When something is on fire, pass the buck to other people and stand around saying “that thing is on fire… wouldn’t it be great if someone called the fire brigade? I have the number here. One of you guys, give them a call.”
Microsoft's moat continues to be in the number of enterprise contracts that have already been signed.
It's easy for someone to get access to Copilot Copilot because their large company already has an Azure billing agreement set up somewhere.
I would not call this success. I would not want to emulate this.
Survivorship bias is a thing no? Microsoft succeeded despite their organizational flaws. Microsoft produced an insanely backwards-compatible[1] OS despite flawed overall strategy and lack of decisive leadership. Doesn't mean everyone should take a leaf out of their book.
I personally believe there are organizations in a Mr. Burns-type equilibrium[2]. Maybe, like Mr Burns, they are in that perfect but fragile state of dysfunction which somehow makes them deliver, for some definition of "deliver". Maybe they have a core team that keeps the whole thing going against the odds. Either way, I wouldn't call any of these organizations resilient.
It made me cringe about three emails post-Bill because I recognized exactly what was happening. My first job was in a company past its glory days and couldn't adapt to the mobile-firstness of the smartphone era. They, too, had "product devs" whose sole job, as far as I could tell, was to forward emails to and from the right department/partner. It was even more egregious than MS---most of the emails forwarded were just "Hi sysads. The request below from engineering is authorized." or "Hi Engineering, see reply from $PARTNER below".
The company died a relatively quick death, spurned on by the Conglomerate Mothership. Thankfully I recognized the signs and jumped ship as soon as they were on borrowed time.
[1] I wouldn't know personally as I daily drive Linux but that _was_ the conceit of why you'd choose Windows. I won't be surprised if this one solid invariant that Windows could offer has changed lately.
Yeah, that’s basically what I mean. Dilbert made real.
And we all know Microsoft caters hard to enterprise and Apple almost seems to give them the middle finger on purpose. So all those big companies only buy MS.
Add in the giant base of existing software, especially line of business/custom stuff, and MS is safe for a long time, no matter how bad they are.
What else is there that _needs_ windows?
And then, presumably, their downstream supply chains and integration tooling and yadda yadda.
Every time I am in a railway station it seems that digital signage runs on Windows, because the digital signs are always throwing errors.
None of this stuff needs windows but most of the time I guess no one is going to switch away because they are all so embedded, and it requires work and a bunch of people to make a decision.
Maybe the Windows execs were just modelling how they hoped corporate culture would look in their perfect customer.
Which is why it’s nice when the Swiss and French and so on ditch Windows for more open alternatives.
Or are there still groups of Microsoft employees saying “I saw a fire extinguisher in Bob’s office the other day. He was using it as footrest. I told Magda to warn him about the health and safety but she said it was Julian’s job… and the guy who pays for them to be filled and tested left three years ago and no one replaced him, so it probably doesn’t work anyway.”
If it wasn’t for corpo contracts, Microsoft would be long dead.
The book is simply: acquire monopoly, wield power ruthlessly to keep it. Everything else is orthogonal.