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.