And came to the conclusion that many firms like DEC and Xerox did not sufficiently move to new technology because their customers were not interested and didn’t feel served by it, at least not until it had decades to improve.
Today we have the FOMO dilemma where executives all read that book and no way they are going to end up like DEC or Xerox so you get things like Windows 8, really a lot of what Microsoft has done since then has been in the same vein. We’re yet to see a “big tech” company die from the FOMO dilemma but maybe 20 years back we’ll see Google or Facebook or Microsoft in that frame.
I agree that a cheap MacBook and the steam machine are presenting a perfect storm situation for windows to lose some serious marketshare with casual/consumer users. Itll be interesting to see how or even if Microsoft reacts to this.
Author is using Microsoft and Windows interchangeably, this post is only about Windows.
Gaming is a bigger business for Microsoft than Windows and that can only ever be consumer focused. There's no mention of Xbox, nor an awareness that Microsoft published games are playable on the Steam Machine.
Gaming is a massive loss leader, MS will never make back the money they invested to buy other publishers. The subscription model will fail aswell, prices will have to go up more, to try and actually make some profit.
IDK I started running Bazzite on my workstation after Win11 died on me a couple weeks ago, and if it is the premier experience for Linux desktop gaming then we aren’t there yet. It is great as far as distros go, don’t get me wrong. But WiFi dies after waking from sleep, and bluetooth worked once then died. I had to hack on it for a bit, then do it again with immutable OS patterns in mind. MS is certainly leaving an opportunity open for a new desktop OS. Would anyone dare offer a commercially supported consumer Linux OS?
Yes, Microsoft is shifting away from consumer technology.
The difference is Microsoft is squeezing every last drop of profit from consumers on their way out. That’s not debt, that’s an asset.
In 25 years Microsoft will be similar to Oracle. Maybe they’ll have investments in some consumer brands, but largely they will be selling to enterprises and governments.
Another point not mentioned in this article is that Windows desktops are incredibly slow these days.
I did some compilation tests on a 2025 Windows desktop with an i9 vs some MacBooks and a new top-of-the-line Windows machine can’t even keep up with a bottom-tier M1 MacBook Pro.
The web/webapps/mobile helped lead to this era of "desktop PCs" (to include laptops) where the browser mattered more than the OS. It allowed Apple to become resurgent in the desktop market because OS compatibility mattered less than ever.
It's not weird that it led to Apple regaining _some_ market share because clearly there was demand for the Apple/MacOS/OS X experience that may have been tempered by incompatibility in the pre-webapp days.
What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market. All the more weird for two reasons:
1. The Apple experience, at least on the OS side, matters less and less in the webapp world.
2. Apple isn't trying, either! They're seemingly doing their best to abandon and alienate their desktop OS users. A decade or more of stagnation or regression in features and usability, capped off by Tahoe this year.
It feels like Apple and Microsoft are just waiting for the desktop OS to die, waiting for mobile to take it over; so we can all just shut up and stop asking for filesystems and terminals so they can sell us iPads and Surfaces, and they can finally be free of this ancient burden of selling desktop computer OSes.
And the consumers keep buying the stupid things, demanding product in a market that the vendors don't want any part of.
I feel like when I fire up my mac(s) the OS really is there for me to use, new features, better or worse do in fact feel like they're there FOR me with some thought of me as a user.
Windows, it feels like the OS is pointed AT ME more than anything else. I used to be happy with windows, it wasn't great but it was utilitarian enough that I could get things done ... not anymore, the OS is a hurdle.
I understand longer time Apple users say macOS used to be better, I don't know about that, but the experience with apple silicon and so forth has been great for me. If Apple wasn't trying they could have just stuck with x86...
A more interesting question to me (and one where MSFT employees here would have some insight) is to what degree is Windows' recent ABYSMAL fucking quality the result of AI, outsourcing, or bad management? You can also feel the difference in healthy employees vs. unhealthy, when you switch between something like VSCode (polished, fast, intelligent UI, not buggy, consistently improves) and Explorer (paleolithically slow, unstable, buggy, crashy, the worst version is always the latest).
Nobody seems to want to use Copilot, but Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing. They can just provision however many virtual coworkers to a Microsoft Teams instance and you'll be handing off documents and chatting with the AGI workers pretty much as you would any other remote worker.
Microsoft doesn't have to be first or best here. Just owning the plumbing of so many present-day workplaces with Teams and Office will make it hard to beat them.
The way Microsoft are ruining Windows makes it seem like enterprise users are the tech debt they want to get rid off. Like making their servers non-deterministic by serving random ads or leaking secret content to their AI. It makes sense that they would rather have their customers run Linux on Azure, so they don't have to do R&D for their own OS.
I think of it a different way. The consumer market (if Microsoft doesn’t value it) is holding them back from paying tech debt. The fear of regressions is a good reason to not touch stuff.
If you do value a market and ignore this, the consequences can be fatal (see Sonos). But if you don’t, then doing the minimum is rational.
What does it mean specifically for the OS? What were the exciting improvements you've noticed that would entice that switch? Is the liquid glass design that is making it harder to read text "costumer first"?
> The third thing is gamers. Gamers use Windows largely because they have to
But also not entirely to game, so the case for an OS where almost all the basics/apps are even worse, why would they switch?
Fifteen years ago every piece of hardware supported windows and windows was arguably more friendly for casual developers than Linux with things like Visual Basic and Delphi so a lot of novel and very custom software was written (guilty as charged). The good thing is that most of these still work, as windows has thankfully not fucked with the underlying Win32 libraries. The bad thing is that this one piece of custom software was probably written by someone of retirement age and it is probably what's running the company.
This is just life, the same will happen to your latest wiz-bang program you wrote today in ten or fifteen years, good companies insist on the source code and/or plan for obsolescence, others become cash cows for the software industry or die.
People need to have realistic expectations of large corporations.
The old microsoft is dead. It's not coming back. I'm sorry if you used to like what they did - all those people are gone now. Just the name is the same.
> The only thing of note they have added to Windows in the last five years is Copilot
That's a quite unfair take, especially when it fails to compare it with what things of note Linux distros have added over the last five years. Valve made Windows emulation better, yes. That's it. What else?
Actually, I wouldn't even call Copilot a thing of note. It's just ChatGPT-in-a-popup at the moment. A real thing of note is WSL2. It's a total game changer.
Windows has got many quality of life improvements over the recent years such as an extremely polished web browser, clipboard history, Windows Sandbox, screen recording, OCR, automatic private info redaction, Markdown support in Notepad and many more. None of those exists on most distros.
Most distros lack the features below, out of the box, which Windows has supported for years:
- "reset this PC" functionality
- a built-in anti-malware
- Touch/Face login
- Ability to enable FDE post-installation
- Hybrid-sleep
- Fast fractional HiDPI scaling
- Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
I agree that Microsoft needs to stop letting product groups get their way with screwing up user comfort on Windows for the sake of their arbitrary goals (like shoving Microsoft accounts, Teams, and anything Electron-based down our throats) and keep it as a solid, bloat-free system that everyone can safely rely on. But, dismissing the existing pros of Windows is just unfair. Despite all the cons, it's still a very good OS.
Disclaimer: I had to switch to Fedora on my old machines because Windows 11 weren't supported on them. That's an exceptionally rare incident where Microsoft dropped the ball on backwards compatibility. But that doesn't mean Windows itself is bad.
Consumers are leads and beta testers. Microsoft's business is licensing and reselling -- directly and via Azure. Their primary concerns are keeping businesses and developers happy. Consumers are a distant third.
There is value in training consumers on Windows & Office so they are familiar when coming to the office. MS needs to retain endpoint dominance in the workplace. They can't survive on server alone. Windows & Office endpoints are essential to their business. This is the leads channel.
They add pizazz to features and beta test them to consumers . Consumer licensing is moderate revenue but minimal income for Microsoft. Thus consumers are really beta testers.
So Microsoft will continue to provide low quality consumer experiences that don't fit the consumer market that well. The consumer market isn't their goal. It's a means to their actual business.
Bazzite has been great for me so far except for a few exceptions to okay with friends. With the end of support for 10 and the hostile crap Windows has become, I'm trying to see how to transition. Anti-cheat and business agreements seem to be the only real remaining barriers.
And to the original question: no, consumers are moat to the enterprise licensing pot of gold.
Microsoft really should just open source Windows and completely abandon the OS market. They make their money on things like gaming, Office, and Azure. At this point, Windows is just a loss leader for other products. Outsource the dev cost with open source like phone makers do with Android.
When I started using Linux about 10 years ago, whenever I bought a new computer, I would keep a partition for Windows just in case for dual boot... Nowadays I just wipe it all clean.
It's weird to think I'm still paying for the Windows license because I like to buy from a physical store and they don't have alternatives.
Microsoft has become a bit like Oracle... You don't need what they make anymore but you have to keep paying for it. It's like the company has entered into retirement and society is still supporting it... But the difference is it never dies of old age to make room for new generations of companies.
34 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 44.2 ms ] threadhttps://www.google.com/search?q=innovator%27s+dilemma&ie=UTF...
And came to the conclusion that many firms like DEC and Xerox did not sufficiently move to new technology because their customers were not interested and didn’t feel served by it, at least not until it had decades to improve.
Today we have the FOMO dilemma where executives all read that book and no way they are going to end up like DEC or Xerox so you get things like Windows 8, really a lot of what Microsoft has done since then has been in the same vein. We’re yet to see a “big tech” company die from the FOMO dilemma but maybe 20 years back we’ll see Google or Facebook or Microsoft in that frame.
Gaming is a bigger business for Microsoft than Windows and that can only ever be consumer focused. There's no mention of Xbox, nor an awareness that Microsoft published games are playable on the Steam Machine.
Yes, Microsoft is shifting away from consumer technology.
The difference is Microsoft is squeezing every last drop of profit from consumers on their way out. That’s not debt, that’s an asset.
In 25 years Microsoft will be similar to Oracle. Maybe they’ll have investments in some consumer brands, but largely they will be selling to enterprises and governments.
At least in terms of Windows/Office, Microsoft has never been a consumer tech company. They've always been focused on corporate sales.
There have always been consumer-focused side areas, from Bob to Encarta to MSN to Xbox.
But Microsoft's bread and butter has always been corporations. I don't understand how the author thinks it was different at any time in the past.
I did some compilation tests on a 2025 Windows desktop with an i9 vs some MacBooks and a new top-of-the-line Windows machine can’t even keep up with a bottom-tier M1 MacBook Pro.
https://www.tyleo.com/blog/compiler-performance-on-2025-devi...
It's not weird that it led to Apple regaining _some_ market share because clearly there was demand for the Apple/MacOS/OS X experience that may have been tempered by incompatibility in the pre-webapp days.
What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market. All the more weird for two reasons:
1. The Apple experience, at least on the OS side, matters less and less in the webapp world.
2. Apple isn't trying, either! They're seemingly doing their best to abandon and alienate their desktop OS users. A decade or more of stagnation or regression in features and usability, capped off by Tahoe this year.
It feels like Apple and Microsoft are just waiting for the desktop OS to die, waiting for mobile to take it over; so we can all just shut up and stop asking for filesystems and terminals so they can sell us iPads and Surfaces, and they can finally be free of this ancient burden of selling desktop computer OSes.
And the consumers keep buying the stupid things, demanding product in a market that the vendors don't want any part of.
Windows, it feels like the OS is pointed AT ME more than anything else. I used to be happy with windows, it wasn't great but it was utilitarian enough that I could get things done ... not anymore, the OS is a hurdle.
I understand longer time Apple users say macOS used to be better, I don't know about that, but the experience with apple silicon and so forth has been great for me. If Apple wasn't trying they could have just stuck with x86...
Microsoft doesn't have to be first or best here. Just owning the plumbing of so many present-day workplaces with Teams and Office will make it hard to beat them.
If you do value a market and ignore this, the consequences can be fatal (see Sonos). But if you don’t, then doing the minimum is rational.
What does it mean specifically for the OS? What were the exciting improvements you've noticed that would entice that switch? Is the liquid glass design that is making it harder to read text "costumer first"?
> The third thing is gamers. Gamers use Windows largely because they have to
But also not entirely to game, so the case for an OS where almost all the basics/apps are even worse, why would they switch?
This is just life, the same will happen to your latest wiz-bang program you wrote today in ten or fifteen years, good companies insist on the source code and/or plan for obsolescence, others become cash cows for the software industry or die.
The old microsoft is dead. It's not coming back. I'm sorry if you used to like what they did - all those people are gone now. Just the name is the same.
That's a quite unfair take, especially when it fails to compare it with what things of note Linux distros have added over the last five years. Valve made Windows emulation better, yes. That's it. What else?
Actually, I wouldn't even call Copilot a thing of note. It's just ChatGPT-in-a-popup at the moment. A real thing of note is WSL2. It's a total game changer.
Windows has got many quality of life improvements over the recent years such as an extremely polished web browser, clipboard history, Windows Sandbox, screen recording, OCR, automatic private info redaction, Markdown support in Notepad and many more. None of those exists on most distros.
Most distros lack the features below, out of the box, which Windows has supported for years:
- "reset this PC" functionality
- a built-in anti-malware
- Touch/Face login
- Ability to enable FDE post-installation
- Hybrid-sleep
- Fast fractional HiDPI scaling
- Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
I agree that Microsoft needs to stop letting product groups get their way with screwing up user comfort on Windows for the sake of their arbitrary goals (like shoving Microsoft accounts, Teams, and anything Electron-based down our throats) and keep it as a solid, bloat-free system that everyone can safely rely on. But, dismissing the existing pros of Windows is just unfair. Despite all the cons, it's still a very good OS.
Disclaimer: I had to switch to Fedora on my old machines because Windows 11 weren't supported on them. That's an exceptionally rare incident where Microsoft dropped the ball on backwards compatibility. But that doesn't mean Windows itself is bad.
There is value in training consumers on Windows & Office so they are familiar when coming to the office. MS needs to retain endpoint dominance in the workplace. They can't survive on server alone. Windows & Office endpoints are essential to their business. This is the leads channel.
They add pizazz to features and beta test them to consumers . Consumer licensing is moderate revenue but minimal income for Microsoft. Thus consumers are really beta testers.
So Microsoft will continue to provide low quality consumer experiences that don't fit the consumer market that well. The consumer market isn't their goal. It's a means to their actual business.
Bazzite has been great for me so far except for a few exceptions to okay with friends. With the end of support for 10 and the hostile crap Windows has become, I'm trying to see how to transition. Anti-cheat and business agreements seem to be the only real remaining barriers.
And to the original question: no, consumers are moat to the enterprise licensing pot of gold.
It's weird to think I'm still paying for the Windows license because I like to buy from a physical store and they don't have alternatives.
Microsoft has become a bit like Oracle... You don't need what they make anymore but you have to keep paying for it. It's like the company has entered into retirement and society is still supporting it... But the difference is it never dies of old age to make room for new generations of companies.