[hobofan]

> I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect a business to continue offering the same product or service indefinitely if market forces are pushing it elsewhere

Market forces aren't pushing it elsewhere. The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office. If those would not exist nobody in their right mind would choose Azure over AWS or GCP.

By letting their guard down on those fronts and letting Windows and Office degrade more and more, they are exposing themselves to the risk that someone ends up building a competitive company filling those niches and people risk the switching cost in order to get away from ever increasing Office 365 subscription costs.

[markus_zhang]

Agreed. Companies pick Azure because they have already invested in Windows and Office. I have never worked in one company that uses Azure but not Office. They usually buy azure because of the discount.

[regularfry]

> nobody in their right mind would choose Azure over AWS or GCP.

There's a really interesting dynamic here in that Azure has a solid spoiler role for large organisations that don't want to be commercially dependent on only AWS, and they can probably get really solid discounts if they're aready on board elsewhere. It's something that doesn't play out with Microsoft's other products nearly so much: you get shouted down if you want to have desktop diversity, but having a multicloud strategy is (in my experience) looked on as essential.

[Chris_Newton]

The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office.

Again, is it really, though? I have no special insider knowledge so perhaps this is just a misunderstanding of the public information, but just going by the organisation structure, leadership comments and recent financials, it looks like Windows makes up a relatively small part of Microsoft’s revenues these days, while the traditional desktop Office applications seem to be almost lost in the noise. The emphasis seems to be firmly on cloud services, though admittedly with all the rebranding from Microsoft lately, I find it hard to understand even what basic products and services they offer any more.

[hobofan]

My point is that Windows/Office are a essential part in their sales funnel.

Google also makes most of their money in "ads" but if they were to axe Search and Youtube (which in an reduced view are only sales funnels for ads), they wouldn't have much of a business left.

[Chris_Newton]

I expect you’re right about the sales funnel angle, though neither Windows nor Office seems to be the same kind of product that those brands have traditionally described any more, presumably for that same reason.

Windows appears to be positioned more as a platform to reach all the online services now, rather than its traditional role as a desktop OS. Can you even activate it without being online and having a Microsoft account any more? I’m out of the loop, so genuinely don’t know the answer to this one.

Office — or whatever it’s being called after the recent changes — also appears to have morphed into something quite different. I tried searching just now to see if you could still buy a permanent licence and install the classic applications like Word and Excel locally, and some sources implied you could, but I didn’t actually find any way to buy it in five minutes of looking around office.microsoft.com. As far as I saw, that site is now 100% about the online SaaS version and trying to get users to save their documents in the cloud. For businesses, the strategy seems to include promoting other online services like SharePoint and Teams as well.

So I think I stand by my original argument, though I don’t think it necessarily disagrees with yours. Windows and The Software Product/Service Formerly Known As Office might still be a significant part of Microsoft’s sales funnel, but they aren’t the products that Windows and Office used to be any more. The products they used to be have been repurposed to support an online-first corporate strategy, along with almost everything else in the Nadella era. Would Microsoft care if 100% of their customers stopped using Windows tomorrow and jumped to Apple or Linux systems, as long as they still used the other services that generate most of Microsoft’s revenues these days? I’m not entirely sure they would.

[aruggirello]

Not much? Google would still have cloud services (which unlike Azure adoption depending on Windows/Office, only basically depend on the Internet), Gemini and Google Drive paid subscriptions, their flagship Pixel line...

[hobofan]

Google Ads still make up a 75% share of their revenue, and likely an even bigger share if looking at profit.

[wolvoleo]

They kinda did the same with IE. Got into a virtual monopoly and then let what was already a mediocre browser crumble into a pile of manure. So yeah then Google came along and ate their lunch. They should know better at this point.

[gloosx]

> The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office.

You mean Windows and Microsoft 365 Copilot App?