I got the same info. Windows kernel is developed for B2B needs, if something might be useful to B2C, they might eventually get it, but they don’t affect the roadmap.

> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.

In some ways. Less so in others.

For products that get commoditized for home use, the "business focused" high-margin solutions generally lose out to the commoditized solutions focused on end consumers in the long term.

Yeah. It's telling that this story is about their discord channel, not Teams.

I would have been suspicious of this until I saw a quote for an E5 license

This is 100% true.

You might wonder why, if businesses are the target, why not just make Windows a no-frills, solid base for the other offerings? Why slop it up?

The answer there is cultural. Windows needs a large team just to keep supporting it at scale. All those engineers and PMs need career paths, and shiny things with which to sway their managers into promoting them. The strong, experienced, leaders have largely left because they know this isn't a company priority. So you end up with B players promoting C players for slop.

Time goes on and the Bs become Cs, and so on.

So the dynamic is that something that isn't a priority doesn't merely slop evolving, it devolves. We're now several iterations into this process, which will accelerate due to AI.

"So you end up with B players promoting C players for slop."

Micro-slop(tm).

Micro-slop promoting nano-slop polishing pico-slop

> All those engineers and PMs need career paths, and shiny things with which to sway their managers into promoting them.

This mentality is very US-American. The cynic in me says: "Simply move the development to a different country to get rid of this problem." ;-)

Well, both are happening. Those remaining want to justify their jobs (because new initiatives are not even being considered). And Microslop wants to become the next IBM and move most development into overseas maintenance instead of innovation, as the competition slow passes them by.

The house always wins long term, though.

seems like

  microsoft = 1/apple

I've said this for years. The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error. What little they do make is from preinstalled systems, and, honestly, when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming? I don't need a quote from someone high up in the company to know they couldn't care less how upset people are by the decisions they make about it.

Literally every corporation and government in the world is slavishly devoted to running all of their end-user computers on it, because Microsoft will let them do unspeakable things to the OS, in the name of security, that wind up having next-to-nothing to do with actually making their data more secure, and only serve to infuriate and spy on the users. My company runs THREE different "end point" security packages on my machine. There are at least 35 scripts that run at all hours of the day to make sure I'm not doing anything I shouldn't. It takes 20 minutes to be usable after a boot up. And the VPN drops several times a day, even though my internet is rock solid. It's an entire, vibrant ecosystem of outsourced, bone-headed, second-and-third-party decision making so that no one in the company or the department or the management or the supply chain has any accountability in case something goes wrong. THAT'S what Microsoft is selling, and IT HAS NO COMPETITION IN THIS CAPACITY.

For years, I've begged people on every social network I've been on, including this one, to find a source of operating system market share that has corporate purchases broken out from personal purchases. This is the closest thing I can find. It shows abysmal numbers for Microsoft, and it's at least a decade out of date. I expect that Microsoft -- who obviously underwrote the entire IT press during the 90's and 00's -- has done quite a lot of work and paid quite a lot of money to make sure that nothing definitive in this regard ever sees the light of day. They have gotten to where they are making sure that Gartner never did anything resembling this.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar...

>The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error.

Yes, if you analyse revenue (not profit), sales of Windows count 9% of the total. Microsoft makes around the same percentage from LinkedIn and Xbox as they do from Windows sales.

Cloud is by far the the biggest contributor to revenue.

Beverages and pet food combined make up almost half of Nestlé's sales, with chocolate at around 7.6%. But I certainly wouldn't consider almost $9 billion in chocolate sales per year a rounding error.

>when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming?

I'm sorry, what? I don't know if this is because of the developer-bubble mindset on HN (or the wealth gap that comes with that), but Windows adoption on the consumer level is around 70% and close to 90% on the business level. This actually falls short from what I see anecdotically (I don't live in any North-American / European country), which is close to 95% of Windows adoption, in general.

I'm sorry, but what!? Right back atcha. If you'd have bothered to have looked at the chart in link I posted, you'd have seen that market share of "consumer compute" for Windows was 26% as of 10 years ago. You're going to have to do a lot better anecdata to find a 44% resurgence over the last 10 years, especially given the dismal things that have happened to it as a platform over that time.

Your 26% figure refers to the Total Consumer Compute Market 14 years ago (not 10, it's now 30% btw)... but that includes smartphones and tablets, not just PCs.

You specifically mentioned

> when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming?

So, lets talk about that:

https://safeitexperts.com/en/2025-desktop-operating-system-m...

You are being deliberately opaque, but this is HN and your jerry-rigged data won't fly without scrutiny.

That sentiment is characteristic of the Gates to Ballmer leadership change.

Foolish since a world where no one uses Windows at home will ve damaging for enterprise long term.

I think they (and even Apple) are going to get a walloping from mostly ceding the education market to chromebooks. Kids are growing up using them.

It's interesting to me as well as an ex-microsofter who worked on surface devices. Leadership (at least below the VP level) knew they were getting killed by Chromebooks and tried a few times to get a low cost device (Surface Go 1/2 for example) that ran a slimmed down version of windows (Windows S?). It tries to be more like chrome OS (hard to mess up, easy to flatten and restore a fresh OS on) but kind of just throws away the things you would pick windows for in the first place (legacy app compatibility) to be not bad at the thing Chromebooks are good at.

That said, I don't believe the Chromebook lock-in. It's just chrome and the web, which you can get on literally almost every laptop/pc sold today. Should Microsoft be concerned that you don't need windows as more and more things move onto the web? Absolutely. They should be doubling down hard on the gaming ecosystem (which atm still requires windows for certain games) as their hold is eroding week by week.

I think Windows was a pretty good desktop environment circa. Windows 7. Hardware compatability and just working are huge. If they can get an independent M4 competitor from AMD etc. you would have a compelling reason to switch from Mac (for Joe Average user).

Step 1 get rid of adware

There's a growing set of ARM windows laptops that might bite into the Chromebook market. The surface laptop 7 is pretty nice and comes in both large(ish) 15 inch and small 13.8 inch form factors.

All of the ARM laptops are priced as premium business models in the $900-1700 range and kind of fall down in that space - Qualcomm until recently even refused to release any drivers to anyone not a developer partner and it's honestly still not even close to consumer/business friendly. The hardware is capable of doing what people need the culture around it is just not aligned.

Also it's a joke to run OpenGL on Windows ARM (it fully works just no one makes it anything easy)

My x13s laptop can almost run A tier games without a fan which is impressive but it really feels disconnected and unsupported from all parties making these laptops.

I think there is almost zero overlap between the premium laptop market (Surface laptop) and Chromebooks.

> kind of just throws away the things you would pick windows for in the first place

I'd be interested to see a legacy-free Windows, stripped out like LTSC, with no 32-bit binary support. Especially an Arm64 version with no x86 binary support.

How lean and mean could it be in the 2020s?

> I think they (and even Apple) are going to get a walloping from mostly ceding the education market to chromebooks.

I think this is an Americentric view. As far as I can tell, the mass adoption of Chromebooks for education is just the US, which is 4% of the world population. And in this particular case there's little reason to believe it will suddenly propagate everywhere else - the US education ceding has been going on for years, and yet it's still confined. It's not like the iPhone which started in the US and within a few years rapidly gained ground in Japan, then Europe and so on.

Only in some countries, most schools of the planet are free of Chromebooks.

MS is the new IBM

That's fine, they should still do a good job for moral reasons rather than economic ones, and they deserve to be dragged through the mud if they do not.

> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.

And all of the ERP vendors.

That said, most FOSS devs don't target those platforms for releases, so IMO the same approach should be taken with Microsoft products then.

That's been obvious for years. It feels like they're extracting whatever remaining money they can get from the home PC market while it lasts but won't much miss it when it's gone.

I'm surprised they haven't given up on xbox and games but perhaps there's enough money there to keep it going.

Their new appointment of leader for their Xbox group suggests that they intend to wind down that business unit in time. The founder of the Xbox team has commented that he believes it’s the beginning of the end for Xbox, for the exact reasons of this thread.

Which is odd because the major reason Xbox is petering out is because it's been completely mismanaged. Sony and Nintendo are still doing just fine. Nintendo even had a dodgy console that no one bought within relatively recent memory. Xbox messed up with the One and then have just failed to get back on track. It's not like the industry is dying.

Sony’s best selling console is still the PS2. They make more profit per console these days but the market doesn’t seem all that healthy.

I think Microsoft will just allow strong DRM to prevent cheats/piracy in PCs instead of dedicated xboxes.

It's skewed by the PS2 being one of the cheapest DVD players available at the time, which is no longer needed now.

> home PC market while it lasts

Tinfoil hat thought: Microsoft only focuses on B2B and not consumer market, because they make it so that consumers can only rent from Microsoft and other businesses, not actually own anything. That way, Microsoft can keep jacking up prices as they see fit.

If Microsoft wanted to be monopolistic, and it wouldn't be the first time, then why are they abandoning their strongest exclusives (Windows, Office) and instead enter a more competitive market, where Google, Amazon, etc... are well established and with no sign of letting go.

> why are they abandoning their strongest exclusives (Windows, Office)

They're abandoning the consumer versions of these, not the enterprise versions. The consumer versions are the competitive market, where they're competing against iPads and such. They're not abandoning Windows for businesses, Office for businesses, where there is still no established business end-user OS/office suite alternative.

Given Office 365 and day-one Game Pass release of all first-party titles, I don't think you need a tinfoil hat to imagine this.

I suspect lingering antitrust concerns are one of the few things standing in the way of locking consumer Windows updates behind a paywall, possibly alongside a "free with ads" version.

It's not fully clear yet but they definitely gave up on the current Xbox strategy, after firing both the CEO and the next-in-line and replacing them with people previously working on integrating AI around the entire product line. Sure they said they won't fill up Xbox with soulless AI slop, not sure I believe them.

Consoles are probably getting phased out, which makes financial sense at this point if they don't manage a massive comeback, and Xbox might try to go with a more Steam-based model (they've been trying for the last decade with not much success), maybe trying to make PCs more console-like with their new Xbox Windows changes, as well as putting AI everywhere, so that's going to be fun!

That's been obvious for decades. Everyone who worked in the 90's or 00's has stories about coming in one day to find that the VP has been conned into a $1m contract for MS office or development software everyone hates and now we all have to use it because if we don't then he made a huge mistake and VPs don't make huge mistakes.

So we have to eat shit or find open source software to work around MS's garbage check-box-driven software.

Clearly you were there.

This is still happening. The org I work at was all-in on Google stuff, then just before I joined 5 years ago, some senior exec joined. Must have been in tight with Microsoft because suddenly the org was all in on Microsoft. The exec left, job well done, and the org suffered for years during the changeover; we still suffer because all the Microsoft stuff is total garbage these days.

I yearn for the Microsoft software of the 90s and 00s, pre-cloud, pre-webslop, pre-AI.

Nadella has been the best thing to happen to MS since Gates. He came from Azure.

I’m pretty sure that Amazon now makes most of their money from AWS.

> Nadella has been the best thing to happen to MS since Gates.

Wow. My impression, as an MS watcher since 1988, is the exact reverse: that he is guiding the death-spiral.

Depends. Number go up, and he's good at that.

Good point, at least for certain values of "good".

I'm always astounded by the tendency to bet it all on core competencies and wind down every other effort that's profitable but not profitable _enough _ As if times don't change, innovation never happens, and your accessory plays of today are never the overtaking market of tomorrow.

It’s basically management 101. But I’ve gone through that phase and come out the other end believing that outsourcing any of the functions that aren’t commodified enough to switch at a moment’s notice is a terrible idea.

It is managment 101 to identify what makes you unique and sell that down the drain for the thing that currently makes you the most money?

Yes.

Witness every company that got disrupted from existence, because the thing they were doing was more profitable.

If you cut r&d that's a saving that a manager is rewarded for. The losses down the line are borne by others.

Certainly seems like it from how most companies I have had personal insight into have been ran.

Kodak comes to mind. They invented digital photography, but their film people deliberately kneecapped their digital people. Killed the company.

I worked for a camera company that made boatloads of cash from point-and-shoot cameras. That entire business was pretty much turned into chum by smartphones. I remember them refusing to even take the iPhone seriously, when it was announced. They took a serious hit, but seem to be recovering.

Can you post good articles on what you said.

I'm not really going to do that.

I have personal experience in the field (27 years), and met and worked with the folks involved, so I know it's good info. I'm not especially interested in hunting around for stuff that basically is a "lite" version of my personal experience.

Maybe you should write an article!

Thanks, but no thanks.

I don’t really get specific about my employer, and I suspect that the folks at Kodak, wouldn’t be thrilled about me writing about them.

There’s a fair bit of press out there, anyway. Not too hard to find corroborating information.

That’s a non AI search away.

> According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.

> Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities.

This does not explain why Microsoft then does not consider the consumer products as "stable (somewhat 'legacy') platforms", i.e. no deep changes and improvements will happen anymore (mostly bugfixes, security fixes and smaller improvements) - at least for the next years.

Considering that

- many Windows users would rather prefer a Windows 7 with small iterative improvements to handle new hardware (including performance improvements for new hardware)

- by quite many Windows users even Windows 2000 is celebrated (and many users would still love to use it if it included support for more modern hardware features and some convenience features that were introduced with newer Windows versions)

I can easily imagine that that this development path for Windows and Office would actually be liked by quite a lot of users.

Instead what Microsoft provides is an enshitification of Windows (and Office) with spyware, telemetry, AI slop, ads, changes for the sake of change, ...: this is clearly not what most users want.

I even have a feeling that this development path would be much cheaper for Microsoft than the AI integrations for Windows and Office for which Microsoft has clearly spent an insane amount of money.

If Windows 2000 still had security updates and modern hardware support, I'd sure as heck still be using it. Every version since has been a regression.

> Every version since has been a regression.

So very true.

I set up a machine with Windows 2003 Server Datacentre Edition last year. That's the version of the XP codebase that has PAE support and can access >4 GB of RAM... and with all the junk turned off. No themes, for instance.

It was really pleasant to use.

Give me that, with MS Security Essentials and no IE, just Firefox, and I could happily work on it today.

After using agentic AI that can actually do things (like cursor or even GitHub Copilot) using the AI in Microsoft products feels like an absolute joke. People want it to do actual things like apply a template to their PowerPoint or fill out a spreadsheet etc. but it just copies the work and makes you a new file to download pulling you absolutely out of the workflow. I've seen users excited for it and then get a new file to download in the chat and just quit using it completely in disappointment.

Even the developer tools are clunky and slow to use (SSMS, Visual Studio, VSCode) or can't do simple things like make a new file and put code it generates in.

Is this a joke?

IBM market cap is 225B, Microsoft market cap is 2.9T. IBM literally lost its matket to Microsoft in 80s and 90s specifically because it was too focused on enterprise...

Microslop got a much bigger market capture before pivoting to B2B as its focus. It could shift because it feels its too entrenched in society, so not much is needed to maintain the safe revenue stream.

If they aren't focused on consumer products they should stop shoving half baked features into them and let them coast. I can't imagine any enterprise solutions updating windows and being complacent that an LLMA was shoved into their OS overnight.

> During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products.

Nowadays phones, tablets and game boxes are the consumer products. Currently they outnumber consumer windows desktops by about 6 or 7 to 1 [0]. 5 years ago, it was about 3.5 to 1.

Microsoft doesn't seem to have much control over this. They are executing a pivot in response.

[0] https://learn.g2.com/operating-system-statistics#:~:text=Mic...

> Mac OS X's market share in the US climbed from 12.17% in December 2022 to 22.08% in May 2023. The market share was consistent for the next few months until it dropped to 14.03% in December 2023.

What. MacOS doubled from December to the next may, then cut in half by the next December? I’m skeptical. It also talks about approval ratings for OS X Lion, from 14 years ago. I think that site is powered by a set of dice.

I think your overall point is correct, but I’m doubting that reference as an accurate data source.

> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.

It is until it isn't, but I think this is the same trap as not training up junior engineers. The consumer market is often where future engineers and professionals first interact with technology, being exposed to Windows early and being able to use it at school and at home have always been major drivers of adoption at work.

Linux is another perfect example - devs who wanted a unix-ish system landed on it early in their own work and education (partly due to the BSD licensing stuff too) - and over time it became one of the most commonly used server operating systems.

I think this is Microsoft optimizing for predictable growth, just like everyone else is doing right now, but this is shortsighted and ultimately a defensive posture, not one suited for the future.

What choice do they really have though? More and more consumers completely forgo owning a regular computer and only use a phone or a tablet now a days. And among the ones who do own a computer there's still a strong trend towards not paying for software, presumably a behavior taught to them by the overwhelming success of strictly ad-financed apps.

It's easy to forget that us here on HN are several standard deviations from the norm.

Windows 8 was supposed to dig into that mobile device/tablet market, as well as the Windows phone. You can argue about why Win8 was a titanic failure that pushed a backtrack in 8.1 (and Win10), but it seems like Microsoft didn't really know how to approach the space at the time and failed to commit to a trend they correctly identified early enough that they could have capitalized better on it.

If they thought windows 8 would tap the mobile market then they really didn't understand much of that market at all.

Meanwhile windows phone was pretty good actually but they killed it way too early. They had an app gap but time and money would have solved it.

I once worked for a retail computer repair shop that had an unbelievable amount of ethical concerns ( many things outright illegal). Among them was cracking Windows Vista or installing 7, cracking it and then rolling to Windows 10 get a license key from MS and then charging the customer for a license key.

I tried calling MS to report it and the guy on the other side said they didn't have a process for handling that and basically suggested I hang up.

I think that this was somewhat obvious to many in the last 10 years or so. There's no reason to fault them for that and, in all fairness, there are few corporate clients on here - or even online, considering Microsoft's market share for certain products and services - that complain about the quality of Microsoft's services and products.

What I find difficult to understand is the amount of effort and money that Microsoft puts towards making life painful for the B2C user; if your focus is on B2B, let the fucking user create offline accounts and let them crack the license and let them do whatever they please, as that would likely be less of a burden to you than a way to ensure market domination. You take care of the security, the UX, and availability parts and let the general public carry on with whatever it does. I am, of course, oversimplifying things here for the sake of the argument, but surely I can't be part of a tiny minority of people who see things this way.

At the end of the day, there are multiple and interconnected rational, irrational, economic, legal, social, political, strategical etc. reasons for why a company emerges as the dominant player in their respective niche, it's never down to the quality or convenience of the system alone. Microsoft stands more to lose than gain from their toxic attitude towards users, especially in the context of US playing the bully, and the EU considering disentangling itself from what is perceived a dangerous relationship that could undermine its very existence.

As an enterprise admin of Microsoft services I think they're pretty mediocre. Their stuff is always behind the state of the art. It's just good enough to not go for a third party option that isn't included in their bundle pricing. But it never really satisfies, it's always got this 'make do' feeling about it.

The single pane of glass thing is nice but I don't think it's really something you can't do without. I think what really cements them in the enterprise market is their ability to deep discount their bundles.

It's very hard with third party vendors to compete with that. You're not gonna pay $10 per user per month for zoom or slack when you can have teams included in the bundle you're already paying, even if it's not quite as good.

It's like IKEA. It's cheap, it does the job and for that reason almost everyone has it, but I wouldn't call it quality.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.

I am not sure if the average executive is dumb or just shortsighted. Imagine making decisions based solely on the optics of the Pareto principle when corporate history itself says that is fraught with risk.

Hmm

Not surprising, but it's sad to accept that the only major company building consumer-focused computing devices is Apple.

My hope is that LLMs allow linux to gain market share quickly. I know personally I've had a much smoother time moving to linux now that I can delegate a lot of the annoying troubleshooting/customization to claude.

Being able to say something like "I don't like the window colors make them more consistent with my terminal color scheme" and have it "just work" feels like a superpower. I've even gone as far as asking Claude to directly edit the icon pack svg files to whenever if I encounter something that feels out of place.

this is interesting because of how much it differs from my own hopes. I don't really have any personal need or want for the Linux desktop marketshare to increase. I like computers because I can program them to do something and it will do it. Ideally you have complete control over it. I've customized my desktop here and there in order to get some result, but while you care most about the _result_, for me the act of _making_ that result happen is as important if not more. I'm not looking to offload it to something else.

I don't really see the troubleshooting/customization as annoying. It's not much different than learning to program. At first you don't have any intuition for patterns or ways to solve problems, but given time, you start to identify them and know how to work on it unaided. For many distros or operating systems more broadly, it's the same thing. When in doubt, I head to the Arch wiki or more rarely the forums, then I'm good to go.

I'm not really after some integrated LLM or Copilot 365 for Linux experience when it comes to using my computer.

"We sell car tires, selling fruit is just a side business."

"The fact that our fruit is rotten and customers complain about that does not faze us as, again: we're primarily a car tire business and that's where our revenue comes from."

The 'reasoning' of the sociopath-level[1] of the corporate hierarchy never fails to entertain.

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

See where IBM is now though. Between some legacy hardware and random consulting services, they don't really have much of a strategy. They just exist because people still need them for old stuff and because older people trust their name. They used to lead the industry. Now they're not leading anything.

Of course their enterprise focus wasn't their only failure. But it was a factor in one of the biggest failures: their underestimation of the importance of the PC. They allowed Microsoft to market DOS to clones because they didn't see the potential.

So yeah I think their focus on enterprise was one of their biggest failures.

They’ve always been B2B driven. Solving their own internal problems easily lends itself to solving the problems of other comparably sized orgs.

> with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure

Linux.

> AI

The slop people are complaining about.

> and enterprise solutions.

Business users are totally fed up of poorly-function Co-Pilot buttons in every UI. The people who sign contracts are not the people forced to digest the cruft.