of architect building huge bridge that then falls, no souls harmed. Such person would have issue finding any other work. Lets do the same, name and shame shouldnt be that hard.

"Give a PM a numerical goal, and they will burn the company down to hit it."

As someone who has worked in big tech and seen decision-making in action, I 100% believe it. This is how incentives are structured.

Their shareholders wanted AI.

Their shareholders wanted MSFT stock price to go up.

Like, just because the outcome sucks and the solutions are user-hostile, let’s not assume the decision makers are dummies. I see profit motives as the likely delta between their decisions and our userland expectations.

Let me run the MS LLM department and I could easily explain to the board why we’re about to see a big upsurge Azure, office 365 integrated, and MCP-based solution spending… hint: it’s because the machine god will tell the consultants AND the customer those solutions are what’s SmartGood. We’ll sell ‘em a box that tells ‘em what to buy (lul, subscribe to!), the profitability part kinda writes itself.

Knowing who the windows product leadership is should be easy. Find them on linked in. But even they may not be responsible if the direction came from the ceo or the cto. We know who those are.

Quit calling for naming and shaming of individuals just trying to make a living.

And I mentioned PMs but realistically its whatever decision makers that decide these, PM can be a middle manager cog with no real power or somebody adequately high. I know I myself won't affect some hiring of some CTO but somebody here eventually might. Thats a good start.

I am fed up with uncritical celebration of people who make this world a worse place and harm us all. Perfect execution of amoral goal is still purely a shit in negative sphere (this goes straight to worship of mr musk but thats another topic)

See AI components for Blazor, Aspire AI dashboards, Aspire CLI with AI, Powershell AI, aspire.dev web site proudly written with AI, .NET Upgrade tool is now AI driven,....?

What pure C# inference tooling is out there? I know they have a solid ONNX engine, but not everything runs on ONNX.

I say this as both a Python and .NET developer mind you, but if Microsoft actually built up .NET more seriously to power AI infrastructure, I could see it making a big difference for them. Look at how many game engines use C# as opposed to literally any other programming language. C# could have been a #2 language for AI by now.

Guess why Microsoft hired Guido and other Python devs, who gets the whole Python experience on VSCode, or introduced Python as better option to Excel, in detriment of .NET addins.

People forget that nowadays .NET is only yet another language on DevDiv, check the developer blogs for all languages.

That was F# failure as well, trying to cater to data science for its relevance, while other Microsoft departments double down on Python.

Jokes aside, not really, however people have to accept to be polyglot, there isn't one language to solve all problems.

Regardless of whatever is in Rust, all AI key frameworks are in C++ and Python.

NVidia, Intel, AMD, Khronos aren't going to start publishing tools in .NET, Rust, Zig, or whatever is our liking.

So anything outside those stacks will always be a second class experience in IDE tooling, debugging, and libraries.

My Labrador says a/ he’s neutered c/ dogix user b/ his teams always begin with empathy: people (and retrieves) over outcomes

"Azure Active Directory" wasn't Active Directory, and who'd have guessed a year ago that "365 Co-pilot" would mean the Office applications in 2026. Yes really.

At one point in time, before AzureAD got renamed to Entra ID (or is it just Entra now?) they had:

Active Directory Domain Services, Azure Active Directory Domain Services, Azure Active Directory. All three different products.

I just want to be productive, not fly a plane.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...

tl;dr : the website formerly known as office.com that was a portal for accessing a bunch of stuff changed name to "Microsoft 365" in 2022, and then again more recently (adding the copilot bit).

Edit: Although the horror show that is Microsoft product naming in that area left the door wide open for this confusion.

'The Microsoft Office app is now Microsoft 365 Copilot'

It is really sad to see MS kill such a behemoth brand for nothing.

Wow

Only the domain and SEO artifacts remain.

But even the Labrador licking his own balls that someone else mentioned would be better than Microsoft at naming things. I'm surprised they haven't changed Windows to Microsoft Azure Copilot Platform .NET 365 yet.

I mean, c'mon. They are deliberately trying to be confusing.

MacBook Pro (M5)

MacBook Pro (M4 Ultra)

MacBook Pro (M4 Pro)

Mac Pro (M2 Ultra)

Once you remember the general rule that Pro costs/does more than the base model, it’s really not that hard to keep track of.

Every generation the base iPhone becomes a lower and lower tier product.

I bet MS saw this too and the “CoPilot Everything” pivot was their failed effort to maintain vendor lock-in in the age of LLMs. That failed, devalued their product, since they doubled-down in the meantime on enhanced hostility to cross-platform tools (try lately to read LLM markdown on vanilla M365?) now MS will have that reckoning after conceding a 3-year head start to disrupters and, yes, antagonizing core users with uptempo customer-hostile slop.

There needs to be more squeaky wheels than anticipated at all times in IT to justify investments in software thereby your compensations and promotions. One easy way to achieve that is to keep throwing in shiny new things with more moving parts so to keep something on fire to keep spotlights on. Webdevs achieve this by wrapping wrappers, Google by pulling plugs randomly off the wall, and various parts of Microsoft for the past few quarters had done so by introducing new GUI toolkits and adding moar AI to Windows.

But that doesn't matter. It was bought as a toy and propaganda network. It can lose money indefinitely as long as its owner is paid by Tesla: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk6kvyxvzo

... where is this collapse?

FWIW, I don't have a skin in this game - just observing the facts.

Best guess would be he gets ~$10-$20bn, all of the companies collapse, their value driven to possibly sub-billion dollar ranges, and it triggers the Great Depression pt 2, electric boogaloo, and within a year he's "fallen out of a window".

It is very fortunate for Elon that Starshield exists, and that we've failed serving our country to the point that we need Starlink for rural areas.

Where I come from we prefer monkeys throwing darts.

They already made money.

They know what works to make money by convincing CEO VP PM devs. I do hope they jump to the next company (please meta or apple) and do their duties.

Marketing Driven Development is terrible. If the CEO of Microsoft keeps pulling off these terrible moves time and time again, I would suggest he has overstayed his welcome, bring in fresh blood. Windows should be an OS not an ad platform. If Office doesn't want to be replaced and remain profitable maybe its time to trim your marketing department, clearly they are overstaffed if they can affect the entire OS itself.

I refuse to use Windows. I only use Mac and Linux now, unless an employer gives me a Windows device, that's the only exception, but given the choice I'll ask for Mac or Linux any day.

They also missed the boat on mobile, and I suspect they didn't want to miss the "AI" boat this time around.

Mac user and Office subscriber here. The wild thing is this soured me on the Copilot brand so broadly that I’ve recommended folks weighing it strongly avoid committing to it as their AI strategy. (None of them did.)

That infamous agentic OS tweet pretty much sums up the incentives and response to criticism at Redmond.

It actually serves a purpose to them we can say every employee "has AI" so we're an "AI first" company at fancy press events.

Meanwhile nothing actually changed because the free features are even worse than the paid ones.

It's basically greenwashing all over again. AI washing :)

You’ve never worked at MS, have you? PMs aren’t asleep at the wheel. They are doing their job because their performance reviews are tied to adding these top-down goals into the team’s roadmap. That’s the horrible part.

Wathever problems windows have today, retro compatibility was always a strong point in favor of windows. Breaking it with such a change in the kernel, would make most of its users even bitter than they are today.

What exactly was wrong with Edge Legacy(not IE) based on their own engine that they need to fix, and why was Chromium a sweet taste?

AFAIk Edge Legacy was kicking ass in all benchmarks. Their only achilles heel was Google messing up Youtube and G-apps to break they way they got displayed on Edge LEgacy forcing users to switch to Chrome.

And personally, I preferred the native IE UI over the Chrome-lookalike Edge UI.

I’d still have liked for Microsoft to keep maintaining their own engine, but I can understand why they didn’t.

I imagine it was not as compatible and it was less work to simply rebrand Chromium as Edge.

The constant fear of having Copilot shoved down your throat whenever you close and update Edge. And Microsoft homepage.

> why was Chromium a sweet taste?

Do zero of the heavy work maintaining a browser engine. Do maximum (little) work of adding AI slop.

Copilot only cam after they switched Edge Legacy to Edge Chromium.

That is just completely illogical and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how Windows works. Most problems people have with Windows are in the user mode, and not in the kernel. The pain of reverting straightforward UI/UX/vendor-provided application code that is probably version-controlled and tagged for specific historic Windows releases is 'too high', so, therefore, let's do something that's even higher cost, and...

> windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro

Ugh, not this again. It looks like this train of thought will never leave HN commenters who probably have never seriously actually used or programmed on Windows. Literally every week I see 'Windows should keep the same user mode and move to the Linux kernel'.

You guys know what another Linux kernel running a locked-down user mode stack is called? Android.

They’d have nothing to gain from doing this, NT kernel isn’t the problem with windows.

On the other hand, Windows Home and Windows Pro are only part of the bigger picture. Microsoft gets billions in revenue from Windows Enterprise seats and billions more from Windows Server, probably more enterprise revenue than Red Hat and Canonical combined does for their Linux offerings. They have zero reason to give up on Windows while the money keeps rolling in.

Where I work, there have been a lot of pushback where that BS doesn't make a lick of sense (the crown jewel of BS request atm: "let's put AI in the bootloader").

Good governance "should" also mean that those kinds of pushback are encouraged.

CEO: Put AI everywhere/

Engineering Staff: There's a lot of places where it doesn't make sense to do this.

CEO: Do it or find somewhere else to work.

The problem of pushback at the lower levels is that it is completely ineffective when the top levels are set on something.

It was complete nonsense. Wound up leaving, partly over it. Nobody wanted to hear the emporor had no clothes and it made more sense to get out before that made my a layoff or URA target.

- having friends is more important than making output, which means that people above certain level just play politics instead of actually managing the company

- managers who miss targets get more people assigned which makes them climb the hierarchy, which means all levels below top level have the incentive to be inefficient

- saying "no" to the ruling party, no matter how stupid the idea is, is the second-easiest way to get replaced. The easiest is to offend the wrong person

- planning periods misaligned with the economic reality

An intelligent person will either be optimized out of the system, or will learn how to game it to their own advantage.

It is easier to let it all crash and burn, and try to leave with less scars as possible than try to fight the system.

You get to lose more for the visibility to fight back than letting it go down in flames.

In a company as large as MS, I'd never really expect a culture of encouraging pushback from below. They'd just never get anything done and the team culture and morale would likely end up in the tank.

It's just that I don't vibe with the sentiment that company culture are a one-way street from management.

Anyway I do see that after a while the people who would have said no would all be gone. So maybe this is not the start of the decline but actually closer to the end of Microslop.

Sure they want to hide their embarrassment at this second, but I'm not hearing any vision for a future where they make a product designed for someone like me. They don't want me anyore and they've made that quite clear through generations of hostile decisions

How so? The forced feeding of AI is what Satya called for.

As an OS, Windows died with 10.

Given their current fixation on writing windows components in React Native, I suspect they have a talent problem internally. From the outside looking in, it looks like anyone who knew windows (and office) internals really well are gone, and the new talent they bring in can't deal with the legacy so now they don't touch it, and are building on top using web tech.

Jobs was correct when he said that Microsoft has no taste.

It does, imagine how much faster it's going to be in the next model version!

We never, ever, learn from "lessons learned". They are there, just as a generic way, to tell other teams, that there might be some issues.

I deleted "Microsoft" from the quote because this, unfortunately, applies to a lot of companies.

At least some team at MS probably wanted to see what kind of data about and from their user base they could squeeze out with those features in those places.

No matter how much value this company has brought the people, the main goal at some point became extraction of data. They rolled those features out just when AI tools began to hit the same wall: no more data this way; I guess not even more noise.

If instead we look at all of this as a company that doesn't really care about the overall product that much, and wants a chance of growth, then it all makes sense: Every team/owner decides that they want to ship AI in whatever bit of the OS they control, as it's a chance for relevancy with minimal downside. Then their boss realizes that they don't want to say no to anyone, and in fact might have the winning lottery ticket if more AI features are tried under them, and then you end up with the kind of disaster you see.

This isn't Microsoft specific at all: I bet many of us have seen this elsewhere, and even in different cycles. Everything is turned into a website whether it needed it or not, and then rewritten into a single page, because it was going to be revolutionary. Five different blockchain teams inventing use cases, including one spending a hundred million a year trying to make NFT videogames happen, and every project failed. This is the current governance standard in a megacorp.

People will only bother about the unstable mess when the risk is balanced, and they have as much to lose for ending up with an unstable mess as they have to win for risking instability for a half baked feature. Because I bet that, just like everywhere else, some people get promotions and large amounts of stock compensation for shipping a product before it proves to be good, so one can even be lavishly rewarded for failing.

So from where I stand, all of this is just Microsoft showing that they are just like everyone else. Given how fast the world moves, the governance you describe is rarer every year. So rare that even though I share your instincts, I am not even sure what "right" might be.

They're not even trying anymore.