[natas]

I recently had dinner in Bellevue with an individual who holds a relatively senior position within Microsoft’s executive leadership. During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products. According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions. Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities. While this may not be surprising to some, what stood out to me was how emphatically she underscored that the company’s strategic focus is squarely on enterprise customers rather than end users.

That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.

[10000truths]

Windows' value is as a funnel to the Microsoft platform. Starving that funnel of attention might not have an immediate effect, but it's a slow death spiral for the company because it cannibalizes their long-term mind share. The 10-year-olds today who grow up using Chromebooks in school, Macbooks in college, and iPhones/Android phones in their daily lives, will end up investing in Google and Apple products as a working adult at home or at the office. The one remaining moat that Windows has over other operating systems is games and old software, but with Valve hard at work to get Steam games working on Linux, this last bastion of Microsoft's consumer presence is under attack as well.

[xp84]

> The 10-year-olds today who grow up using Chromebooks in school, Macbooks in college, and iPhones/Android phones in their daily lives, will end up investing in Google and Apple products as a working adult at home or at the office.

1. That's not how businesses work - the 10-year-old will be 28 when he becomes an IT manager, and their 40yo boss will say "LOL no, learn to use Active Directory, we're not switching the entire company to Chromebooks/MacBook Neos because you 'grew up with' them." They will then adapt and learn to use what the business has.

2. Even assuming charitably that our 10yo will be founding a company one day and making all purchasing decisions for themselves, it's worth pointing out that neither Google nor especially Apple has shown even slight interest in delivering "Enterprise" anything. Even MDM Apple farms out to third parties, likewise they have no realistic counterpart for Active Directory, nor business email or collaboration (at least Google has that though). A startup may be all-Mac. Eventually if it's successful though, it'll be too big to use 'consumer' tools only.

The MacBook Neo is a cute PC for a student or a grandma or indeed any casual user. But despite it giving Apple (for the first time in Apple's existence) a price point for an entire computer that's under the amount where you'd be embarrassed to propose adopting it for your whole fleet... the hardware is but one part of a larger ecosystem, and Apple has demonstrated that they have no interest into selling into "The Enterprise" except for tiny niches (relative to the whole PC market) such as "web and mobile" software engineers, video editors, VFX shops etc.

[hunterpayne]

Their 40 yo boss will have never used anything other than a web browser (or a game) in their entire lives at that point. He will never have heard of AD. Windows is legacy at this point. Only the most old and obtuse businesses still use it and then only for Excel and maybe PowerPoint. Most of the staff today only uses a web browser. In 20 years, nobody will even know that AD existed except in some museum in SJ.

[2b3a51]

In the medium sized public sector organisation I do some work in (not tech), most of the business type systems we use are reached via Chrome and are subscription based. I can log into them all using Linux with Chrome installed from home and there is no difference compared to using an organisation PC in their premises. Yes, I am logging in via Microsoft 365 but very few of the applications apart from email and calendar/Teams are used. The business type systems could well be running on Azure but I suspect not, at least for some of them.

Contrast that with a decade ago. All systems accessed via networked PCs using Windows native clients. I had to use RDP to a desktop to access anything from outside the network.

One day someone is going to realise that the organisation does not have to spend £££ replacing every PC just to keep running a Web browser.

[weitendorf]

Their 40 year old boss the will be younger than many of the 20 something, 30 something, 40 something entrepreneurs who already, now, at this moment (me included) would find the idea of moving to Active Directory and stocking the company with Wintel laptops equally farcical.

> A startup may be all-Mac. Eventually if it's successful though, it'll be too big to use 'consumer' tools only... likewise they have no realistic counterpart for Active Directory, nor business email or collaboration (at least Google has that though).

Between the two, they have those needs pretty much completely covered (also, Apple does have increasingly good support for MDM now). To me this reads more as a complaint that neither of them is trying to execute the same bundling/business model as Microsoft, or selling the same kind of security model as what makes sense for an old school IT shop that literally could never leave Microsoft products if it even wanted to.

Every single mobile device in "Enterprise" is using MDM provided and supported by those two companies for business users at multiple layers of the stack required to provide that functionality, they just don't make a business out of selling it directly as a Serious Enterprise Product to IT departments (the least important part of the stack, ie where a guy in a collared shirt with a web app takes a middle manager out for a steak dinner).

I set up MDM for the first time while standing in line for a flight at the airport, on my iphone and for my iphone. My company uses an enterprise IdP with a zero trust security model, which I saw executed firsthand by both Microsoft and Google for their own companies, neither of which made a fuss about giving me a mac device to work with. Somehow, it worked.

[p2detar]

> it's worth pointing out that neither Google nor especially Apple has shown even slight interest in delivering "Enterprise" anything

You make a bold claim and then kind of refute it yourself. Apple Business and School Manager, Managed Apple Ids, Google-managed Enterprises with the admin console. The thing that Microsoft has is Entra Conditional Access and it is powerful, but also this thing is actively crumbling under its own complexity weight. From my experience the future of Enterprise solutions does not belong to Microsoft.

edit: typos

[hyperhello]

I recently saw this comment. You made it a few weeks ago, copy and paste identical.

[mholm]

Not OP, but I've got a friend of a friend in the Windows org that backs this up. Most engineers are teamed up by manufacturers. HP team, Lenovo team, etc. These are the primary drivers of feature development. If it won't sell grandma another $500 HP laptop, they're not interested.

[DoctorDabadedoo]

It's B2B/Enterprise in the driver's seat to keep revenue coming. Usability and polishing of the products is locked in the trunk of the car.

source: been there.

[jm4]

Interesting. Sounds not too much unlike Linux.

[itsfine2]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223342

[natas]

I’ve included this here because it’s highly relevant to the discussion. That said, anything not closely tied to revenue will not be prioritized, which limits the impact of this microsoft post.

[xbar]

I noticed that, too. However, I will say that having a couple weeks to watch Microsoft through the lens of the original post, I am inclined to adopt it as my current model for Microsoft's actual agenda.

As a result, I do not currently think that Microsoft is consumer-oriented. They have reinforced my opinion by doing anti-consumer changes in XBOX and then saying that they were pro-gamer. Seems like a pattern.

Maybe they will prove me wrong; I am sun-setting my final host that's running their software soon.

[naikrovek]

This is a fantastic reason to ditch Windows.

Windows used to be built for the user. Now, Microsoft builds it for themselves, as a way to help hardware partners sell hardware which includes a windows license.

So if Microsoft makes Windows for their own benefit, and not for the users benefit, I see no reason to use it at all. I don’t like games that much.

MacOS has gone downhill in a hurry but it’s still very good. Far better than Windows for me in every way.

[throwaway5752]

This sounds exactly like how IBM sounded 50 years ago, before Microsoft disrupted them.

[orthoxerox]

But probably the biggest reason why Windows became the enterprise OS of choice was that every worker already learned how to use Windows on their home PC.

Now that people have phones as their principal computing devices and 90% of enterprise software runs in a browser the biggest thing helping Microsoft keep their share is AD (or whatever it's called these days, Copilot Entra ID 365?).

If someone disrupts their business by releasing a stripped-down OS that you don't even need GPOs to lock tight and a companion comprehensive IAM solution that works with iOS/Android as well, I can see Windows quickly degrading to become the "we keep one Windows PC around to control this widget from 2022" OS.

[Gigachad]

This is actually true though. If you look at the revenue breakdown for Microsoft, windows is relatively small. It's Azure and Office that make up the lions share. Those are also the growth sectors. No matter how good you make Windows, you won't sell more licenses because everyone who wants a PC already has one. The only thing they need to do is prevent people moving to Mac, which historically hasn't been a huge risk.

[reaperducer]

the company’s strategic focus is squarely on enterprise customers rather than end users

Yet it was the end users that forced enterprise to embrace the iPhone, not the other way around.

If her vision was the only driver, we'd still be rocking Blackberries.

[jimbob45]

The whole point of Azure is that it ties into Windows processes neatly. If everyone stops using Windows, then there won’t be any real point to use Azure.

[HaZeust]

I've seen almost this exact comment before, have you shared this anecdote before?

[wrs]

Just FYI, this is the same as when I left Microsoft 20 years ago.

[rsanheim]

This has been the case for 15-20 years at least. It’s only now that the horrible experience for regular users is so obvious compared to Linux becoming quite good, and Mac OS ranging from fine to meh.

The continual recall/ai push from Microsoft has not helped at all and is pretty gross. There is a way to do a “recall” style thing that some folks will really want if they can trust it. The msft approach has been the opposite of that.