alexcason

I agree. As with most bad products and failing companies, the problem here is focus.

Microsoft need to have a vision about what products they want to create and go about making them with a singular focus on producing something which customers will love. It's not about abandoning consumer software or business software, it's about making something great, regardless of it's purpose.

It's Monday morning in Europe.

While I agree that the Windows team needs a singular vision about what they want their product to be, the advice given by the author is starkly reminiscent of the strategy adopted by Blackberry when they realised consumers weren't interested in using their products any more.

For Microsoft to abandon the consumer market and solely focus on a sub-section of 'doers' would be to set in motion an unstoppable slide into obscurity, as it did with Blackberry. Increasingly people only have one device and they're not going to choose a product which is only good for 50% of what they want. This mythical group of people who only care about using products for business just doesn't exist.

What they need to do is to make the product better so that people in general like using it again. It's that simple.

I guess a negative reaction on HN isn't always necessarily an indicator of potential failure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335153

Don't take a negative reaction as the be all and end all when you present something to people.

It's quite difficult to use because it takes ~10 seconds to refresh the list. It's hard to get into a rhythm.

This seems great/dangerous in equal measure.

Yeah, the validation on the URLs is pretty basic. That, along with listing the recent/popular URLs and usernames are probably the areas for my attention.