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Comment by KingMachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

Because Microsoft doesn't get a 30% cut of products sold for it's platforms. Also Windows on ARM hasn't caught on and x86 has only recently been closing the performance per watt gap with ARM.

Meta's headset is Android based so it has 18+ years of low power, ARM performance and power tweaking. And Apple is using their in-house M series chips.

Microsoft's bread and butter is B2B; Azure, Office, etc. The Xbox and consumer divisions are just too small to take on high cost, novel devices. They've historically not been great at branding or marketing direct to consumer either. (Zune, those Microsoft store commercials, etc.).

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Fundamentally those are excuses based on Microsoft’s current market position.

When they invested in Windows 1.0, their existing users were not asking for it and didn’t have a use for it. MS-DOS wasn’t a good foundation for a GUI, the IBM PC hardware was misaligned (e.g. terrible graphics), and obviously Apple was miles ahead.

The product didn’t fit any of Microsoft’s existing strengths and felt like a toy rather than a credible business tool. By the same logic that’s applied to AR/VR today, Microsoft absolutely should have exited the GUI market in 1988. (They were even a leading Mac software vendor! Why bother making their own worse GUI?)

> IBM PC hardware was misaligned (e.g. terrible graphics)

In 1985 it was terrible for games due to no sprites, but business applications run on the Hercules graphics card (monochrome but 720x348) or EGA, which had decent resolution and was way better than the competition for business applications. It had worse color resolution than say the Amiga, but by 1988 the VGA had fixed that as well.

How was it better for business? Text mode?There were plenty of terminals available at that time with better monochrome and color text modes and fonts, even line graphics support. It was about various attractive business software available for PC, not about EGA being superior somehow.

It's ok to make short sighted investment decisions based on current market position, especially when one of your biggest bets from the last decade is striking gold in a big way, and you need all hands on deck to reap maximum strategic value during the temporary opportunity window.

In that phase, it makes absolute sense to reduce or cut anything that is not CURRENTLY performing well, in favor of the area that is taking off and needs all the push you can give it. When the gen AI market stabilizes, ideally with Microsoft in a dominant position, it will again be appropriate to diversify bets. That includes pushes for markets where MS can grab 2nd or even 3rd place.

The old Microsoft wasn't so myopic which resulted in not one but two of the biggest software dynasties with windows and office and in more recent times Azure.

You can't get a winner if you leave the game early.

Good point but Google gets a 30% cut for things on Android and they killed their VR/AR as well.

I do think the stupid ads and rent seeking turned out to be so incredibly lucrative that it's essentially all that companies can think about.

I recall in the late 2000s Microsoft had some of the best mice and keyboards on the market, but you'd never know they existed unless you happened upon them.

Gamers definitely did know. For a good part of the decade, the basic IntelliMouse Optical (2001 revision) was one of the very few devices that didn't have pointer assistance gimmicks that stand in your way, like angle snapping. It was sought after well into 2010s, despite it being limited to the measly 125Hz polling rate, having high SRAV and slippery sides.

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