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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

I hope Microsoft stays complacent and ultimately loses the gamer market. With gamers out and most other casual consumers going mobile, Microsoft will be ever more relegated to office environments, making them even less cool and hopefully starting a snowball effect that really hurts them.

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They need to actually hire good devs again but then again they are a major part of why software as a career is dying in America.

This might not be an engineering problem. It just doesn’t feel like anyone at MS actually cares what their users care for. Doesn’t seem like they use the OS themselves.

> Doesn’t seem like they use the OS themselves.

Watch any of the MS BUILD or Ignite conference sessions, and take note of how many MS employees are using MacBooks - there's still Windows & Surface there, but I swear it's becoming less and less every year as Microsoft keeps acquihiring, and moved all in on the MS <3 Open Source campaign.

There used to be a huge culture of dogfooding in MS and I don't see it anymore (granted, I'm not an insider - just speaking from public perception). Also see any new open source stuff they put out - very little of it is using their own stack. Good for the community at large, but it speaks volumes to Microsoft's priorities.

Even on the business side - InTune (their MDM) will happily manage macOS, Ubuntu, Android, iOS almost as well as Windows (there' still deficiencies compared to competitors like JamF). Office is on Mac, EntraID doesn't care what OS you use, Defender EDR doesn't care what OS you use, etc.

It's clear that Windows is no longer a priority. Microsoft doesn't care what OS you use as long as you are using Azure, Office, and M365's suite of services. Definitely a better strategy for them to reach more customers, but it does spell the death of Windows long term.

Actually renting office suites is kind of stupid and I don't think it's going to work out for them. If they don't revert to something that isn't abusive to their customers. There's plenty of old businesses that are still running windows 95.

Initially when Satya took over many were oblieged to use Macs and Linux, exactly because they had to ensure their services also worked great on them, and that there as a culture shift beyond Windows one and only.

The problem is that this kind of backfired, and nowadays they also seem unable to hire new devs, outside game developers, that actually know what developing native Windows applications, and OS services actually means in practice.

Even though Microsoft nowadays is more open, I miss the "Developers, Developers, Developers" mindset on the Windows development team.

Gonna be tough when they own literally all the gaming studios now

They own a bunch of AAA gaming studios, which have been producing flop after multimillion-dollar flop. All that while random indie darlings produce high quality cross-platform hits for a fraction of the budget.

True, and while quite sad for everyone involved, they had one of the best years in gaming, with all their gaming divisions combined.

They just fired a lot of the gaming studios they used to own. (Tango, Arkane), and cancelled most of their major upcoming projects (Everwild, Perfect Dark, the new MMO, etc)

And - while there are rare examples otherwise (like iD software), many of their studios haven't made a well received game in over a decade.

It's not necessarily a great thing for the industry, but Microsoft leaving gaming entirely would not be that terribly tough. If anything, it would probably have the least amount of impact now, then it would have at any other time since 2001.

Microsoft bought the Call of Duty studios for a lot of money and likes to say they are succeeding at video games by pointing to Call of Duty revenue in a vacuum without counting the cost to aquire Activision.

They certainly aren't going to stop releasing Call of Duty games.

Not any of the good ones though. The long-tail of game developers are where most PC gamers are at these days, the AAA slop have large numbers on a per-game basis, but aren't very large compared to the whole gaming market.

Not even close? Tencent and Sony likely have (indirectly) more game developers on their payroll, and even the top 3 (MS, Sony, Tencent) combined aren't that much of the market. Nobody seems to control even 10% of the 500 billion dollar video game market.[1] Also note that for MS and Sony this revenue may also contain sales of third-party games through their stores.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_video_game_com...

Most office environments seem to be using OSX for their client OS these days. It's just much more behaved OOTB. The only thing people really need Windows for now is the domain controllers and goofy legacy embedded stuff.

That is definitely a silicon valley thing.

I'm definitely seeing it consistently on the East Coast.

Consistently for management or the unwashed masses?

I work at a large F500 company and I would be shocked if Macs were more than 5% of the total computer inventory. Excel alone is very sticky. Excel excerpts will tell you that Mac Excel is weird and does not work correctly.

Said as someone stuck on a windows machine with all of the corporate monitoring spyware which makes performance crawl.

It's expanding beyond the valley, at least I can only speak for the PNW which is admittedly still a minor tech hub but not the level of the Bay Area. My own company I work for included (a change driven by myself) has switched almost everyone to macOS, as have many of our peers and competitors (non tech companies).

I'm also starting to see a lot of Macs pop up in smaller private practices - most dentist offices around here are on Macs, a few dealerships have moved over, etc.

Windows is still the majority by far, but its marketshare is slowly being eroded away. It'll be a while before F500 enterprises move over, if at all, but small-medium businesses are definitely growing their macOS usage.

depends if you look at advertising as a sector it's almost 90% mac.

I wish this was true.

But, there's a lot of business software that's locked into the MS ecosystem with Active Directory.

Office365 is de rigeur.

Then there's everything built on SQL Server.

Excel is the "bicycle for the mind" for many types of professional.

Heaven forbid you ever have to work with an IE-only app from 2003, but those still exist in the wild.

I dream of a glorious shining day when all computing will be 100% POSIX-compliant.

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