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Comment by dustedcodes | Hacker News Reader

That’s still the case until today. Microsoft has zero innovation capabilities. Nothing they built themselves since the 90s became even remotely a product which consumers enjoy. Everything they have today is Office which is kind of okay and the rest are acquisitions.

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I think for a company to innovate, you need both to have a) an innovative person or team, and just as importantly, b) give them a lot of freedom/power. Just having one or the other doesn't work.

I've been at companies with innovative people, who just get stifled by higher ups, get bored, then leave. Most big companies have too many layers of power in place to keep anyone from shaking things up.

I guess that's to say, I wouldn't single out MSFT. It's a disease of every large company.

Xbox is very popular.

In the context of innovation, the original Xbox truly was a trailblazer. Standard PC processors, onboard storage and high-speed networking in every unit, online service subscriptions, downloadable updates and content, game achievements, huge and ugly: the following three console generations have closely followed the path cut by Xbox 20+ years ago.

For perspective, Microsoft has sold around 20 million of the latest generation consoles that have been on sale since early 2021.

Back in the iPod’s heyday, Apple was selling 20 million iPods during the Christmas quarter.

Apple now sells from 40-65 million iPhones per quarter according to third party estimates.

I'd argue that PlayStation is dominating that segment.

And even if we're talking about PC gaming, Xbox wouldn't be the word you'd be thinking of.

Not sure I'd say 'dominating', they have a 60-40 split IIRC.

Honestly I think the only reason it's anywhere as close this generation is because of the PS5 supply issues until very recently meant many people gave up and bought a Series X. I don't think it actually has that much to put it ahead of the PS5 other than availability, and the Xbox One generation was such a flop that it seriously dented their network effects

Visual Studio Code? Visual Studio?

C# / .NET (Core) / Typescript?

Teams are... "OK" at best. For school they're decent, for work their video-co is good I'd say, but chat is bad.

in the 90s/early 2000s visual studio was a poor imitation of Borland's tools

now they're a poor imitation of Jetbrains'

Teams are worst software ever. other things - I agree.

office ripped off every other product too

(wordperfect, 123, ...)

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