I'm surprised they haven't given up on xbox and games but perhaps there's enough money there to keep it going.
I think Microsoft will just allow strong DRM to prevent cheats/piracy in PCs instead of dedicated xboxes.
Tinfoil hat thought: Microsoft only focuses on B2B and not consumer market, because they make it so that consumers can only rent from Microsoft and other businesses, not actually own anything. That way, Microsoft can keep jacking up prices as they see fit.
I suspect lingering antitrust concerns are one of the few things standing in the way of locking consumer Windows updates behind a paywall, possibly alongside a "free with ads" version.
They're abandoning the consumer versions of these, not the enterprise versions. The consumer versions are the competitive market, where they're competing against iPads and such. They're not abandoning Windows for businesses, Office for businesses, where there is still no established business end-user OS/office suite alternative.
Consoles are probably getting phased out, which makes financial sense at this point if they don't manage a massive comeback, and Xbox might try to go with a more Steam-based model (they've been trying for the last decade with not much success), maybe trying to make PCs more console-like with their new Xbox Windows changes, as well as putting AI everywhere, so that's going to be fun!
So we have to eat shit or find open source software to work around MS's garbage check-box-driven software.
I yearn for the Microsoft software of the 90s and 00s, pre-cloud, pre-webslop, pre-AI.
I’m pretty sure that Amazon now makes most of their money from AWS.
Wow. My impression, as an MS watcher since 1988, is the exact reverse: that he is guiding the death-spiral.