[cjk2]

It's worse than that. They always sacrifice their customers to try and win new business on some fad of the hour. Every fucking time. This has been going on 20 years at least.

This is another Windows Phone. They shaft the entire platform for a decade to fulfil some stupid fucked up half baked ideology.

Imagine Windows if they invested in their customers rather than their stock price and ego. Imagine if they became a bastion of privacy and security. Imagine if they became someone we could trust.

[airocker]

This is so true! Going after the pie in the sky only works for a short while, then you have to work for your pie. the worst is that employees in windows used to get slower promotions than these new tech groups (live,mobile etc ) which means more of them are in powerful positions to continue this trend. They tasted success with this strategy in their early days when they built sq L, xbox and word. Azure was the last successful play like this but at least they wrote own software.

[cjk2]

As my father used to say, shit floats to the top of the tank. Shit being sycophants, yes men and liars usually. Oh that sums up MSFT senior management nicely.

[throwawayqqq11]

And this is why you cannot trust any corporation in the long term and why i think copy left licences are becomming a hidden corner stone of our civilization.

[jononor]

I agree their customers certainly are being sacrificed now.

Windows Phone was very costly, but did not have much negative impact on existing products - Windows/Office etc?

[pjmlp]

I learnt that lesson, the way they allowed a small team to screw up C++/CX customers, paying for Visual Studio licenses, bringing down the whole XAML C++ development experience to the 2000's ATL days.

[dageshi]

Most people do trust them already, they're still the worlds biggest desktop os by a large margin.

So erm, it probably wouldn't make any meaningful difference?

[cjk2]

Actually no we don't. I work for a company with 10,000 windows seats and we use it because we're basically locked in and stuck with the steaming turd. And the rug is getting pulled on Windows 10 now.

Notably one of our biggest security threat vectors is actually Windows. The security model on it is so crap it's either locked down so it's completely unusable via GPOs and behind DLP proxies and firewalls. Or the risk is accepted and as a regulated industry we get fined to death if anything goes wrong.

So no we aren't happy, we don't trust them but we have to gargle it anyway.

[nunez]

> Most people do trust them already,

Forced to trust them. Windows is the default at most companies, and the cheapest laptops on the market (the ones that will shove ads all over Edge and your start menu) run Windows also.

[contrast]

Mobile phones were a fad?

[arresin]

No but Microsoft was never going to be able to do it. Maybe there’s a parallel now.

[znpy]

> Imagine Windows if they invested in their customers rather than their stock price and ego. Imagine if they became a bastion of privacy and security. Imagine if they became someone we could trust.

You're missing the point. Think of the actual Windows user: it's not the average joe/jane that get the oem laptop with windows pre-installed, it's the big IT departments that are going to not only ship tens of thousands of windows machines (with "professional" tier licenses) but also the whole bundle of expensive shit (office, outlook, teams, office364, active directory and the whole thing).

Have you focused on those customers?

Ok now think: what alternatives do those customer have? Pretty much NONE.

If you're thinking GNU/Linux you're being unrealistic. GNU/Linux on non-tech workers' desktop will always be ready next year, every year.

If you're thinking Macbooks... No IT budget is deep enough for that.

Microsoft has no need to worry about their customers as Windows users. They have no other place to go anyway.