[ptero]

Microsoft lost its way much earlier than 4 years ago. It abused users at the time of Netscape wars and forcing Internet Explorer down people's throats.

But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to shake off government use.

Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engineering is to get govvies off it. My 2c.

[GuB-42]

We could say that Microsoft never lost its way in that regard, it has always been predatory.

Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows, it was their flagship product after all. It was terrible in some aspects, but also excellent in some others. I particular, they took compatibility very seriously, which is far from an easy task in the wild PC ecosystem. They were also quite good in the UI/UX department. The Office suite was unmatched too, I tried a few alternative, none of them came close.

Now, they completely broke their UI/UX, and that's not just the ads, forced Copilot stuff, etc... It is pure incompetence. They still have good compatibility, but it is not as impressive of a feat as it once was, as apps today are naturally more portable because of all the abstraction layers (performance be damned, but that's another story). The traditional Office suite is still good, but they are in the process of sabotaging it with web-based apps that remove tons of features without actually simplifying anything.

[blincoln]

> Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows

I agree with you, but I feel like they've stopped caring about most of their software. Windows is just the most egregious, high-impact example.

SharePoint and Teams were the first ones I noticed. I used to run an enterprise SharePoint farm for a big company. Under the covers it was a Rube Goldberg machine. Microsoft has some of the best database-related developer knowledge in the world because of SQL Server, but SharePoint was storing its data in giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.

That lazy "it works (most of the time), and it's cheaper for us to offload the cost onto our customers' devices" approach was even more pronounced in Teams, and now Office and Windows itself each spawn about a million Edge WebViews for the same reason.

I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Microsoft of the mid-2000s.

[p_ing]

> giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.

Prior to SharePoint 2013, Microsoft used sparse columns. It made for massive tables and was poor design.

Moving to XML blobs for user-defined schemas was the correct choice. The table schema became significantly smaller and user-defined schemas (for Lists/Libraries) could become much more complex.

[olav]

> The traditional Office suite is still good

I don't think so. The web version is mostly incompatible with the Windows or Mac desktop versions.

Have you compared the UI of Word/Powerpoint/Excel with alternatives like Apple Pages/Keynote/Numbers or Google Docs/Sheets? For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons, abysmal font rendering and insane defaults.

[GuB-42]

> For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons

In the case of Office I actually consider it a strength. Office has to take into account a large number of use cases, most people will use only a fraction of what is available, but not everyone use the same fraction. So that "unrelated button" may be someone else's essential feature. The "insane defaults" are what people are used to. I don't know about Apple, but I tend to get to the limits of Google Docs/Sheets rather quickly. It may cover 99% of my needs, but Office gives me the missing 1%.

That's for the traditional Office Microsoft are sabotaging, the web versions are only a shadow of it, and by most points worse than the Google suite, and that's the problem.

As for font rendering, I am sure that Apple is ahead, it has always been their strength. Microsoft may be the king of the office, but when it comes to art and creative work, Apple has always been on top.

[kstrauser]

The font rendering is a dealbreaker for me. I have to use Word periodically for exchanging files with customers where we have zero say in the mechanism. That is, when they say "here's our version of the contract for review before we give you $$$", and it's in Word that doesn't open cleanly in something better like Pages or Google Docs (yeah, I said it and I meant it), then Word it is.

I can't stand using it a moment longer than I have to, and never, ever use it for anything other than this kind of legacy doc compatibility situation. The font rendering is so, so bad that I just can't look at it. If MS ever cared to fix it then I bet that could move their Mac adoption by at least a few percent, which would work out to a nice chunk of change at their scale. But alas, no. We get stuck with something that looks like they took a photo of an LCD calculator screen and downscaled it.

[Gigachad]

Windows used to exist in a competitive environment where they had to fight to remain relevant. For a long time now they have become complacent, no matter how many ads, product placements, and user abusive features they push, people will tolerate it.

The situation has only just changed now that Apple and Valve are getting close to threatening the Windows monopoly.

[foldr]

Isn’t this backwards? Microsoft had way less competition on the desktop in the 90s than they do now.

[ptero]

I do not think so. The Windows - OS/2 war was a big fight that Microsoft won on merits. Windows 95 was revolutionary at the time, folks queued at the malls on the release day to get it, bugs and all.

They fought the compiler wars with real engineering, giving Borland a run for the money. Different people have different opinions about Visual Studio. As a Linux user since 0.9 I did not like its architecture and focus on GUI at the expense of everything else, but I still saw it as a consistent framework done by excellent engineers. And so on.

[p_ing]

On the desktop, I don't believe Microsoft has had significant competition for quite some time, likely back to Windows 95. In the server space, NT fought really hard against the UNIX giants of the time.

[foldr]

Windows’ share of the desktop market has dropped from about 95% in the late 90s to around 70% now.

[makapuf]

Frankly I don't know why we still have laptops. Honestly I think my mobile with a usbc base for screen and usb would perfectly work in a hardware pov. I don't know if Android would work, and besides of that a small fixed pc for whatever needs power.

[dec0dedab0de]

because phones are not general computing devices, and really shouldn't be. They are too important to modern society to be unlocked for their full potential.

That said, I doubt the average person on a laptop even needs a general computing device, so your point does make sense. Though, is carrying around a screen and a keyboard and cable any better than carrying a laptop?

I could see an argument of it being cheaper, but that would take years, possibly decades, of multiple competitors in the space for the market to make that true.

Now, if we could have a decent folding keyboard and monitor that fit into the same case as your phone, that would be a game changer, but I don't think anyone is risking the investment to develop that.

[philistine]

People want a full-size keyboard. Adding a couple of millimetres underneath that keyboard allows you to put a whole computer in there.

We have laptops because it makes sense. Look at Apple's Macbook Neo. The tiny logic board on that computer is the least of Apple's worries. The most expensive components are the display and case. Why not charge 100 bucks more and not have to worry about this thing being a phone accessory?

[dec0dedab0de]

Yeah, that's basically my point.

The only way it would make sense to use your phone is if the keyboard and monitor can fold up so small that they can attach to the phone and still fit in your pocket. Otherwise, just using a laptop is going to be better every time.

[HexPhantom]

Yeah, it used to feel like "we'll crush competitors, but at least we ship solid software"

[yfw]

Its as steve jobs said, once you control market share theres no incentive to build a good product and you lose the ability to do it.

[tremon]

It's a bit baffling to me that people are talking about Microsoft "losing their way" as if they ever operated differently. They have always been user-hostile if it increased next quarter's outlook. There's a clear continuing thread from the Halloween files in the 90s via antitrust probes in the 00s, the handling of Skype and Teams in the 10s, and now Copilot -- and that's ignoring all the mishandling on the business side of things (e.g. forcing Dynamics cloud migrations, Power Platform in a permanent state of unworthiness, the customary rug pulling via user license changes, constantly renaming products).

Microsoft being good to their customers is the anomaly, not the other way around.

[philistine]

Microsoft has indeed lost their way with Microsoft, but not in the sense that they became evil ghouls. They've always been evil ghouls. No, what's happened is that Windows became a minor part of Microsoft's profits. The whole company is not focused on Windows the way Apple is with the iPhone.

The higher ups no longer care about Windows as a product itself. They only care about Windows as a storefront to their other efforts (OneDrive, Office, Copilot, etc.)

[bell-cot]

I'd read "Microsoft lost their way" as a description of how the speaker's worldview has changed, as they've gained experience and perspective.

Microsoft is often good to their customers. Generally in situations where badness has a poor RoI, or they're trying to lure you deeper into their clutches.

[tombert]

I mean, at least their software used to be pretty good. The Windows NT kernel is arguably a better design than Linux. I complain about NTFS now, but thirty years ago it was better than most other filesystems. And Windows NT at least didn't jam a billion ads down your throat.

Granted, MS has always been a pretty evil anti-competitive company, so I'm not trying to sanitize them much here.

[mschild]

I find Teams is often simply picked because of cost reasons.

A lot of companies are paying for office and teams comes bundled with it. Why pay extra when its included?

[account42]

Don't forget network effects. If other companies you are working with use Teams then there is less friction if you also use Teams yourself.

[joe_mamba]

Yep, the amount of penny pinching some companies do nowadays is insane. Teams coming "for free" with their Microsoft 365 subscription is net positive for the bean counters.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Chat software is absurdly expensive. I’m not saying teams is good, but being nickel and dimed is a real risk for businesses too.

[joe_mamba]

>Chat software is absurdly expensive.

Define absurdly expensive here. I can probably guarantee that for small to medium sized business paying Slack or Microsoft for chat software is miles cheaper than self hosting it yourself.

My Google-Fu says Slack costs $18.00 /user/mo for their Business+ subscription plan. That's still relative peanuts compared to the yearly salary, let's say 60k/year, of developer you hire to self-host and maintain an on-prem Matrix/Jitsi instance with all the equivalent bells and whistles of Slack/Teams, but guess what, even then your clients/partner will send you MS Teams invites for calls, so you still have to pay for it anyway.

Then isn't it easier if you just fork out the cash for Teams so you can focus on your product instead?

[OkayPhysicist]

You do not need anywhere need a full time employee to spin up a Matrix instance.

You need 1 of the IT people you're paying already to do a couple of hours of allocating a server, running it, and setting up permissions.

[joe_mamba]

>You need 1 of the IT people you're paying already to do a couple of hours of allocating a server, running it, and setting up permissions.

We did that at my previous job during covid because we also though maintenance would only be a couple of hours of effort. It didn't work out that easy. It became a full time job so it was scrapped. People underestimate the amount of effort required maintaining on-prem infra across an org to match what cloud hypersacler providers offer.

[Ekaros]

18€ a month per user for Business+ with Slack... I really do question whole thing... Ofc, when someone is making quarter to half a million paying twenty for basic cup of coffee is nothing. But still whole thing for chat application seems absolutely insane.

[9dev]

That was the reason we ditched Slack. I hate Teams with a passion, but we're not going to pay 6k per year for a chat app if we get Teams for free. There's just no way to defend that decision.

[dahcryn]

6k would be a no-brainer.

In our office, we'd definitely need the enterprise version for compliance reasons, not because of the features. That's about 14/user/month.

At a workforce of roughly 2500, that's a 4million+ yearly cost for something that is comparable to something you can get without that pricetag. It's no competition at all at that point. Think about it, would you be willing to ask your boss to pay 4 million so you can have a different chat app? No matter how much more ergonomic and friendly and intuitive it is.

[bluegatty]

That's a very upside down way to think about it.

The question is: "are staffers $14 / mo more productive with it, than the free version?"

The answer may also boil down to satisfaction, support calls, other things, aka 'total cost of ownership' as well.

Not 'But it costs $X million!'.

Companies will spend a fortune giving staff the right monitor, or chair, but literally don't think they're smart enough to know the dam tool they use all day?

Let them pick their chat software, like they pick their monitors.

[kstrauser]

This is exactly right. You're going to pay a dev on the order of $10,000 per month, then make it harder to do their job to save $14? That's idiocy.

The person responsible for picking our work laptops asked me for advice selecting our new Macs since our old model was being replaced:

"Do we really need to spend an extra $1000 for 64GB of RAM instead of 24GB?"

"That'd save us $300 per year, or about a dollar a day, over the deprecation schedule, and it'd make our devs slower. We spend more than this to have lunch catered."

"You know... good point. 64GB it is, then."

And that's how we opted for beefy machines on this hardware cycle. The guy I talked to is extremely smart and competent, but just hadn't looked at it from that angle. Once he saw it, he instantly bought in. There are dumb ways to save money with massive negative ROI, and cheaping out on basic equipment and resources is one of them.

[lossyalgo]

My company doesn't OK basically any software requests, even cheap stuff :( We also don't make anywhere near $10k/mo (not USA). REcently got a new dev machine and it had 512GB m2 SSD and 16GB of RAM. I had to order 32GB but I had to explain why: to run docker images (and i'm hitting limits with 32GB constantly). I had to wait 2 weeks for the RAM upgrade. I wanted a bigger SSD but it would have taken longer and I needed to upgrade ASAP. It doesn't even have a USB-C plug (but a SD card slot, good grief).

[mulmen]

Careful, at some companies that kind of talk leads to discontinuing catered lunch.

[Mashimo]

> You're going to pay a dev on the order of $10,000 per month,

Mhh, far from it.

[mulmen]

Monitors are a personal choice. My monitor doesn’t force anyone else to install yet another a chat app to talk to me. The choice of chat app has to be made centrally, or at least at an organizational level.

[9dev]

I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales.

[aleph_minus_one]

> I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales.

I, living in Germany, rather wonder myself quite often why US-American tech startups don't act much more frugally: this would give them so much more leeway/runway to make their startups succeed.

[matsemann]

Half of the time it's startups subsidizing each other in a circle to have users. Like if you're a VC, you "force" your companies to use tools made by your other companies. So everyone will use the chat app made by one company the VC owns, the CRM software, all the different SaaSes etc. So it's just money moving in a circle, but then all the apps get to claim good sales and user numbers.

[kstrauser]

A big part of it is that if you're in a very competitive realm, where most of the startups you hear about are working, then every day counts. If you can spend $1M to develop a product in a year or $2M to develop it in 6 months, that extra million gives you a 6 month head start in sales, revenue growth, and publicitity. Depending on the numbers involved, that frugality could cost huge amounts of money overall.

Note that you don't hear so much about the many, many startups doing slow growth things in less glamorous fields. I know a few companies making agricultural products for small farmers. Yes, frugality makes perfect sense for them. They're not going to have a hockey stick growth curve where they go from $0 to $10M to $1B over the course of 2 years. Their revenue graph will look more like a traditional manufacturer. They're doing things the way you describe, but they're not all over tech and non-tech news sites.

[carlosjobim]

Quicker and bigger is better than slower and smaller. Especially in a competitive sector.

Better to go bust quick, than to eke out a tiny profit by being super frugal. The latter is a waste of everybody's time.

[jasonkester]

The reasoning makes more sense when you factor in that your startup’s VC is also Slack’s VC.

You’re actually giving that same venture capitalist $4m of their own money back, in a way that makes their investment more valuable.

[pixelpoet]

> 6k would be a no-brainer.

"It’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost? 10 dollars?"

[bonoboTP]

That would be 420k/yr. To get to 4 million you need 25000 users. That's quite a big company.

[kakacik]

So cca 16 million $ yearly for my corporation... Nobody is going to approve that, thats a ridiculous sum. There must be massive discounts above certain threshold.

[dpark]

Your corp has 95 thousand employees but bats an eye at 16 million dollars?

Also yes, volume licensees generally get massive discounts.

[hnthrow0287345]

You can easily defend that for only 6k with 'but we like it and we'll be more productive with it and we won't hate our jobs'

[9dev]

yeah, but that wouldn't be honest. Slack is more pleasant to use, but not 6k more pleasant to use. I'd rather put up with Teams and get my devs a raise instead.

[craftkiller]

How few devs do you have? Assuming a small startup of 12, you'd be able to give each dev a raise of $42 per month. Your devs would have to be severely underpaid to notice a $42/month raise.

[kstrauser]

And if you put it to a vote, "would you rather upgrade from Teams to Slack for $9 per month, or get $9 of taxable income more per month?", I think there's a very good chance you'd be switching that week.

(I don't love Slack by any means. Still, I'd pay $9/mo out of my own pocket not to use Teams.)

[iso1631]

We used to have anti trust regulators. We don't now.

[9dev]

We've got a lot of billionaires with a higher balance on their bank accounts though, so you can't say it was all for nothing

[iso1631]

It's not the billionaires that depress me, it's the "temporarily embarrased billionaires", the wannabes who don't believe in the American Dream but idolise instead a winner takes all Ferengi style system.

[mulmen]

You get teams for free with office but how do you justify that logic when free office suites are available? You can’t justify your decision on functionality because that could also be used to justify the cost of Slack. If you’re actually considering cost vs functionality then it’s no longer a no-brainer.

[dahcryn]

yeah I don't understand how this isn't blatant market abuse through their monopoly position

Regulators should be all over it. EU has tried, but unsuccesfully, since it was lawyers who came up with the mitigation.

[ekianjo]

Regulators are either sleeping on billions of lobby money or asleep at the wheel

[dismalpedigree]

Completely agree. Not just govt, but everyone who interacts with govt, especially DoW. Meetings are on DoD teams. Proposals and updates must be Powerpoint. Memos in word. Windows to connect to some networks.

We tried not using Office or Windows. Ended up needing a laptop with Windows and Office anyway.

Note to MS Product Manager: this should not be a success story. I was once your biggest cheerleader, now I am so desperate to get away from you that I am starting to look at Google as my savior.

[duped]

> Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams?

People seem to forget Teams is the unloved child of a forced marriage between acquisitions, it was never going to turn out successful.

[HexPhantom]

Even if gov adoption dropped, I suspect the incentives wouldn't change much unless there were genuinely viable, low-friction alternatives.

[dartharva]

What % of Microsoft's revenue comes from government contracts? I'd be very surprised if it's more than 2-3%

[bluescrn]

Windows has historically oscillated between pretty awful and pretty decent.

XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.

Maybe there's another 'good Windows' on the way. But I'm sceptical this time, being in the era of enshittification and the AI slop bubble, where everything is user-hostile by design, where if something seems like a good deal, you know it's a bait+switch.

[aleph_minus_one]

> XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.

The cycle is more complicated:

* 2000: exceptional

* XP: bad (the original XP was indeed bad)

* XP SP2 (from a technological perspective basically a new OS): decent

* Vista: bad

* 7: good

* 8: awful (it was so bad that soon 8.1 was introduced)

* 8.1: bad

* 10: controversial (some say it's "decent"; some say it's "bad" because of the magnitude of telemetry (spying) that Windows 10 introduced)

* 11: awful

So, in my opinion it's rather a general downward trend with some overlaid cycle.

[hedora]

Windows 8 was better than 10. The UI might have been wonky, but 10's telemetry was a far bigger problem.

They had a "last release in the series was best pattern" with Win 3.11 / NT, Win 98 SE / 2K and XP SP2 (which merged the consumer and business tracks).

After that, it's been strictly downhill. 7's additions vs XP are purely hostile to the end user, including escrowed disk encryption and DRM. 8 was the beginning of the pivot to mandatory cloud. 10 added mandatory telemetry and ads. 11 added nonsensical AI crapware, and turned the ads to 11.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Windows 8 was better than 10. The UI might have been wonky, but 10's telemetry was a far bigger problem.

Don't worship Windows 8/8.1.

It also introduced WinRT, an API that gave the programmers a lot less freedom; the roadmap was clear: applications should from now on be developed for the WinRT API, and only be distributed via an app store (Windows Store). The old WinAPI shall be legacy, and will only be provided as long as Microsoft is willing to.

Windows 8's ARM version (Windows RT) was incredibly locked-down; here applications could only be installed via an app store (Windows Store). It was clear that Microsoft had similar plans for the x86 version.

Actually, because of programmers' and users outcry regarding this, Microsoft pedaled back in this regard with Windows 10 (but started introducing a lot more telemetry).

Also, Windows 8 was the Windows version that started the tight integration of the local user account and the Microsoft account. Windows 8 and 8.1 were the first versions of Windows for which the "How can I avoid setting up a Microsoft account when installing Windows?" tutorials started.

[bluescrn]

> Windows 8 was better than 10.

No, Win8 was all about the Metro/RT nonsense, the attempt to convert Windows into a touch-centric locked-down App Store platform.

While a fair bit of that lived on in 10, it was far less obnoxious. Although they still managed to break things like Sticky Notes in the process of converting them to 'store apps'

[bluescrn]

The general downward trend is across the whole of tech, if not the whole of society, rather than just Microsoft products though.

[kakacik]

Completely agree with your timeline and rating, 2000 was the first windows one could use the word 'stable' with, before it was such a bad shitshow that MS-DOS 6.22 seemed like coming from another planet.

Hated 10, was forced to it basically only due to gaming, a common assholish trick MS uses whenever it can. But when looking from 11 perspective, 10 was fine compared to that heap of disorganized badly designed crap.

Yet again time to be ashamed to work for MS, this time its sticking around like tar spit on a white shirt.

[aleph_minus_one]

> 2000 was the first windows one could use the word 'stable' with

Windows NT4 was also very stable (once you installed the Service Packs), but had a lot less convenience and modern features than Windows 2000.

[kawsper]

Even earlier than that:

Win98: bad

Win98 SE: good

[JollySharp0]

No they haven't oscillated.

Generally Windows NT line to Windows 2000-7 was pretty decent. Even Vista once Service Pack 1 came out was pretty decent. Vista Service Pack 2 is basically Windows 7. Win 8 and everything after has been garbage.

[throwa356262]

Am I the only one who prefers Teams to the Slack and Zoom?

The ability to write in the meeting chat before and after a meeting for example. That is some serious quality of life function that all others are lacking.

[Ekaros]

I haven't had that many issues on Windows "native" client. So I really don't get what the critical issue is... To me it has long looked like good enough.

[delecti]

Teams if you only use it for meetings is great, truly. It's easy and simple. Messages in the attached chat rooms of recurring meetings is really convenient. DMs work seamlessly and sort in between those meeting chats.

The problem is that the "teams" in teams are a cobbled mess that works like a combination of forums posts and chat rooms. If you have coworkers who really like that functionality, you're forced to interact with the garbage underbelly of the app. My opinion of Teams shifted drastically when we got a new PM (former MS employee) who started putting things there, making them hard to keep track of.

[jwrallie]

Teams is not that bad if you are using Office and OneDrive anyway, as it integrates well with those.

Most of my team members are using different named chats for discussion instead of channels, which are used for more important notices. Somehow it works, and our channels on slack were also basically chats anyway.

My only gripe is that Linux does not have a “native” client anymore and the web client is full of bugs on Firefox. But it’s Microsoft, what can you expect. It’s not that bad except for memory consumption on other platforms.

[hedora]

I use Firefox on Mac when I'm stuck in a Teams meeting. The native client attendees invariably have more problems than I do with connections, authentication, forced updates mid-meeting, etc.

I'm guessing the native client has been going downhill, based on frequency of issues people report. I hope they kind of forgot about the web client, and won't enshittify it as quickly.

[smackeyacky]

No but it’s hard to get excited about two different flavours of shit sandwich. Teams is terrible piece of software no doubt but slack is worse, marginally

[rishav_sharan]

Well I genuinely like Teams. Being forced to work on a mix of Zoom & teams in my new work, I have found an appreciation of using M365 connected tools - Outlook,claendar, teams, sharepoint, copilot etc just work very well together for me.

[projektfu]

I don't like either very much. Both Teams and Zoom try to stay resident after you're done. I use both from the browser now because they are both abusive.

[a_victorp]

Zoom has this feature as well

[BLKNSLVR]

Yes, and you are wrong.

Objectively.