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Comment by awesan | Hacker News Reader

People have forgotten this, but he did the same with Windows Phone for a while at the very start of his time as CEO. His motto was "cloud first, mobile first" where cloud meant Azure and mobile meant Windows Phone. After some time he gave up and they pivoted into the direction he is now well known for, which was to focus on good developer tooling regardless of OS.

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GitHub and VSCode were smart ways to quickly recapture developer mindshare. They felt distinctly un-Microsoft with how open and multiplatform they were.

The Azure Linux friendliness play was essential and smart. Again, Microsoft felt like they were opening up to the world.

But they've backslidden. They've ceded Windows and gaming to their cloud and AI infra ambitions. They're not being friendly anymore.

Microsoft spent a lot of energy making Windows more consumer friendly, only to piss it away with Windows 11.

One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.

They'll continue to win in enterprise, but they're losing consumer, gamer, and developer/IC support and mindshare. I've never seen so many people bitch about GitHub as in the last year. You'd swear it had became worse than Windows 7 at this point.

> You'd swear it had became worse than Windows 7 at this point.

Do you mean Windows Vista instead? Because Windows 7 was probably the last (half-)decent windows (no UI though for tablet, no ads in the OS, no ubiquitous telemetry, no account BS).

Yeah, my mistake. I spent the post-XP era on Linux and specially Ubuntu.

I've been using all three major OS families recently and I'm not enjoying my time on Windows. It's so full of ads, and the Linux / Unix bits feel bolted on.

Often gets confused because of same liquid-glass as vista.

Windows 7 was the last Windows version to still support the Classic theme: https://betawiki.net/images/d/da/Windows_7_classic_theme.png

I don’t see program manager there, what does “classic” mean?

The classic theme, in a Windows context, refers to the Win95-2000 look.

Do you think they'll continue to win in enterprise? As a casual office user, who's had to do some PowerPoint and word docs recently, I found the experience of using office 365 truly miserable. All of them are laggy and horrible to use.

I think by moving onto the cloud they've left themselves open to being disrupted, and when it comes it'll be like Lotus Notes, an extremely quick downfall.

They have enterprise users locked in mainly due to Active Directory, for which there is no good replacement, and to a some extent SharePoint. There's also Office, of course, and you are right that the migration to web tech isn't well taken. I'm thinking of "New Outlook" in particular. They probably plan to EOL classic Outlook when Office 2024 EOLs in 2029. The last stronghold will be Excel. If native Excel ever gets discontinued, then everything Microsoft will have been webshittified™.

Trust me, I really want that to happen, but who has the billions to burn (and the will to use them at that) to build a solid alternative? Most probably, the EU will have a misguided shot at it, out of desperation from the USA, and will subsidise some inadequate local actors. I'm not sure whether it will be good, timely nor sufficient.

>One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.

No kidding, the totally threw it all away. It used to be that Windows was already the place for gaming. And the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation. But that was a long time ago. Has any Microsoft gaming release exceeded expectations lately? Call of Duty will always sell like hotcakes, but the latest Black Ops is a hot expensive mess that underperformed last year's title.

> the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation

Maybe it won some battles in your part of the world, presumably North America. But the PS3 outsold it globally as its contemporary, and even the PS5 passed the 360 in global lifetime sales as of November 2025: https://www.vgchartz.com/article/466599/ps5-outsells-xbox-36...

Microsoft seems to have decided that they can't make all that much money with gaming. But they are underestimating the mindshare they are losing with that.

Slightly related, they also discontinued most of their PC peripherals in 2023, many of which were quite good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35748645

Windows 7 was about the best Windows ever got, like 2K and XP. Vista and 8 (and now 11) are the bad ones.

Yes, I use Win7 every day!

Every other Windows is bad. 95 bad, 98 okayish, ME bad, etc. Win 10 was good and now we have the 11.

Microsoft has never been an end-user-focused company. Almost every successful product they've ever made was to sell to a business for their employees to use. Everything else they seem to either half ass or screw up or lose their passion for at some point.

I think I first came to that realization with windows phone 7/8? The UI was cool looking, but functionality was half-baked and third party app availability was dismal. HOWEVER! You could sign a windows phone into an active directory/365 account and manage the bloody daylights out of it via group policy and the tools to do that were SUPER WELL MADE.

Same is/was true of Microsoft Teams - an utter abomination of a chat client, the search is garbage, the emoji and sticker variety sometimes weird, the client itself randomly uses up 100% CPU for no reason and is just generally buggy... but gosh darnit, MS made sure sysadmins could ban memes and use of certain emoji via policy and gave insane amounts of detail to auditing and record keeping. So sure it's a pile of shit to use, but awesome if you wanna spy on your employees and restrict their every move.

Windows is fun because with the enterprise version, they give all that control to the employers, but with the consumer version they give all that control to advertisers, developers, and themselves.

I think this is also why every consumer-focused product they make either fails instantly, or ends up rotting on the vine and failing after whoever evangelized that product leaves the company (possibly being forced out for not being a "culture fit"). Do I have to go on about zune/windows phone/xbox? Or surface? Or the way they randomly dumped their peripherals product line on another company? lol.

I believe Microsoft biggest achievement is being capable to stay relevant for the past 50 years, largely due to enterprise.

If you take a close look as an user, all their products is half-baked in some way (inconsistent behaviors, dark patterns, poor support, etc.), good enough so they can lock you in and hold your data hostage with time.

You either die a hero or live long enough to become IBM

> largely due to enterprise.

And government bribes, and piracy, and giving Windows for free to some Universities in exchange for being included in curriculum.

That and Teams is free with an Office 365 subscription (sorry, Microsoft 365 Copilot -- geez).

Same reason why Google Chat and Meet are super popular now despite Slack and Zoom being infinitely better (free with Google Workspace)

> But they've backslidden. They've ceded Windows and gaming to their cloud and AI infra ambitions. They're not being friendly anymore.

Forget being “friendly”. GitHub has enormous mindshare and has frankly quite reasonably pricing (far cheaper than GitLab, for example), but the product just sucks lately. The website, while quite capable (impressively so at times) is so slow and buggy that it’s hard to benefit from any of its capabilities.

It’s gotten to the point where, every time I try a newish capability, I ask myself “how bad can this possibly be,” and it invariably exceeds expectations.

GitHub needs to take a step back and focus on fixing things. Existing features should work, be coherent, and be fast. If it takes longer to load a diff in the web viewer than it takes to pull the entire branch and view the diff locally, something is wrong.

If a coworker reviews my code, I should not sitting right next to them, literally looking at the same website they’re on, and wondering why they see the correct context for their review comment but I don’t.

> "focus on good developer tooling"

So "developers, developers, developers"?

The ability to know that giving up might be the right path forwards, is very useful.

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