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Comment by dismalaf | Hacker News Reader

With the way the economy is going (some call it K-shaped) it's more profitable to squeeze as hard as you can and extract as much as possible out of whales versus trying to have mass market appeal. Azure, Office and Copilot will sustain them.

Nvidia is doing something similar where they're just extracting as much as possible out of AI companies and not caring one bit about consumers.

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Consumers need to remember how to wield a pitchfork

The challenge is that consumers in the case of Windows don’t generally choose Windows. Someone else chooses it for them.

The term cloud feudalism is not new, but now I'm thinking it feels like humanity is being dragged to the feudal ages because more and more everything happens online now. You want to work? Be a peasant for Uber Eats, they have all the power and you have none, they set the rules as they please and all you can do is grin and bear it, or try move from one feudal domain to another (i.e. work for a different delivery app).

That’s a funny way of spelling “guillotine”.

>With the way the economy is going (some call it K-shaped) it's more profitable to squeeze as hard as you can and extract as much as possible out of whales versus trying to have mass market appeal

How does whatever microsoft is doing to windows line up with that?

Hmm, it does line up with that from my perspective too.

It's just a different way to say "you're the product, not the customer" if you look at the statement from a neutral perspective - the whale being the actual customer, who changes all the time depending on what Microsoft MBAs think might have the highest potential value they can extract.

>the whale being the actual customer, who changes all the time depending on what Microsoft MBAs think might have the highest potential value they can extract.

Who's the "whale" in this context? Windows users who subscribe to copilot? Enterprise? Advertisers?

Enterprise.

Enterprises are the whales. Microsoft sells user management, Office, Copilot, Outlook, etc... all bundled together for more per seat per year than a consumer will spend or generate in the whole lifecycle of their device. Nevermind Azure.

So consumers are mostly ignored, except as a testbed to shove AI and ads.

And based on historical trends, they are doing the clever thing. If there are enterprises today still running IBM mainframes, MS is probably right to expect that today's enterprise contracts will be paying off at least 40 years down the line -- especially when you factor in the motte of regulatory traps and labyrinthine compliance checks.

Yeah I can't blame them. Just as I can't blame Nvidia for ripping off the hyperscalers. It is terrible for consumers though.

The only positive is all the interest in Linux and software optimization though.

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