Microsoft the company(and shareholders) gives absolutely no shit about it but there is someone somewhere in the org who has that app and its earnings in their yearly priorities and that person and perhaps the people who work for them do in fact care.
Apple is making similar mistakes with their aggressive App Store take rate, by allowing so many scam apps on the App Store, and with their unfair policy enforcement. Apple sentiment among developers has been declining steadily as a result. For many the tipping point hasn't been reached yet even though they are fed up.
The problem with brand destruction is that it takes a long time to show up as in the revenue chart. But by the time it does a ton of damage has been done.
This seems to be the core of the discussion.
Is there a fundamental trust to have towards any of these corporation, and where do you go when they all breached the amount of trust you had in them ?
To give a parallel, it's like boycotting every airline that wronged you. Very quickly you have to revise your criteria.
Linux would be the exception as there's a path where you don't need to trust any organization, but I don't think it's practical for an average computer user.
While Ubuntu for instance is a good experience, you still need to trust Canonical. Granted it's a lot easier when it's OSS at its core and there's a whole community watching.
Correction: brand damage is dangerous for businesses that haven't reached the monopoly stage yet. Once they do, they no longer care about it.
This app can be done in an afternoon.
"that app and its earnings in their yearly priorities"
If you mean, monetizing the day they spent on it, sure, but that's still just ridiculous.
Microsoft is almost more of a conglomerate than a singular software (and hardware) company. It would take a solid leader who also appoints appropriate corporate heads in each division.
The marching orders for Windows seems to be "monetize home users." They don't "sell" the OS anymore on practical terms for home use... it's more about trying to sell adjacent services, shove Edge with built in consumerware plugins and nickel and diming every possible corner to each out a dollar or two a year per user.
If you can't as a company belt out a simple game in a short amount of time without roping in 4 project managers a senior project manager 2 senior developers 12 code monkeys and 4 graphic designers and all the overhead to manage them, your company sucks and should be buried.
Heck, once you factor in alpha, beta, and user testing, I don't think anyone could build a releasable Minesweeper in an afternoon unless it's just a junk implementation.
Like what would be the scope of an "alpha" that isn't a working game? Opening an empty window? Writing a console version of the logic?
True, but there's a lot more to it than the game logic. Regardless, it's not a complex application by any standard -- but I don't think I know any dev who could implement it well and in its finished form in an afternoon.
> Like what would be the scope of an "alpha" that isn't a working game?
I don't understand this question. Any alpha is a working program. If the devs don't think it's done, then it's not yet an alpha.