Yep! That’s what I was thinking of. It is a cloud hosting company that keeps some legacy software around for sentimental reasons.

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davkan 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would imagine a significant portion of the cloud revenue is derivative of windows though. Whether that’s lift and shift workloads or entra id which is picked over alternatives for its compatibility with existing windows and AD infrastructure.

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wvenable 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The only reason Azure is a success though is because of Windows. Maybe now it's so big that it can exist without Windows but Windows is the gateway into Azure. So many other companies would kill for a platform (aka Meta) and here Microsoft has one and is treating it poorly. In pure financial terms it makes sense but, as a business strategy, I think it's severely lacking.

	▲	cbozeman 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's because Satya is worried about next quarter's earnings call, not what Windows looks like in ten years. BillG had that big meeting with everybody at Microsoft awhile back and basically told them they had about 6-12 months to right the ship. Personally I hope they don't. Nothing makes me happier than arrogant jackasses being utterly destroyed by life, which is what will happen if they continue to enshittify Windows. Satya seems to forget that Azure exists because of Windows. It's the deep integration into Windows that makes it worth anything, otherwise we could all switch to Linux / Mac OS X and run everything in AWS / GCP. You quite literally don't need Azure at all for anything if you don't have Windows-based machines.

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einr 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think it's sentimentality, exactly. Who picks Azure or OneDrive or AD or Office 365 or Sharepoint or Teams or any Microsoft product or service if they're not already running Windows? The desktop operating system, "legacy" though it may be, has near universal reach and has therefore been key in pushing people to their more lucrative services. But they pushed too hard, it's too obviously shit, and now people and enterprises are looking for an exit. What then?

	▲	pjmlp 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Meanwhile they have very cool tech like .NET, VS C++ debugging/hot reload, that gets overshadowed by Microsoft being Microsoft. Then the .NET team asks why there isn't more uptake outside Windows, in spite of all open sourcing efforts, this is why.
	▲	cbozeman 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Microsoft slowly becomes IBM. That's "what then".