I think of it a different way. The consumer market (if Microsoft doesn’t value it) is holding them back from paying tech debt. The fear of regressions is a good reason to not touch stuff.

If you do value a market and ignore this, the consequences can be fatal (see Sonos). But if you don’t, then doing the minimum is rational.

▲

apples_oranges an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I think it’s just like Steve Jobs said: they have no taste. That never changed and it causes them to fail time and again with innovations

	▲	__aru 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I actually think Microsoft is often ahead of it's time with it's consumer-facing products, but executes very poorly. So they have good foresight, but "very bad taste" when it comes to execution. Microsoft was early to making tablets, smartphones, living room PCs, etc. They just royally screw up the execution of each product category every time. Maybe it'd be a fun idea for to take some of Microsoft's failed consumer ideas, and revisit them 10-15 years later to see if some other company successfully executes on it.

▲

layer8 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem with the last 15 years of Windows is the way that Microsoft did touch it, a lot.