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Comment by segasaturn | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs famously said Microsoft's problem is that they have no taste in design. I had the displeasure of having to use a fresh install of Windows 11 the other day and Bing without an adblocker was a complete horror show, big carousels of products and obvious ads at the top of the results screen you have to scroll past to see results, irrelevant news articles shoved in your face, the signal to noise ratio of Bing's search results page is abysmal. If Bing just copied the way Google's homepage and search results looked like in 2008 they would immediately start taking marketshare from Google.

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Reminds me of the "Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging" video[1] from nearly 2 decades ago (wow, I feel old). It was funny because all of Microsoft's brand looked exactly like that back in those days, and you could really picture them screwing the product marketing up that badly.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

The best marketing move for Microsoft is to fire all their marketing people that touch Windows.

An Operating System should be a tool, not a marketing destination. Get rid of all the useless telemetry that caused you to colossally ruin Windows 8 by removing the start menu button that "nobody used" and then "how do I turn off my computer" became the most looked up search term that year.

Microsoft has great products, all ruined by marketing departments.

Devs are forced to do something by the manager to please the skip manager. Teams do things the hard way to make it look as if they're actually doing things. Organizations hide from leadership what users really like lest the org got disassembled because they were creating literal crap. And leadership went to marketing team to cover this all up from the investors. Traders would buy in these stocks just because these big companies have good marketing to pretend they were making the right decisions.

Most if not all big companies without tasteful people would eventually turn into monstrosities like this. Everyone were telling 'stories' around 'stories' that fold into a tangled web of everyone else, but sooner or later one day the bubble's going to pop, and down the stocks be gone.

People with bad tastes aren't the worst to deal with. They have taste, it's just that it's different from others'. Tasteless people will do anything in their power to keep the wheels turning, and that means to let tasteful people surrounding them surrender their tastes, so everyone can and will become tasteless people who would do anything to keep the wheels turning.

I used to work at a large telco, and had daily dealings with Marketing.

It was incredible to see how important they thought they were, and how every single aspect of the entire company had to be about Marketing. Even when it very clearly made the product shitter and pissed off customers and was a total disaster, they would increase the number of ads, increase the BS customers had to listen to when calling in and make the website a nightmare to navigate.

Even when external experts hired specifically to re-design the website for millions of dollars said point blank their decisions were horrific and were driving customers away, marketing said "We are Marketing, do as we say".

Everyday working with them made me think of that Steve Jobs video where he talks about a company being doomed when the marketing folks take over.

(Incidentally, the VP of Marketing is now the CEO, so yeah)

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