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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The situation has only just changed now that Apple and Valve are getting close to threatening the Windows monopoly.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Microsoft being good to their customers is the anomaly, not the other way around.
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.)
Granted, MS has always been a pretty evil anti-competitive company, so I'm not trying to sanitize them much here.
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.
A lot of companies are paying for office and teams comes bundled with it. Why pay extra when its included?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’re actually giving that same venture capitalist $4m of their own money back, in a way that makes their investment more valuable.
"It’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost? 10 dollars?"
Also yes, volume licensees generally get massive discounts.
(I don't love Slack by any means. Still, I'd pay $9/mo out of my own pocket not to use Teams.)
Regulators should be all over it. EU has tried, but unsuccesfully, since it was lawyers who came up with the mitigation.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'
Win98: bad
Win98 SE: good
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.
Windows NT4 was also very stable (once you installed the Service Packs), but had a lot less convenience and modern features than Windows 2000.
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.
People seem to forget Teams is the unloved child of a forced marriage between acquisitions, it was never going to turn out successful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Objectively.