Microsoft has been failing on the gaming front, trying to make their buggy "current gen" OS relevant by force, and is losing ground to other online competitors (i.e. Google docs). Azure is still growing, albeit slower than their top competitors. Bing has actually been doing good thanks in part to ChatGPT, but even there they still resort to bizarre tactics, like pretending to look like Google. [0]
I would love to hear from others truly in the know, but it looks at times like the company is less an organism and more a writhing mass of creatures in a thin, shared skin trying to make it appear as one.
It’s less desperate than you think. Windows 11 is 4 years old, so this is just pushing the straggling organizations into an overdue upgrade.
Office and Windows have been a decreasing proportion of Microsoft’s revenue for years. The real money is coming from cloud services in its many forms. Microsoft may not be #1, but they are clearly in a strong position with good growth. Specifically Microsoft is great at onboarding mid sized businesses onto Azure/Teams and then building a big enough moat to keep churn low.
Look at their growth numbers and you’ll see their business is in a strong position. Their cloud position is entrenched. Windows, Office, and Bing are all just bells and whistles to attract people to their real offerings (Teams, Azure, other subscriptions)
> but it looks at times like the company is less an organism and more a writhing mass of creatures in a thin, shared skin trying to make it appear as one.
This is pretty accurate. A bunch of disjointed orgs who get sometimes seemingly random direction from the overlord. The random direction isn't really random, it's whatever move the overlord believes investors will respond to.
Copilot is a great example - shoved ungracefully into every product with the effect of making basic tasks more difficult. But hey - early movement on LLMs makes the stock go up.
Microsoft has been failing on the gaming front, trying to make their buggy "current gen" OS relevant by force, and is losing ground to other online competitors (i.e. Google docs). Azure is still growing, albeit slower than their top competitors. Bing has actually been doing good thanks in part to ChatGPT, but even there they still resort to bizarre tactics, like pretending to look like Google. [0]
I would love to hear from others truly in the know, but it looks at times like the company is less an organism and more a writhing mass of creatures in a thin, shared skin trying to make it appear as one.
[0] https://www.howtogeek.com/bing-stopped-pretending-to-be-goog...