[headmelted]

I think what's more likely in this case is that MS under Satya really does want to be a good corporate citizen, but are finding themselves in a bind that threatens the whole organisation.

They're spending up the wazoo on Xbox, still, to battle PlayStation. They were supposed to have conquered that market over 15 years ago and are still throwing money at it.

Windows is hurting as a retail business. License costs have been driven down by Chromebooks and resurgent Macs, and with all the free upgrades they get very little revenue from gaming PCs anymore (which is one of their biggest markets) while also battling Proton and Vulkan to keep users on the platform.

That leaves Azure and Office as the big cash cows. Azure is struggling to compete with AWS, and the big draw of Azure is the deep integration between it and Visual Studio (which, to be fair, is unrivalled anywhere else).

That's the bind. Microsoft needs the open-source community to embrace Visual Studio Code, and they have, but they also need to protect Azure's hegemony with .NET developers.

Can you build and deploy .NET on other clouds currently? Of course. Do you lose a lot of features by doing that? yes. Ones you may miss, or (if you've never been on Azure to become familiar with them), ones that may draw you to migrate later.

[kelnos]

This reads to me as:

> MS under Satya really does want to be a good corporate citizen

... followed by...

> [a bunch of reasons why MS won't be a good corporate citizen]

Wanting is great, but actions speak louder. Maybe instead of doing sketchy things to try to lock people into your cloud platform (and make using your framework on other platforms more difficult), they could, I dunno, maybe focus on Azure itself, and making it better than AWS? The world would be a better place if companies were incentivized to compete on product features, and not through shady practices and backroom dealing.

[short_sells_poo]

I wonder how much inertia an organization like MS has. I never worked there, but the anecdotes I read/hear indicate that MS is really 4-5 semi-independent competing power structures. E.g. there's sometimes (often?) adversarial relationship between them even, which then projects into baffling end user experiences. The windows shut down menu or the highly schizophrenic situation between the new and old control panels comes to mind.

Steering something like that is not even analogous to captaining a single large ship, it's more like trying to steer a flotilla where each captain hates the other bunch and they are all continuously pulling in different directions.

Satya may be doing his very best to improve the culture, but management has to change or be replaced on multiple levels below him to make things stick. He has to do this in a way that doesn't unite the leaders of the sub-groups against him in mutiny.

Again, I'm not trying to excuse MS's behavior in any measure, just highlight that even with the best of intentions it may take decades to change firm like MS to give up it's old ways.

[pooper]

> Steering something like that is not even analogous to captaining a single large ship, it's more like trying to steer a flotilla where each captain hates the other bunch and they are all continuously pulling in different directions.

I'm sure this is a constant struggle even within the dotnet umbrella. Remember the whole hot reload mess?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28972431

I don't get it. Why can't they simply open source the common code between visual studio and visual studio code? Who cares if Visual Studio makes an extra million dollars in revenue? Talk about being penny wise and pound foolish. Spending all these resources to get developer mindshare and constantly tripping over themselves because oh we must protect visual studio revenue.

[StopHammoTime]

Home licensing has not been a big deal for a very long time. Their actual cash cows are things like Enterprise Licensing which aren’t going anywhere soon. You’ve also entirely excluded server licensing as well.

Have a read of their actual results and maybe re-think your hypothesis a bit. Microsoft’s revenue went up by 18%. I think they’ll be fine without some .NET extension,

[smcl]

Exactly. This is yet another bizarre move from MS which doesn't exactly seem to make financial sense and just pisses off developers who might otherwise be persuaded to soften their stance towards them. I wonder if these are part of a deliberate strategy MS are trying, or just the actions a few overly ambitious managers

[nerdix]

This seems like one of those decisions that they will walk back within a month similar to the "hot reloading" fiasco. This makes even less sense than that because it was clear which moat they were protecting (Visual Studio proper) by making hot reloading "exclusive" to Visual Studio 2022.

But this extension, by its very nature, is for the VS Code. So, in this case, VS Code isn't being neutered to make a paid product more appealing. The only thing I can think of is that they want to keep the "secret sauce" away from JetBrains to give Visual Studio an advantage over Rider. Its really perplexing when you consider that they created LSP and DAP. And C# was one of the first languages to have an implementation for both standards which opened up the door to potential C# feature parity between Visual Studio and non-Visual Studio editors.

I just don't understand why anyone working on .NET tooling would think that this decision would go over better than the hot reloading one. Once you open the FOSS genie, you cannot put it back in the bottle without stirring controversy. Is protecting some small percentage of VS license revenue worth all of this bad PR they seem to be willing to subject themselves too?

[oblio]

> Azure is struggling to compete with AWS

It's not. Everyone's darling, Google, is. So are IBM, Oracle, Alibaba.

Azure is the only true threat to AWS and the only actual peer.

[rootlocus]

> They're spending up the wazoo on Xbox

> Windows is hurting as a retail business.

> License costs have been driven down by Chromebooks and resurgent Macs

> That leaves Azure and Office as the big cash cows.

Where are you pulling all this data from? And I don't mean coarse data from various articles, anectodal evidence or personal observations, I mean actual evidence that microsoft's revenue share is dominated by office and azure? Microsoft sells a lot of stuff to a lot of entities, I'm not convinced you can sum up their revenue so neatly without opening their books.

[headmelted]

> They're spending up the wazoo on Xbox

2002 - Rare - $375 million

2005 - Lionhead - ???

2014 - Mojang - $4 billion

2014 - Gears of War - ???

2018 - Compulsion - ???

2018 - inXile - ???

2018 - Obsidian - ???

2018 - Ninja Theory - ???

2018 - Playground - ???

2018 - Undead Labs - ???

Sept 2020 - Zenimax / Bethesda - $7.5 billion

January 2022 - Activision Blizzard - $69 billion

This is just acquisitions, so it isn't exhaustive as it doesn't include first party costs and development expenditure, or Halo expenses / 343, as it assumes they essentially paid nothing to Bungie (or their costs were negative) after that split happened.

Microsoft don't publish extensive separate numbers for the Xbox division, but their Q1 2022 filing nonetheless states $3.6 billion - which is up 8%. They've also been open that they still, 21 years later, make at most break-even on their hardware sales.

That's a lot of expenditure relative to income. To state the utterly obvious: they're not getting nothing for that money, so it's not like they are sunk costs, but I'm not sure what standard would meet "spending up the wazoo" if not 20 times revenue (at minimum, as it only includes spending on acquisitions for which the amount paid is made public).

[deadbunny]

They are building Xbox as a brand/service not as a product these days. Sure they ship consoles but you can subscribe to Xbox Gamepass and and use it on both Windows and Xbox (and I think they also have game streaming? I could be wrong).

[headmelted]

Exactly.

.. and they’re spending up the wazoo to do it!

[blackoil]

Buying companies is not same as spending as the acquired companies are independently profitable. e.g. Mojang in hind sight is a steal for 4B. Same should be true for Bethesda/Blizzard.

These investment need not return profit in excess of the sticker price but increase the valuation of MS proportionally. If MS tries to offload Mojang it will get an impressive ROI.

[gertrunde]

Azure struggling to compete with AWS?

I wonder if this is specific to particular spaces, like very large enterprises maybe?

In the SME space, Azure is significantly more dominant in my experience.

All those companies where "Can't get fired for buying Microsoft" applies, went to Azure.

[qayxc]

GP seems to be oblivious to actual stats [0].

Last year, Azure was the 2nd biggest player in cloud computing, being "only" 2/3 of AWS' market share, but still having more than 3x the market share of the next biggest competitor (Google).

Indeed hardly something I'd call "struggling".

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1202770/hyperscaler-iaas...

[oxfordmale]

I can't remember the source, however, I believe Microsoft is overstating the usage of Azure as a cloud computing platform. For example Office 365 is hosted on Azure and counted towards the cloud computing figure.

[yyyk]

That may have been true in the past, but definitely not these days. MS separates Office 365 sales from Azure sales in its reports (e.g. [0]).

[0] https://news.microsoft.com/2021/07/27/microsoft-cloud-streng...

[qayxc]

I can only cite sources. Disputing the numbers would have to be taken up with Statista and their sources, I can't comment on this.

The revenue chart looks more favourable for Microsoft (e.g. 20% share for Azure vs. 30% share for AWS), so maybe that's the data you have in mind?

[p1necone]

> They're spending up the wazoo on Xbox, still, to battle PlayStation.

Microsofts decision to release all of their new XBox games on PC was kinda bizarre to me. It basically guarantees the XBox as a gaming console is going to lose market share to the PlayStation and eventually die out because the core gaming market is going to pick PC + PS5 + Switch (or some subset of those) as the sensible combo to be able to play all the games on.

XBox as just a game publishing brand can never be as big of a deal as being one of the three major consoles.

Meanwhile the Switch totally justifies it's existence with cool hardware decisions and good exclusives. And the PS5 with kinda unique hardware decisions (the really fast SSD actually enables cool stuff, the dualsense triggers feel a bit more of a gimmick to me) but mostly good exclusives.

But hey, maybe I'm missing something here.

[blackoil]

You are overestimating the overlap between PC and XBox for gaming and profits in selling the console. XBox buyers are looking for a cheap appliance while PC users are ready to invest lot more in both time and money.

[square_usual]

Then why is Sony heavily emphasizing PC too?

[headmelted]

That’s the more bizarre decision to me.

I get that some suits have decided PC isn’t a threat to Playstation’s business model, but they’re just wrong.

A gaming PC will play PC/Xbox/Playstation/Switch exclusives now. That really is compelling for someone in the market.

[snovv_crash]

Maybe it is due to hardware supply chain shortages, since they make their money from the game sales anyways.

[lovich]

> But hey, maybe I'm missing something here.

Most consumers want appliances. Having to debug software and hardware issues that frequently come up on PC gives them zero satisfaction.

For example, most people want a toaster when they want toast, instead of a more versatile fire

[torginus]

Consoles are very close to PCs, hardware-wise. The main draw imo is the hassle-free gaming experience. I think the use case of building a dedicated box just for gaming is becoming less valid with every console generation.

[WorldMaker]

I think you are missing some things here.

For Microsoft the Xbox hardware was always intended to be "aspirational" for PC owners and push developers to build better PC games. Even the name choice from "DirectX-Box" has always come from that relationship back to the PC (even with the brief side jump in the Xbox 360 era away from traditional PC hardware).

Just as the Surface line of hardware isn't designed to "replace" the PC but encourage innovation in PC hardware design.

For a really good example since you already brought it up: "the really fast SSD enables cool stuff" you mention with respect to the PS5 is a big part of the Xbox Series X/S hardware too. They are only sold with really fast SSDs and even the expansion slots only support those kinds of SSDs. (Some gamers have been upset by this that they can't just plug in any USB drive like on the Xbox One.) But also Microsoft also added a lot of that exact same "cool stuff" to Windows and PC games can use "DirectStorage" APIs to get some of those exact same benefits when PCs are built with really fast SSDs that support DirectStorage. But right now the easiest (and cheapest) to find "PCs" with all that hardware and configured correctly to use it "fresh out of the box" are: the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. (Even despite the supply chain issues.)

That's an interesting circle around the hardware: the Xbox hardware pushes PC standards that are aspirationally available sooner and easier on Xbox hardware. Xbox hardware puts "high performance gaming PCs" in living rooms in homes that might now otherwise consider a "high performance gaming PCs" while also giving those that love building their own "high performance gaming PCs" performance goals to shoot for and a baseline hardware standard to judge their gaming PCs by (is your gaming PC at least as good as an Xbox One X? do you have the RTX and NVMe SSD with DirectStorage support to hit Xbox Series X fidelity in Xbox Series X optimized games? etc).

Surface doesn't want to be the only PC hardware, it wants to be PC hardware that gives ideas to the other PC hardware companies. That sets benchmarks even for home PC builders to measure themselves. Xbox as a console seems to want to do the same thing: it isn't designed to be the last or only gaming PC in a household: it's designed to be the "first", it's designed to be easily accessible for those that wouldn't otherwise buy a gaming PC, it's designed to be the measuring stick for what a "gaming PC" means and give ideas to PC manufacturers of things they can also be doing. (And it is designed to keep Windows as the most innovative OS for gaming. Microsoft "wins" either way if you buy an Xbox or a gaming PC so long as it still includes Windows.)

(Personally, I tend to own a gaming PC for 7+ years and watch it slowly grow out of date with new releases, because a PC is also a lot of other things and stability is great. When I choose to play "keeping up with the Gamer Joneses", I do it by following Xbox cycles. The Xbox Series X does outclass my gaming PC on quite a few specs and I'm happy with that arrangement. I also like the fluidity that I often buy the games only once and can run them on my PC in the other room, at my discretion. Some games you want "latest and greatest looks on the couch" and some games you want the freedom to jump over to the other room and "slightly dated graphics fidelity but I just need to hop on the game from my desktop where I'm multitasking a TV show and a Discord chat in my PC chair".)

I have a lot more questions for what Sony's strategy is with current PC releases of games and that the PS5 is again back on "ordinary" PC hardware. They certainly don't "win" anywhere near as much by making their PC games available on Windows.

[anonymous_sorry]

You say Microsoft is in a bind because in most of its businesses it is facing existential threats from stiff competition. But that is exactly how free market capitalism is meant to work.

You almost imply that we can expect better corporate citizenship (whatever that means) from corporates with comfortable monopolies. I think 90s Microsoft is probably sufficient rebuttal of that.