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by FirmwareBurner 883 days ago
>Conservatism is a better fit for Microsoft because their users have "Who moved my cheese?" as a motto.

No way. Had they been conservative they would have remained as the "Windows and Office company" and died off 10 years ago as an IBM-also-has-been.

The fact they moved into consoles, cloud, linux, Github, LinkedIn, cross platform subscription based services like Office365, entertainment IP and AI, is what kept them alive and relevant.

Staying conservative from this point on is also not a good idea. If they can push ChatGPT and Copilot further to everyone an turn it profitable it would be another major win.

Conservatism is a better fit for someone like SAP.

1 comments

I'd say cloud is basically a conservative business. The last things customers want is to get their cheese moved.

XBOX is a Google-esque side project with the exception that Google would have killed it long ago. So far as I can tell they were afraid Sony might have created a competitive "home computer" platform by broadening Playstation and Microsoft. I personally feel I made a mistake getting an XBOX ONE instead of a PS4 a few years back because there are just so many stupid things about XBOX such as you can't play couch multiplayer unless you buy multiple subscriptions. And the fact that the video codecs are deficient so Jellyfin and Plex "just don't work" despite working just fine with trash Android devices.

The most striking thing about the Microsoft-Activision hearing was that Microsoft's management came across as indifferent to games. It would be one thing if Microsoft had a business plan that really makes sense (e.g. dominate an industry so you can make money) but as it is it just seems that they want to dominate games because they are a big dominant company that dominates things.

The most notable thing about the Microsoft-Activision hearings is that management seemed absolutely indifferent to games.

A lot of other changes are less radical than they seem. With cloud they can take your money just fine if you use Linux or Windows. Microsoft has always courted developers and often been generous (it's amazing what you got with an MSDN subscription) whereas once the Mac came along Apple has consistently seen developers as money bags that they could bleed dry. It was painful for Microsoft to realize that POSIX culture is here to stay but getting behind GitHub, NPM and stuff like that is consistent with their history of winning the hearts and minds of developers. Office365 is about as revolutionary as Adobe's Creative Cloud, a product that didn't really change much, now they just bill you by the month. It was just necessary to get parts of the office suite on mobile because that's where the users are.