[observationist]

How's your IBM mainframe doing, these days? Wait, you use Watson, right?

IBM still exists. They're the perfect example of how far a corporate behemoth can keep rolling after it effectively dies.

Microsoft is effectively dead.

It's easier and less hassle to use Linux desktop environments than to wrestle with Windows bullshit. Their flagship product is a sad joke, their leadership is flailing for purpose, and their entire corporation is bloated and unable to focus on anything meaningful.

That doesn't mean they'll disappear tomorrow, or in 5 years, or even in 20. They've already lost whatever relevance they had, and will have to fight to get it back. There will be something called Microsoft still churning recognizably Microsoft slop, because they have a lot of money and resources with which to continue flailing.

It's the year of the Linux desktop, and Windows has fallen.

[john_strinlai]

>IBM still exists. They're the perfect example of how far a corporate behemoth can keep rolling after it effectively dies.

wish i ran a dead company that did 67 billion in revenue last year, with year-over-year increases.

>Microsoft is effectively dead.

damn, and this dead company did 280 billion in revenue last year.

(you have a ~unique~ definition of dead.)

[theturtletalks]

But can really say any of their products are top of their respective niches? Windows, Xbox, Azure are not the gold standard. They had the lead or close to it in these niches but floundered that.

I never understand these takes like they did this much in revenue. OP acknowledges that, they have enterprise down and are too big to fail. What’s to say they couldn’t be doing more revenue? Or even better year over year if they played their cards right. Don’t get me started on GitHub and VSCode. Popular projects are leaving GitHub and VSCode wasn’t able to monetize itself where many forks were able to do so.

[wan23]

If Windows isn't the gold standard having 70% of the market, then what is? Azure is in second place not by far after AWS. And these are huge, HUGE markets. I wouldn't say your local grocer is dead because it's not Costco, and of course by this logic Costco is itself dead because it's not Walmart.

[theturtletalks]

Maybe we are jumping the gun on Windows. My echo chamber is tech people and they seemed to have lost faith in windows after they Windows 11 introduced ads and plugged every hole that allowed to bypass needing a Microsoft account. Gaming and anti-cheat not working on Linux will keep that market share high for a while.

[dafelst]

You don't need to be the gold standard to make obscene amounts of money. Product quality and financial success are only loosely correlated at best.

[justinclift]

> wish i ran a dead company that did 67 billion in revenue last year, with year-over-year increases.

Didn't IBM used to be north of US$100B/yr?

[altmanaltman]

yeah its kindda wild calling one of the largest companies in the world effectively dead because you don't like their AI strategy.

[andsoitis]

> Microsoft is effectively dead.

Microsoft is the 4th largest company by market cap.

[vitally3643]

Tesla has shown very conclusively that that metric has almost nothing to do with reality.

[partiallypro]

Tesla trades at a massive multiple, Microsoft doesn't. I think a lot of you just hate Microsoft and ignore (or rather prefer to pretend) the reality that the world runs on it.

[economistbob]

Enron was 7th.

[observationist]

Yes. They're not in any danger of disappearing. They just don't have any purpose anymore. They don't provide anything to the market that can't be gotten elsewhere, more cheaply, at higher quality, with better support, or with any other product advantage you might suggest.

The only advantage they have is inertia; software works on windows that doesn't work on other platforms. Those are a tiny, tiny percentage of cases. Microsoft brings nothing to the table; you're going to have an easier time, be more secure, spend less money, deal with less hassle, if you use Linux. Linux hassles me less over the course of a month than Windows does in a single day of use.

So yeah, Microsoft has a lot of wealth and resources. They don't have a point, anymore. There's no innovation, progress in development, novel or unique products, etc - they're effectively dead, as far as the market goes. They're going to have to undergo an epic struggle and battle for relevance, or within 20 years they're going to be a lot like IBM or Yahoo or even Bear Sterns.

They're the 4th largest company because they underwent an epic struggle and seized on a purpose and were driven to develop the best in class enterprise operating system and went tooth and nail against Apple for decades. Now they're a second rate mishmash of adtech surveillance grifting, meaningless, flailing product development, prancing around and cashing out the reputation that was built, and supremely vulnerable.

But yeah, they're big. I'm sure that will suffice to keep them alive for a long time. There just won't be a point - unless they get leadership that revitalizes the entire organization. I don't see that happening.

[jongjong]

It's like Oracle. They became a law firm. They only just happen to use software as an excuse to get free money from the government.

The main purpose of the software is as a narrative device for making sales.

[aniceperson]

microsoft won't die because of Entra. enterprise IT will never migrate to anything else; they are mostly incompetent.

[pipes]

Sorry, very much disagree:

- c# is a great language that is looked down on by people who haven't used it.

- typescript is also amazing and has helped massively in web front end development and backend.

- .net is cross platform especially in the backend world.

- windows backwards compatibility and hardware support is way better than the alternatives.

- yeah windows 11 is full of so much adware crap it's a shame but i recently switchedy home desktop back to it after giving up trouble shooting a network card driver issue on Linux. The same issue I've encountered multiple times over 22 years running on different hardware.

- and all my gog games just work on windows :)

- yes I know proton, it's amazing, I have a steam deck, but not everything works easily or at all.

[conception]

I hate powershell but if you actually need a quick, just works on win/mac/linux… powershell does the trick.

[grim_io]

I wish, but it's far from it.

There is no other IAM/SIEM solution that I know of out there that makes it possible for a single guy to manage the companies' strict compliance requirements.

The complete integration just keeps getting more valuable and hard to replace every day.

[pjmlp]

IBM owns Linux thanks to Red-Hat investments, alongside all the ones that have done directly.

GCC, OpenJ9, Wayland, GNOME, systemd,...

Valve has to translate Windows games to have any content worth playing on Steam Deck.

Everyone and their dog use VSCode, npm, Typescript, Github, LinkedIn,...

[gigel82]

Are you high on your own supply, or did you genuinely hallucinate a reality where a $3 trillion company is dying because a handful of Redditors learned how to use Proton?

[thewebguyd]

Eh, I don't think they're quite dead yet. Microsoft isn't a direct parallel to IBM. IBM ignored the cloud early and fell behind because of it, they had to buy Red Hat to remain any kind of relevance at all.

Meanwhile, Azure is the #2 cloud and still growing pretty fast. They own nearly the entire dev tool ecosystem at most companies (Github, VSCode, NPM), and pretty much every single F500 company's IT runs on Microsoft tech, for better or for worse.

The mistake is thinking that Windows is still their flagship product. It's not, it's basically a side quest now.

[afavour]

> It's easier and less hassle to use Linux desktop environments than to wrestle with Windows bullshit.

Almost every corporate IT deployment disagrees with you. Linux is free, if companies could switch to it with no negative consequences they would. And yet they don't.

[Xfx7028]

It's dead for you and me since we won't willfully use any of the slop products they put out, but as long as they produce the default OS for most of the PCs that the average Joe buys, they aren't going anywhere. I'm not entirely sure how this works, but I don't think there are many Linux distros/organizations that will pay for manufacturers to install Linux on the PCs.

The there is also the cloud like other comments already mentioned.