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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

What is their proposed future then?

It's not Xbox, they're losing that war, and it was based on Windows. It's not phones, they already lost that one and that was based on Windows anyways.

It can't be Office; there's less and less of a need for a paid office suite, and MS Office in a browser is rather bad.

It might be Azure, but IMHO the big onramp to Azure is Microsoft pushing corporations to move ActiveDirectory and Exchange into the cloud, but the end of Windows means the end of ActiveDirectory, and there's options for Cloud mail and calendar. Is Azure compelling for many if you're not already there because of Exchange?

> And once you realize that you can see the future is very bright

The future may be bright, but how will you know if there's no Windows to see it through? ;p

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It may be fun to joke at and hate on them but look at their revenues, growth and market shares, instead of thinking as a consumer where you personal come across them and whether you like them. Nearly monopoly personal OS and productivity, top 2 cloud and search engine (cue the Bing jokes but it makes them $12bn a year), rights to frontier AI models via OpenAI. The only rival who competes in multiple markets is Google - who still makes 90% of their money from ads and does not have sales/distribution that MS has. If Microsoft doesn't have a future then what of the rest of FAANG, none of them are as diversified or have OpenAI. Oh I forgot Github and Linkedin

I think Google is afraid of Microsoft.

> What is their proposed future then?

Microsoft's Future is Azure AI POWERED CLOUD. Their CEO explicitly said this. Windoze is just the legacy on-boarding software.

> What is their proposed future then?

Whatever IBM and Oracle do to stay solvent in spite of being irrelevant to most people and even most software people.

AFAICT the future is just Azure and legacy enterprise contracts. Windows has no growth to make, stockholders only value growth, hence Windows is not of interest to the company.

That's the genius plan: kill Windows marketshare so that it can grow again in the future!

I know this is a joke, but.

This strategy would eventually let them rebuild it from the ground up.

WSL is a good bridge for now, but a larger shift to a unix OS is still needed.

I thought for sure way back when the original Xbox came out that they were playing the really long game (no pun intended) to get a foothold and conquer the living room. After nearly 25 years I don't see that happening and it seems like they are going to end up going the Sega route and just develop software.

I thought the same thing. It's crazy to see the state of Xbox today. Microsoft just seems bad at spotting, nurturing, and retaining talented game developers. Look at the recent layoffs where they nuked Tango Gameworks despite HiFi Rush's success.

Going all-in on Gamepass has also devalued their own games in many consumers' minds. Why buy it when you can just get it on Gamepass? I suspect the recurring revenue is not making up for the lost unit sales within any reasonable timeframe.

Ironically, the fact that Xbox is so windows-friendly is exactly why I think its sales suffer and why they're going to end up just making software - for me as a gamer, I don't feel the need to own an xbox when I can play any xbox exclusive on my PC (and often with much better performance and peripherals). I can only play Playstation exclusive games on a Playstation, and the Playstation exclusives have been consistently very, very good. Pretty much everything on the Switch is exclusive to that console. So why would a budget-constrained person ever buy an Xbox?

The idea of a sort of home-computer situated in the living room instead of the office made a whole lot more sense before smartphones.

> "to get a foothold and conquer the living room"

They did try it, remember? During the Xbox One launch, there was a heavy marketing blitz to position it as a living room multimedia machine and console gamers absolutely tore them to pieces for it. They gave up after that debacle.

The really tried to conquer the living room with the Xbox One, making it more about media than games, and the gamers revolted while the non-gamers shrugged. I think that's when the rest of Microsoft wrote it off.

For one thing, they need to hire someone to be "Chief Executive of Naming Things That Make Sense" because they are terrible with naming stuff.

"I got an Xbox One!" "Oh, the first one?" "No, the XBox One not the original XBox 1."

Or, looking at the .NET evolution:

.NET Framework 4.8 .NET Core .NET Core 2 .NET Core 3 .NET 5

There is no .NET Core 4 because people would get confused with .NET Framework 4 which is still getting bug fixes and has support. And they wanted people to move from .NET Framework 4 so they called it .NET 5 instead of .NET Core 5.

Well, the name of the company is Microsoft, not Microhard.

Less need for an office suite? Tell that to all the companies that are not only paying for Office but are now migrating from Slack to Teams, thus becoming even more dependent on it.

Have you looked at Microsoft's revenue breakdown by segment? Cloud already dominates the totals, but more importantly it also dominates growth. Gaming, devices, and Windows are a shrinking pieces of the MS pie.

Now you understand Microsoft. They have no reason to care about Windows any more.

> What is their proposed future then?

selling azure and consulting to governments and big corps.

> Is Azure compelling for many if you're not already there because of Exchange?

Most are already on Exchange, I think.

Also: I think MS wants Azure to be compelling even without Exchange. (though I am not sure if that works out)

> there's less and less of a need for a paid office suite

Since when? Is the world's white collar population decreasing?

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