as an avid gamer, win11 is the one that pushed me to use linux only. i would have LIKED to keep using windows but the way they treat their customers is unforgivable. when i go to a restaurant i give them 2 chances at annoying me before i go elsewhere, i gave the windows team what feels like a hundred chances. dont care what they do now, theyre history.

re last para.

loss leader funda in action, prolly.

or, sort of: those who live together, stick together.

aka if you buy window pcs, you're likely to buy windows servers and vice versa.

Not a loss leader, it's still $17.08 Billion dollars (~5%) of their revenue according to bullfincher:

In fiscal year 2026, Microsoft Corporation's revenue by segment (products & services) are as follows:

    Dynamics Products And Cloud Services: $9.01 B
    Enterprise and partner services: $8.26 B
    Linked In Corporation: $19.82 B
    Microsoft Three Six Five Commercial Products And Cloud Services: $102.00 B
    Microsoft Three Six Five Consumer Products and Cloud Services: $9.18 B
    Other Products And Services: $109.00 M
    Search Advertising: $15.18 B
    Server Products And Cloud Services: $129.43 B
    Windows and Devices: $17.08 B
    XBOX: $21.79 B

This is down from 2024, when Windows was $23 Billion of revenue equaling nearly 10% of their annual revenue.

https://bullfincher.io/companies/microsoft-corporation/reven...

> As a longtime Mac user, Windows leadership decisions don’t make any sense to me either.

To be sure, as another Mac user, they make sense in that they want Apple's revenue and reputation. The problem is they categorically refuse to invest in their engineering staff to even remotely the degree Apple does, which is reflected in the "quality" of the products on offer.

Everyone wants to be Apple, and they're all convinced despite ongoing proof to the contrary, that they can do it for pennies on the dollar. It's genuinely kind of pathetic how desperate they are to be Apple.

> Everyone wants to be Apple

Can they instead aim to be what Apple was? Being what Apple is or going where Apple is heading is rather gross.

Microsoft's talent pool is deeper and equally smart. The problem is in the leadership, which grew fat and lazy and permitted a continuously terrible corporate culture and unfocused plan, and in the design. Microsoft's historical game plan is to copy and leverage its scale, but you can't copy and leverage scale in design or in management.

> If they’d just taken Windows 10 and applied the Windows 11 theme

That is what they did. They took windows 10 added the theme and taskbar/start from the triple failed 10x added arbitrary cpu cutoff and released as 11.