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Forums - Gaming - Microsoft keeps getting better and better! Will it ever end?


I'm failing to see at what point Microsoft has ever not had enterprise as its main focus, and when they've ever had a popular consumer product aside from Xbox in the past. Their tablets are also not dead, the division that produces them is making more money than they have before. 

Microsoft Surface FY21 Q2 revenue hits over $2 billion for the first time | Windows Central

"Falling under More Personal Computing is Microsoft's Surface devices, which for the first time broke $2 billion, a modest increase year over year of three percent."

This stuff is easily searchable, to me it just seems you have a preconceived notion about the company and are just trying to use anecdotes to justify it.

Well... I'm not here to convince you that Microsoft is not the company it used to be.  That's obviously an opinion.  It's not just my opinion, though: a lot of people think Microsoft peaked in the Windows XP era.  Now the crown belongs to the RedHats, AWSes and Googles of the IT industry.



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Ryuu96 said:

Did they ever? Most of their consumer stuff was DOA, even Windows Phone, Microsoft has always been more of a corporate company than a consumer one and they do really well in corporate, leading in OS by a significant margin still, Office is still huge, they're #2 in Cloud, Teams I believe is bigger than Slack, etc. I had a Windows Phone too but it definitely didn't set the world on fire, far from it, Lol, barely anyone had one.

Surface is actually doing well though, it is slowly increasing every year, it became a $2bn business for the first time ever in 2021. Hololens is winning billion dollar contracts cause of the tech. They're very much a leader in many areas still. Investors are loving Satya, Microsoft's financial reports are consistently great.

Not really sure how Google is innovative, Elon Musk while a dick, sure, SpaceX is very innovative, Google though? Chrome has stagnated and is frankly terrible lately, Youtube too, they're a distant 3rd in Cloud, they make most of their revenue from Ads, Android is the same as ever, Stadia is dead, Google is about one of the most boring companies in the industry I would say and far from innovative, they actually play it pretty safe, anything that isn't a instant hit is killed off.

As I say - this is all opinion.  I believe that from a technical and innovation perspective, Microsoft peaked under Bill Gates, Apple under Steve Jobs.  Maybe Google is starting to peak too, who knows?

The trouble is, when companies get that big and start being run by bureaucrats (rather than the founders) they just start to "buy" innovation, they can't actually do it internally any more.



Ryuu96 said:

Oh, Edge is gaining market-share too, which I suppose is good, I may switch to Edge because Chrome has lately been awful. Microsoft is pretty boring from a consumer side but at least they have Xbox, I would say they take more risks than Google does as well.

Edge is based on Chrome's source code.  



OneTime said:
Ryuu96 said:

Oh, Edge is gaining market-share too, which I suppose is good, I may switch to Edge because Chrome has lately been awful. Microsoft is pretty boring from a consumer side but at least they have Xbox, I would say they take more risks than Google does as well.

Edge is based on Chrome's source code.  

Which is also open, in which Microsoft now makes plentiful contributions that benefit everyone else using it.



Raven said:
OneTime said:

Edge is based on Chrome's source code.  

Which is also open, in which Microsoft now makes plentiful contributions that benefit everyone else using it.

True - and that's a good thing.  Microsoft were particularly late to the Open Source party, though.  I think they called it "a cancer", if I remember.



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Ryuu96 said:
OneTime said:

As I say - this is all opinion.  I believe that from a technical and innovation perspective, Microsoft peaked under Bill Gates, Apple under Steve Jobs.  Maybe Google is starting to peak too, who knows?

The trouble is, when companies get that big and start being run by bureaucrats (rather than the founders) they just start to "buy" innovation, they can't actually do it internally any more.

Idk...Bill Gates has his issues too, I wonder if he would have approved of Surface and Xbox was almost killed by him before it even launched simply because it didn't use Windows, I believe he again during the Xbox One era gave his approval for selling off Xbox, which would be essentially killing off Microsoft's only consumer operation, Lol.

Surface started under Ballmer too, supported further under Satya, I would say each CEO has had their own perks, don't know necessarily what one is best but as a consumer, Satya is definitely supporting Xbox more than any other CEO did so that's cool for me.

OneTime said:

True - and that's a good thing.  Microsoft were particularly late to the Open Source party, though.  I think they called it "a cancer", if I remember.

Yeah, good ol Ballmer said that, an eccentric fella

It is now Satya that is making Microsoft more open though.

Nadella is certainly taking Microsoft in a better direction than I would have expected.  I think it is ultimately a good thing that Microsoft entered the console market.  In the old days I'd be really worried, but I think Xbox is competing in a "fair" way which they may not have in the past.  That Steam is allowed to exist alongside the Windows store shows that Microsoft has changed in good ways too (although sometimes I miss the crazy competitive Microsoft and all the technology they pumped out).



OneTime said:

Dunno about that... Microsoft is a shadow of what it used to be in the 90s. Windows had 95% market share at one point.

Nowadays, Google and Android are the big guys. Apple is the "designer clothing" one. Valve is the cool one. Linux is the techie one.

Mircrosoft í starting to look a lot like IBM. Big and corporate, and on the way down.

OneTime said:

Not really...  Market Cap is just a number (and the first company over both one and two trillion was Apple).  Tobacco companies are worth a chunk of money too, if that's how you value it.

In the old days, Microsoft was like Google but without any competition what-so-ever.  Apple was basically bankrupt (wish you had bought at $10 a share?).  If you bought any computing device to do anything serious it pretty much ran Windows.  Nowadays you actually have a choice to use Microsoft software or not.  That definitely wasn't the case in the past.  

Microsoft lost the technology thought-leadership years ago, basically when Bill Gates left.  Now all the technical stuff starts in Linux, and often it's Google and IBM doing it.  You could even argue that Xbox/Playstation are AMD, and PC gaming is Nvidia.

Market cap is a much better number to go off of when discussing success than market share. Here is why, back in the 80's the percentage of homes that had a computer was 8%. In the 90's this rose to about 35%. Today, in America, almost 80% of households own a computer. Having 95% marketshare of that 35% isn't as lucrative as owning 70% (which is their current marketshare) of that almost 80%. 



Doctor_MG said:

Market cap is a much better number to go off of when discussing success than market share. Here is why, back in the 80's the percentage of homes that had a computer was 8%. In the 90's this rose to about 35%. Today, in America, almost 80% of households own a computer. Having 95% marketshare of that 35% isn't as lucrative as owning 70% (which is their current marketshare) of that almost 80%. 

Dunno about that - it depends what you want to consider "getting better and better".  Market share describes popularity and maybe a measure of how you compare to the competition.  Market cap as you say is "how big is the market you serve" and that has increased.

I am surprised that so many people dismiss how dominant Microsoft was in the past.  They had the technology, the investment, and the vision.   They toppled IBM.  They were also extremely ruthless.  

These days, Microsoft is "just another" technology company.



Meanwhile sony just launched returnal and ratchet next month, and microsoft releasing halo when? And what else this year?



They are probably making more money now, but I preferred the old MS. You could buy Office for £120 and be done with it. Now the yearly subscription model takes the piss. It's greedy and Office itself is shite incomparison to Google Drive and their version of office.

Google's biggest issues is they are slow with products. They could have done so much better with their Nest products which are amazing but a lot fo them are more expensive than the competition and Google fails to capitalise on them.

This is why I'm uncertain of Gamepass. If it goes the way office has and teams, it will be shit and overpriced once they start gaining more traction. 2-3 years from now we will look thinking how the f did we get here.

Outside of Azure, I don't think they have brought anything great to the table since Gates left. At least Google has created decent Nest products, self driving cars, Android Auto, Chromecast, Maps and some other services which have changed how we do things

MS's greatest contribution since Windows and Office has been Azure... And maybe Surface, although they are insanely priced.