Microsoft used to be the Windows company (after being the BASIC company, then the DOS company). Then it became the Office company. Now it’s SharePoint and Office365 and Azure, a utility. Windows is a relatively small part. Office is both desktop and web (and spacecraft, where they have two versions of Outlook and none of them works). If you are confused at this point, so am I. There is no vision as to what Microsoft is. If Satya Nadella knows what Microsoft is, he isn’t communicating it properly. It’s not Azure, because there is also Office and Windows. And on-prem server products. And a line of hardware products. And stores (do they still exist?).
MS has always been a software application company. Windows was never anything more than a way to sell MS applications--and Windows 3.0 and later wouldn't even have existed in the first place if IBM hadn't dawdled so long over OS/2. Even in the MS-DOS days, when MS was reaping the benefits of IBM's previous bonehead decision to hand the PC OS market to them, MS was selling Office applications--on the Macintosh.
The basic Windows API, in all of its many incarnations, has always been a second-class citizen; MS Office applications have always done their own things that other Windows applications couldn't do without using undocumented features that MS could change at any time (and often did). One could argue that the only reason MS even allowed third-party Windows developers to exist was so that they would, in the words of one of PG's essays, do market research for MS. When a third-party dev came up with something that got enough traction, MS would simply incorporate it into their apps.
In the sense of being marketed as a single integrated package, yes, I agree. I was using the term loosely to refer to the apps themselves (Word & Excel were the first two, as you note, the others came after).
It's quite possible that this attributes too much intentional strategy to MS, and also treats them as a single entity with a single strategy more than they deserve. The MS internal teams that were bending over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility were not the same as the teams that were churning out new APIs, building Azure, etc., and quite likely had very different incentives.
IMO Microsoft's best long-lived products have always been both finished solutions to your problems and platforms to help you develop more solutions, and Microsoft leadership has always recognized this. Examples: Windows. Office. Dynamics (their Salesforce competitor).
But even if a product doesn't meet that "why not both?" ideal, there is always going to be room for it at Microsoft, as long as it is not only a good or at least mediocre product by itself, but also works to sell you on the whole Microsoft ecosystem. Sometimes that is a bad thing (see all the Windows adware for Bing, Copilot, and M365). But that at least is where Microsoft remains consistent.
That was such an amazing mission statement. It was a real measurable goal, and progress towards it was quantifiable. And Microsoft actually did it! That mission statement drove actual strategies (lower costs, don't complete with Apple on the high end, force OEMs to compete against each other on price, etc) that resulted in its ultimate fulfillment.
Gates did this with Windows, Office, XBox among other things. Ballmer failed to do this this with Windows Phone. Nadella did it with Azure, but he needs to do it once again with AI. You can see that he's pushing hard with Copilots everywhere, what's missing is a manager that has a coherent vision of what AI at MS should look like. ScottGu is in charge of both Azure and AI at MS, but I don't know if he can deliver.
He maybe never had a strategy for Windows but he wasn't hired to have a strategy for Windows.
Which bubble are you talking about? Even if you remove everything after January 1 2020, it’s still up 4x since nadella took over. And that follows a decade of stagnation under Balmer.
What numbers do you know of that show that Microsoft hasn’t been successful since nadella took charge?
Complain all you want about the products, but the stock under nadella has been a success.
Microsoft’s net income is up roughly 5.4x from ~$22B in 2014 to $119B today. Profit margin also expanded, from ~25% net margins in 2014 to over 36% today.
I still don't understand why the windows store search sucked so badly. It isn't like they had billions of apps. So why did it suck?
Its income? Around $500 a month.
But then they rioted internally to kill C++/CX (the only time they had something comparable to C++ Builder), Project Reunion got announced and misused from the original goal, porting WinRT back into Win32 killed .NET Native as well, most of the key team members left to Amazon and Google, Azure or AI teams, the team is now mostly interns or juniors from Microsoft India, no direction, and is a mess, naturally.
I went from a WinRT advocate, to pointing out devs to stay away from it, this is how bad they treated those that actually believed WinRT could be it.
Painful and nonsensical from a desktop standpoint but also kind of impressive in a way.
I would not be surprised if you still cannot launch a fricking .exe.
To satisfy my interest, I've tried creating WinUI app (aka UWP/WinRT) in Visual Studio 2026. And this is what I've got on the first app launch after compilation:
"This device needs to be set up correctly to develop this type of app for Windows. If you don't, then you can't install and test your app before you submit it to Windows Store"
I don't want to install/submit, I just want to be able to run my fricking .exe.
Why you call this issue solved? It's still right there - the same voodoo dances and delusional expectations of subordination to Windows Store.
I imagine that MS folks read "issue is solved" report by a manager who covered his back and collectively they thought that the issue indeed had been solved. But it never was solved in the first place, the back of that manager was.