I think it’s more about how they are perceived. They’re making a lot of money somehow, but they have been losing desktop OS marketshare for at least 15 years, they completely missed mobile, Xbox seems to be failing, they completely gave up on the browser and just threw a skin on Chrome. They have O365 in the enterprise, sure, but that was a market they once owned… now they share it with Google Docs and a host of others. They had to shove Linux into Windows just to get developers to stick around. They had the PC gaming market on lockdown, but Valve is coming for them with all their Linux based efforts… we have PewDiePie as an Arch user now. How bad does Microsoft need to screw up to push someone all the way to Arch? All their consumer facing products seem to be trending down.

Everyone loves to talk about FAANG… there is no M, why not? One would think Microsoft would belong more in that collection than Netflix, yet here we are.

In terms of technology and looking forward, what is Microsoft doing really right? Even their investment in AI seems questionable and they pushed it into their products so hard that everyone hates it. They have GitHub and VS Code, but that was an acquisition and people are always nervous, because they don’t really trust Microsoft based on their track record. Azure is fairly popular, but AWS is still the benchmark everyone talks about. There is their enterprise management software… that helped take Styker completely down last week (maybe not totally Microsoft’s fault and more the admin, but that’s still some really bad press). Did I forget something big?

TBH, you could change a few terms and that text wouldn't look much different in the 90's. Microslop never gave a shit on end-users and what they think. Nobody ever "liked" Microslop. People were always complaining that Windows is shit, Office is shit, MS Servers are a joke, etc. Nobody at Microslop ever cared. They always cared only about having all the companies and governments in ransom, which was always their golden egg goose. The only other thing they care about, to make the first thing happen, are developers. They put a lot money into keeping people developing using their tech, and this actually works. Even on Linux it's hard to avoid Miroslop tech. (I've got just today a Pipewire update which pulled in some MS libs for ML; and there is for sure more as they have even code in the Kernel.) Microslop's EEE strategy is a long game, which is actually pretty hard to beat.

I don't think everyone hates Microsoft's AI offerings, but rather a vocal group of online people.

Copilot is useful, particularly if it is the only thing enabled in your company.

Don't get me started on Azure though. Their VMs are insanely slow, yet still cost like hundreds per month.

I don't know who in their right mind thinks it is a good deal and that they should move all their services into Azure. Apparently a lot of senior management.