Here are some things that should be North Star for Microsoft:

- Innovate Office instead of copying competitors. Teams and Loop largely mirror Slack and Notion. Focus on real innovation, especially in long-stagnant products like Word and PowerPoint.

- Stop coercive UX in Windows. Don’t nag users to switch to Edge, Bing, sign in with a Microsoft account, or adopt Copilot.

- Make search foundational everywhere. Searching in Outlook or Teams should be as fast as searching Hacker News.

- Move beyond Flat UI. Flat design is unintuitive and unattractive. Interfaces like NeXTSTEP from decades ago remain more usable, not to mention prettier.

- Retire SQL Server in favor of PostgreSQL compatibility. Provide a first-class SQL Server compatibility layer on Postgres rather than maintaining a separate database.

- Fix display scaling on Surface laptops. 100% and 200% should be the only supported modes. Fractional scaling causes visible artifacts and should not exist on premium hardware.