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Comment by jollyllama | Hacker News Reader

They've gotten away with shipping garbage for years and still getting paid for it. They think we're all stupid.

Given that they aren’t meeting their sales targets at all, I guess that’s a little bit of encouraging about the discernment of their customers. I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long.

> I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long.

How would they? They are a monopoly, and partake in aggressive product bundling and price manipulation tactics. They juice their user numbers by enabling things in enterprise tenants by default.

If a product of theirs doesn't sell, they bundle it for "free" in the next tier up of license to drive adoption and upgrades. Case in point, the InTune suite (includes EntraID P2, Remote assistance, endpoint privilege management) will now be included in E5, and the price of E5 is going up (by $10/user/month, less than the now bundled features cost when bought separately). People didn't buy it otherwise, so now there's an incentive to move customers off E3 and into E5.

Now their customers are in a place where Microsoft can check boxes, even if the products aren't good, so there's little incentive to switch.

Try to price out Google Workspace (and also, an office license still because someone will need Excel), Identity, EDR, MDM for Windows, mac, mobile, slack, VoIP, DLP, etc. You won't come close to Microsoft's bundled pricing by piecing together the whole M365 stack yourself.

So yeah, they escape market discipline because they are the only choice. Their customers are fully captive.

Their customers largely aren't their users. Their customers are the purchasing departments at Dell, Lenovo, and other OEMs. Their customers are the purchasing departments at large enterprises who want to buy Excel. Their customers are the advertisers. The products where the customers and the users are the same people (Excel, MS flight simulator, etc.) tend to be pretty nice. The products where the customers aren't the users inevitably turn to shit.

I think this time is the first time that it will actually hurt all the large corps investing gazillions of dollars into AI infra.

Shipping some ads in windows? Doesn't really hurt you, it makes you extra money. Sure, some customers get a little annoyed, but who cares.

But this time they invested huge amounts of money to chase something that will likely never get profitable and return enough to pay off.

They think we're all stupid.

As time goes by, I'm starting to think they may be right more than they're wrong.

And this is a sad and depressing statement about humanity.

Not really. It's just that the point you have to push people to get them to start pushing back on something tends to be quite high. And it's very different for different people on different topics.

In the past this wasn't such a big deal because businesses weren't so large or so frequently run by myopic sociopaths. Ebenezer Scrooge was running some small local business, not a globe spanning empire entangling itself with government and then imposing itself on everybody and everything.

Scrooge is a fictional person and Microsoft have been getting away with it since I’m alive with people hating it probably just as long. So I think GP definitely has a point.

Are you a fan of reading? Good character fiction is based on reality as understood at a time and a great way to get insights into how and what people think, particularly as it's precisely those believable portrayals that tend to 'stick' with society. For example even most of George R. R. Martin's tales are directly inspired by real things, very much living up to the notion that reality is much stranger than fiction! Or similarly, read something like Dune and the 60s leaks into it hard.

In modern times the tale of Scrooge probably wouldn't really resonate, nor 'stick', because we transitioned to a culture of worshiping wealth, consumerism, and materialism. See (relevant to this topic) how many people defend unethical actions by claiming that fiduciary duty precludes any value beyond greed. In the time of Scrooge this was not the case, and so it was a more viable cautionary tale that strongly resonated.

I think we would agree on a lot of things over a beer or beverage of your choice.

I also think that we as a (globalised?) culture have decided that money trumps everything.

But I don’t think that it’s the “fault” of single sociopaths or big companies; it’s some inherent flaw in human intelligence - we’re just not equipped to make smart long-term decisions or deal with a vast alien intelligence such as “the market”.

Scrooges tale just resonates strongly - why else would it be still so popular that basically everyone know it - we just aren’t able to stop this machine and it will grind on until our species is wiped from the planet.

Not that it matters too much for you and me - but a thousand years more of this? I can’t imagine what that would look like.

Edit: you ever read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair? I don’t think being greedy above all morals is a new thing, it’s always been there. We just “scaled up”

The thing is, the shift happened relatively recently. This [1] is an extremely interesting little report from UCLA where they poll the incoming class on a wide array of things. And there have been some massive shifts as recently as the 60s.

In 1967 86% of student felt it was "essential" or "very important" to develop a meaningful philosophy of life, while only 42% felt the same of "being very well of financially." By 2015 those values had essentially flipped, with only 47% viewing a life philosophy as very important, and 82% viewing being financially well off as very important. It's rather unfortunate it only began in 1967, because I think we would see an even more extreme flip if we were able to just go back a decade or two more.

So we went from a society where the most important value for people was developing a life philosophy to one where the most important value is becoming wealthy. It's fairly easy to see how that leads directly to the situation we see now a days. In a society where wealth is seen as literally the most important aspect in life, what else can we expect other than endless greed?

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In the time of The Jungle, that book resulted in dramatic change that eventually led to the creation of the FDA. In modern times you have that same FDA approving everything from pink slime [2] to Alzheimer's drugs that they know don't work. [3] I think the fact that society has changed is an inescapable conclusion

[1] - https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/50YearTrendsMonograph20...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime

[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/health/alzheimers-drug-ad...

Do they think or do they know? I thought that Microsoft was over after the complete failure of Windows phone and Windows 8 and Office ribbon. And that was 20 years ago...

Subpar companies selling subpar products can be massively successive, because they know their customers.

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