Microsoft confirms it made $27 billion after laying off 9,000 people | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft confirms it made $27 billion after laying off 9,000 people

gamesradar.com

45 points01-_-18 comments

All microsoft software I used is increasingly bad. Loop is a complete mess, office is a maze of useless options, windows became so irritating I actively sought out another option, teams seems to be half integrated and half not with anything else, and has an interface that is steadily getting worse and worse.

When I think about it most software is increasingly bad... Or at least user hostile. It seems like developers simply do not either care or are ready to fight for quality.

* their managers

Steve Jobs explains why this is the case. A famous video of his:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

This explains a lot. Apple iPhone is the new Xerox copier. Liquid Glass is New & Improved but not functionally different.

It's because of their target, they target corporate non-technical IT where the end users have no idea of what they actually want but want it all integrated, badly, and it all works brilliantly for Microsoft as feature x is $y/mo.

For 30 years Autodesk took an increasingly larger and larger share of the 3d modeling market. Over time they became complacent and users were locked in. Prices only went up.

Meanwhile Blender was the most viable free oss alternative, but it was obtuse and lacked features…

Until it didn’t.

Version 2.8 of Blender unlocked a latent avalanche of adoption. It has only snowballed since then. Autodesk is checkmated in the long run.

So when will a similar thing happen with Desktop Linux? Who will do it? Can it be done?

> So when will a similar thing happen with Desktop Linux? Who will do it? Can it be done?

Even if this happens, it would not matter for Microsoft. Windows is now almost a rounding error for them. Here's their revenue and operating income for the fiscal year 2024 [1]. There are 3 categories, with fancy names, but they mean roughly 1. Office, 2. Azure, 3. Windows+Xbox+LinkedIn+Copilot. The profit for the first two (combined) was a bit more than $90B. For the last category, it was a bit less than $20B, and Windows is roughly a third of it.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2024-q4...

When will we see this amazing AI actually make MS Teams fast and usable?

MS teams is my favorite example of software. Big, successful company, well-funded and resourced product. Absolute garbage, universally despised.

If they can fuck that up with all that going for them I can make good software without.

I think Teams being garbage is a strange flex. How can a product core to people working remotely, be so trash and still have such a large contingent of users? Where's face time for android/Linux/other? Apple is too stubborn to recognise other platforms. I'm rooting for jitsi to win the long game!

Teams has a large user base because it is the bean counters who condemn others to use it. I truly believe there is zero software teams who would willingly choose it if given the power to select their own tools.

> How can a product core to people working remotely, be so trash and still have such a large contingent of users?

As others said, the people using it aren't choosing it.

> Where's face time for android/Linux/other? Apple is too stubborn to recognise other platforms

Apple had said at one point they were planning to make it available on other platforms. But that was before they got patent lawsuits against them for it... My guess is they don't want to deal with codecs on a platform they don't control.

I've been a choosy person through my career, if I can't select the software it's not a place I will work, sure I'll have a separate windows box/VM if that's what corporate needs to communicate with the mothership, but the brunt of my work has been on one Linux distro or another.

More and more I'm starting to understand why one of our project managers left Microsoft and started working with us.

It seems to me that they bet that creating this conditions only can get two results.

A company that is lean and efficient and needs almost no people OR that there is a critical point coming up that will drive costs down by people less and less

What makes a business a good business?

When it makes lots of money?

Or hires lots of workers?

When it produces good products/services.

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