Microsoft's quest for short-term $$$ is doing long-term damage to Windows, Surface, Xbox, and beyond

[Windows Central]

Microsoft has made some baffling decisions in recent years. From sucking the life out of Surface to putting ads in the Windows Start Menu to killing Xbox-exclusive games, what exactly is going on?

Microsoft's quest for short-term $$$ is doing long-term damage to Windows, Surface, Xbox, and beyond : Read more

 

[TBBudak]

Saying MS needs to learn patience is a bit outrageous. Any other company would've completely shut down Xbox.

Xbox has been struggling since the Xbox One, that's a decade now. They've made some positive changes like creating the most powerful consoles (One X and Series X) and they've brought major studios.

Microsoft has done everything to increase the popularity of Xbox for over a decade now, and they've failed. They own so many studios that making their games Xbox exclusive would kill the IPs they own.

Starfield wasn't even in the Top 10 best selling games of lasf year, which is outrageous for a Bethesda game. You also have GamePass that cannibalizes sales.

And one thing, Phil Spencer said he's never going to look at an Xbox game and say that they're not coming to PS.

Xbox going multiplatform is the only way to save Xbox. Microsoft is suffering the consequences for having a community that's not buying games.

 

[K Shan]

Great article. It's sad. And frustrating because the only way their recent actions make any sense is that they want to kill Xbox, or at least some there want to stop supporting the console, but they don't say it. They fire their award-winning studio right before they are about to work on a new game, release games cutting the marketing budget, and give their exclusives to the competitor with nothing in return, all while saying nothing but pr spin that makes less and less sense. Yes, these actions make them money shortterm, but what's the log term strategy? We know from sony's emails that Sony uses the funds from Xbox games on Playstation to pay developers not to release on Xbox. But we don't know that MS is going to reinvest any of what they earn into Xbox. I've gone through enough MS products to recognize the pattern of Not exclusive, Just first --> Not First, just best --> Not best, just supported --> Why are you still here?


I'm not selling my Xbox. I still play and enjoy it. But I'm not buying the next one or even downloading their Xbox Phone Store until they can answer honestly what the future of Xbox looks like. Explain why anyone should buy an Xbox. Why anyone should make a game for Xbox. And what are they investing into Xbox.

 

[TheFerrango]

Of course they can’t blatantly say they’ll drop it.

Instead they rely on the well known phrases and sayings typical of the Microsoft way, like “we’re committed to continued support”, “we’re focusing on where the customers are first”, “we’ll keep supporting it for the product’s lifetime”, “we’re consolidating to offer a better experience and faster response”, etcetera.

You never directly close a product, you enshittify it until most customers have left of their own volition and then you close the product, citing poor sales and low usage as the culprit.

Just like Zune and later Windows Phone. The Zune HD team was disbanded as soon as the product hit the shelves, and yet they “remained committed” doing nothing but minor tweaks to the software for years.

Windows Phone was equally disastrous, with earlier versions constantly being abandoned while customers were promised either an upgrade way or a stopgap solution.

The Surface Duo is the latest of the group I can think of, and luckily one of the consumer products I missed on.

But you know what they won’t be discontinuing soon? The Ad platform they baked into Windows.

 

[ikjadoon]

In [January] 2015, surrounded by holograms for the HoloLens reveal, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, "We want to move from people needing Windows to choosing Windows, to loving Windows. That is our goal."

So how is that going, Satya? According to StatCounter (as a rough estimate):

January 2015: Windows 88%, macOS 9%, 3% other
April 2024: Windows 74%, macOS 15%, 11% other

In 9+ years, on a relative basis, Windows has dropped by -16%, macOS gained by +67%, and others (ChromeOS, SteamOS, etc.) gained by +267%. If Satya's words were a strategic shift in policy, whatever MS did has since Jan. 2015 been a colossal failure.

 

[ikjadoon]

It's not one thing in Windows, but it's a death by a thousand cuts. Nonsense ads across the entire OS: File Explorer, Settings, OOBE, Start Menu, Edge, etc.

If the Windows 11 Start Menu was an app, I would've uninstalled it years ago.

Microsoft doesn't stop there: perpetually in-beta Preview updates foisted onto consumers, decades-old bugs still chugging along (spend five minutes in the Windows Microsoft Store), clueless consumer understanding (e.g., no automatic dark / light mode switcher, like every other major OS?), silly performance regressions, a still-disjointed UX where great features are basically invisible (e.g., File History), etc.

Not to mention the singular level of cruft and Microsoft's dozens of overlapping, merged, separated, deprecated, legacy junk in config, networking, permissions, user directories, updates, GPO, etc.

//

Few have faith in MS with Copilot—their latest obsession. It's easy for MS lifers to forget most users and developers refused to take Microsoft up on Mixed Reality, Windows 10X, and Windows RT. People have been talking about Windows' "slow decline" for nearly half-a-decade now.

Satya is definitely the wrong guy for Windows consumers and don't expect any changes until another CEO, so give it another decade or two: Windows 14 anyone?

 

[Laura Knotek]

Gaming was bound to decline post-pandemic, as was consumer PC purchase. When everyone was stuck at home, there were upticks in sales because people needed things to do when they couldn't go out and needed hardware/software to work from home. Now that people are back at work/school, there is less want/need for games, gaming devices, and PC hardware/software. This isn't just a Microsoft issue.

 

[Opinion]

On average, I think the arguments expressed by the post and several comments are beyond simplistic. What is worse is when one tries to defend a simplistic argument with random pieces of partial data aimed at looking smart.

First, it's OK to disagree with anyone in principle, but I wonder what is the background or what are the great achievements of the people who think to have the right recipe in their pocket which should finally educate Satya on how things are done.

Just a couple of considerations: the market of Windows is huge, it's measured in billions of devices, it's not limited to desktop, it involves an impressive share of server applications, IoT applications, industrial applications and embedded applications ranging from your ATM to the public transport panels. Just in case you don't know that: macOS has zero presence in several of these areas, and Linux has zero presence on desktop (it's already been 20 years of "this is the year of Linux desktop"). When it comes to gaming, just go have a look at the shares of users on Steam.

I see a ridiculous amount of arrogance in spending 5 minutes to search online for data on web browser traffic and use that to build a strategy for a product which has been around for almost 4 decades and is certainly not just used for browsing the web. So much arrogance to expect that your own frustration with whatever thing you don't like makes you a better decision maker when it comes to business strategies at a scale you can hardly fathom...

Believe it or not, for how much you dislike the current or past leadership at Microsoft, they are probably better at understanding their products, customers, markets and jobs than you will ever be in your wildest fantasy. This idea that people with a track record of outstanding achievements would be somehow too dumb to understand the things you read in the last 10 minutes is deeply flawed.

Time to get over with Windows Phone, it's a dead product because it couldn't get the minimum necessary market to justify the cost of keeping it alive. Focusing on other areas contributed to put Microsoft where it is now, which definitely not a bad place, compared to the time when Windows Phone was around. If you can't understand that, that is kind of your problem.

 

[Luuthian]

I think a key question here is when do we stop calling them Xbox? If they decide to go multi-platform are they just Microsoft Studios? What becomes of the Xbox brand? The words on everyone's lips seems to be "Xbox is dying" but are we only referring to hardware here, not game output? If the hardware disappeared, would Microsoft sell off the studios eventually?

So many questions. But I think tossing around the word Xbox has less meaning than it used to. Xbox might go away but Microsoft Studios may persist, just like Sega. It's impossible to really nail down what the future looks like for Xbox because.... I don't even think Xbox knows what its future is right now. Phil Spencer looked stupidly depressed in his last interview, and Sarah Bond looked like she was internally screaming during that recent Bloomberg one. Aside from Matt Booty, who is all too comfortable with corpo speak and "growth", these other executives look like kicked puppies. Says a lot about the state of the brand right now imo

 

[taynjack]

Do what's best for others and success will follow. Do what's only best for you and you'll quickly find yourself with a pile of failed products.

The biggest example of this tone deafness is Skype. How long has Microsoft had Skype and it still sucks! and they keep pushing it! Zoom came out of nowhere and dominated online meetings because they actually gave people exactly what they needed! They likely use their own product! I doubt Satya has ever opened Skype ever!

I believe Satya needs to go. The next CEO needs to tell Bill Gates to officially retire and stop whispering in the CEO's ear. Then that new CEO needs to go on a listening tour of the few remaining passionate customers it has left. This new CEO needs to avoid listening to the echo chambers within Microsoft. Microsoft will need to spend billions fixing its relationship with humans (not businesspeople who Microsoft inexplicably thinks don't have personal lives)

 

[Opinion]

Teams costs 1/10th of Zoom, has 10 times more features (and users probably). Why are people here crying for dead (Windows Phone) or super-old (Skype) products is not so easy to understand. Must be this thing of being "passionate customers"...

Just to be clear: I use Skype, and I find it much nicer than Zoom as well. This being said: it's a free product for me, it's been free for me for probably a couple of decades, it didn't shamelessly try to steal or resell my personal data like products from other companies tend to do. I am grateful that Microsoft keeps it alive despite me not paying a penny for it.

Skype is still the best free videocall experience for me and my family. Teams, which I don't love in general, is anyway better than Zoom or Google Meets in every possible way when it comes to professional settings.

 

[rapitts]

Microsoft has made some baffling decisions in recent years. From sucking the life out of Surface to putting ads in the Windows Start Menu to killing Xbox-exclusive games, what exactly is going on?

Microsoft's quest for short-term $$$ is doing long-term damage to Windows, Surface, Xbox, and beyond : Read more

Great write up @Windows-central.

Microsoft business model is heading towards cloud only, nothing else matters.

While its true the cloud business will keep gaining more customers and revenue you shouldn't keep all your eggs in one basket.

The consumer division of Microsoft is a shell of its former glory days, Surface line doesn't really have a future now and XBOX in the hands of Satya is more about acquisitions than R&D.

Satya doesn't understand R&D unless is making large profits after a few years.

Mobile OS iOS and Android are too slow to innovate so nothing major in the last few years.