Ask HN: Any Microsoft employees/devs here? What's happening to Microsoft?
Why are they behaving like this since last year (trying very hard to burn themselves to the ground)
Latest example:
Microsoft Office renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46496465)
Not only the rename is absurd, but the page (office.com) looks heavily vibe-coded
51 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 86.0 ms ] threadFor the last year or so all orders from leadership have been "build more AI, show AI usage" even above things like stability and reliability.
There was no recognition from leadership over what use cases worked or not, and they appeared to believe their own hype.
To complement this, there is near to no long-term accountability for upper leadership for failure, so even as features underperform and strategy turns out to be a flop, they will continue to make millions a year, having layoffs every 6 months, and then acting surprised pikachu when morale is down and top engineers are looking to the door, since salary is barely competitive even if you are a top performer getting special stock awards.
When Mobile came along, Microsoft completely missed. Ballmer laughed at the iPhone when it was released and didn’t take it seriously. By the time they started trying to make moves it was too little, too late. Mobile has shifted how people use computers and other than have a few apps and enterprise management, Microsoft is largely absent.
How much of this push behind AI is a desperate attempt not to miss another transformative shifts in the industry?
A lot of which had to do with being under a consent decree.
> "When Mobile came along, Microsoft completely missed."
By "missed" you mean that MS was at the top of the mobile phone heap after defeating Palm Computing when the iPhone came out and swept Windows Mobile, Palm, Research In Motion and everyone else away.
Microsoft was late to respond, eventually bought Danger and released the Kin phone before cancelling it within weeks, and only released Windows Phone in 2010 a solid 3 years after the iPhone release.
Windows Phone was actually pretty nice to use, but they were already too late to the scene and didn't have a chance to steal ground from iPhone or android who already had solid app ecosystems.
And let's not forget that Google specifically interfered with access to their services on Windows Phone to hamstring it.
I had an iPaq in 2004 when we got married. It was like living in the future, where the future was a scaled down Windows 98 box. We took a one month road trip and was able to Priceline hotels on the road as we explored. Amazing device but not an iPhone.
Ballmer was so butthurt about iPhone he would berate people who appeared before him with one. As a customer, my boss and I were invited to a meeting with high level Microsoft people and asked to not carry iPhones out of respect.
People sitting outside FANG/NAMAMA still drool over those barely competitive salaries you speak of.
Get out of MAANG. There is no decent one, only different flavors of evil and abuse. Integrity is worth more than money. Form a worker-owned co-op consultancy with other decent people and create enduring stability.
Office 365 app suddenly is not called that. It's called copilot. When you open it it just shows chat. No files, no word, no documents. You have to try hard to find your files back.
So suddenly an app that you used to edit word documents and print PDFs is completely gone with no warning. Word doesn't exist. Even Office doesn't exist :D How are clients supposed to navigate that shitshow?
Since last year? Burning themselves into the ground has been their M.O. for the last decade and a half, at least.
I'd argue enshitification started in earnest with Windows 8.
AI just enables them to speed up the process dramatically.
Half of the people are just talking about layoffs and other are keeping thier mouth shut. There is sense that execs are making one bad decision after another. Xbox division knows this very well, the trust in that division is near zero, but now it has spread to even the orgs which were doing decently well.
Product quality is also completely dogshit/dogslop, we have done nothing in last 2 years except making our products worse. We do hear reports of boomer companies moving to Apple every now and then, and these rumours are increasing. Windows 11 is a disaster, Copilot is an convenience no one asked for. Users are contacting support every day asking how to disable all these features but execs keep ignoring users. The consensus among top guys is that customer is wrong and we need to teach them.
Trusting stock market more than the customers is now the industry standard.
We had a service impacting issue and went through the typical Premier/Unified support gaslighting exercise. We finally escalated it to a batshit level and got to a real engineer. The dude was about the retire, was fed up, and knew exactly what was wrong. He claimed to have a fix pending approval that had been held up by his chain. We ended up getting a hot fix after a lot of drama with account leadership.
I was grateful to the guy, but kind of shocked that morale in that group was so bad. I used to be acquainted with a few people there over the years and every single one of them was either laid off or left. I never heard of anything like that at Microsoft at all, especially as a customer.
The sooner they drown the better for everyone and the industry.
So most people.
1. Saying "AI" makes stock price go up
2. Make all things AI
3. Stock price will go even more up
As for everything else, subordinated to the aforementioned.
Windows is utter ass.
They don't even use their own browser, languages, or OS half the time because they're so bad.
I don't use it but stuff like VS Code is a point of light but they run it like an internal project, and will drive it into the ground, just like GitHub.
What Microsoft did do was make is super-confusing to people about what they changed and what is called what.
See: https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...
I realize he can't even open Steam without getting bombarded by ads from MSN in the start menu.
I'm angry at Microsoft for this. Instead of being good stewards of "computing", they provide an environment that's poorly designed and exploitative.
Shame on the people at Microsoft responsible.