Gaming is now Microsoft's third largest business, bigger than Windows
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I don't think they have the money or the human resources necessary for that anymore :(
Too little too late won't save google
This entire meme where people take "I heard some vaguely bad news about $company" and/or "gigantic $company is now slightly less gigantic" to mean "$company is dead" is just silly.
I was being ironic, as revenue for a company that size is easy. However, deciding what to use it for is hard.
Growing new lines of business is even harder for old companies.
So I was only half joking: given the poor use google had made of the resources they have, I really think they don't have enough resources (both brains and dollars) to grow new business lines because I don't think they have anything in their pipeline that can go big.
Maybe I will be proven wrong (good for google!) but I think they should have been more proactive in the last 5 years: you reap what you saw, but they've cut what was trying to grow, so their harvest will be small.
Personally, as much as I loved Windows 10 (and then 11!), I saw the writing on the wall and I moved to Linux last year.
I trust Microsoft a little more than Apple, as by default there's more freedom on Windows than on MacOS, but I fully expect both Apple (and Microsoft) to care about about cellphone users (and gamers) than about developers.
Can you elaborate a bit on “by default there’s more freedom on Windows” part?
1) You can download and install binaries without using an appstore and without going to some settings.
2) You can install offline and create a login that's not tied to a Microsoft account (but this requires typing special commands).
3) You can then download binaries from their store without a login (ex: to get Windows Terminal)
4) You don't have to pay microsoft money if you want to make programs that run on Windows (ex: crosscompiling to a win32 target)
5) You can run Linux in WSL2 after typing a few commands on a default Windows install
6) If you don't like Linux, Microsoft gives away most of what you need to write code (but I guess XCode is like VSCode)
It's not much, but I enjoyed that freedom when I was using Windows (and I couldn't understand why people could accept to use a Mac!)
2) you can install macos without an iCloud login. No special commands needed, just "not now"
3) yeah this you cannot do. but other than xcode I don't actually get anything from the store because you don't need to
4) this is true for Mac, you only need to pay to get the binary signed. Does ms give you signing without paying?
5) WSL2 is a hypervisor run Linux. You can do that on Mac too, there's a few options but orbstack is the one I use, super nice. However, for command like stuff you don't need Linux because macos is Unix anyway so you can just install most stuff natively
6) you don't even need xcode you can use the GCC toolchains
It seems pretty par for the course tbh except not being able to natively run unix tools on windows is a pita
I hated the keyboard on the previous mac I was given so I worked on my personal Dell machine. The difference in setup between MacOS and Linux is pretty minimal. The different to Windows is large and unkempt.
I.e. it looks like there's been basically no organic growth, it was all driven by a single acquisition.