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Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

birchtree.me

11–20 of 241 posts

Re: Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

#11

IDK I started running Bazzite on my workstation after Win11 died on me a couple weeks ago, and if it is the premier experience for Linux desktop gaming then we aren’t there yet. It is great as far as distros go, don’t get me wrong. But WiFi dies after waking from sleep, and bluetooth worked once then died. I had to hack on it for a bit, then do it again with immutable OS patterns in mind. MS is certainly leaving an o…

That's weird. I've been running it for years and it's been rock solid--but I've done so on Ryzen mini-PCs with very standardized hardware, and am not using it as any kind of desktop--purely as a game machine.

Re: Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

#12
Another point not mentioned in this article is that Windows desktops are incredibly slow these days.

I did some compilation tests on a 2025 Windows desktop with an i9 vs some MacBooks and a new top-of-the-line Windows machine can’t even keep up with a bottom-tier M1 MacBook Pro.

https://www.tyleo.com/blog/compiler-performance-on-2025-devi...

Re: Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

#13

Author is using Microsoft and Windows interchangeably, this post is only about Windows. Gaming is a bigger business for Microsoft than Windows and that can only ever be consumer focused. There's no mention of Xbox, nor an awareness that Microsoft published games are playable on the Steam Machine.

Yes, the article should really be titled "Is Windows just tech debt to Microsoft?" and could have been published five or six years ago.

Re: Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

#14
The web/webapps/mobile helped lead to this era of "desktop PCs" (to include laptops) where the browser mattered more than the OS. It allowed Apple to become resurgent in the desktop market because OS compatibility mattered less than ever.

It's not weird that it led to Apple regaining _some_ market share because clearly there was demand for the Apple/MacOS/OS X experience that may have been tempered by incompatibility in the pre-webapp days.

What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market. All the more weird for two reasons:

1. The Apple experience, at least on the OS side, matters less and less in the webapp world.

2. Apple isn't trying, either! They're seemingly doing their best to abandon and alienate their desktop OS users. A decade or more of stagnation or regression in features and usability, capped off by Tahoe this year.

It feels like Apple and Microsoft are just waiting for the desktop OS to die, waiting for mobile to take it over; so we can all just shut up and stop asking for filesystems and terminals so they can sell us iPads and Surfaces, and they can finally be free of this ancient burden of selling desktop computer OSes.

And the consumers keep buying the stupid things, demanding product in a market that the vendors don't want any part of.

Re: Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

#15

Yeah, this book was hugely influential https://www.google.com/search?q=innovator%27s+dilemma&ie=UTF... And came to the conclusion that many firms like DEC and Xerox did not sufficiently move to new technology because their customers were not interested and didn’t feel served by it, at least not until it had decades to improve. Today we have the FOMO dilemma where executives all read that book and no way they are goin…

Link to Worldcat book information: https://search.worldcat.org/title/1423132421

Alibris link: https://www.alibris.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-When-New-Tech...

Re: Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

#16
A more interesting question to me (and one where MSFT employees here would have some insight) is to what degree is Windows' recent ABYSMAL fucking quality the result of AI, outsourcing, or bad management? You can also feel the difference in healthy employees vs. unhealthy, when you switch between something like VSCode (polished, fast, intelligent UI, not buggy, consistently improves) and Explorer (paleolithically slow, unstable, buggy, crashy, the worst version is always the latest).

Re: Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

#17
Nobody seems to want to use Copilot, but Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing. They can just provision however many virtual coworkers to a Microsoft Teams instance and you'll be handing off documents and chatting with the AGI workers pretty much as you would any other remote worker.

Microsoft doesn't have to be first or best here. Just owning the plumbing of so many present-day workplaces with Teams and Office will make it hard to beat them.

Re: Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

#18

Author is using Microsoft and Windows interchangeably, this post is only about Windows. Gaming is a bigger business for Microsoft than Windows and that can only ever be consumer focused. There's no mention of Xbox, nor an awareness that Microsoft published games are playable on the Steam Machine.

Microsoft has definitely angered consumers in the gaming space. Look what they've done to Minecraft, or the formerly beloved studios they bought out. The Game Pass price hike was not well-received.

[deleted]

Re: Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

#19
post #14

The web/webapps/mobile helped lead to this era of "desktop PCs" (to include laptops) where the browser mattered more than the OS. It allowed Apple to become resurgent in the desktop market because OS compatibility mattered less than ever. It's not weird that it led to Apple regaining _some_ market share because clearly there was demand for the Apple/MacOS/OS X experience that may have been tempered by incompatibility…

As an Apple Stan, I don’t understand what you’re referring to. MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas, I’m not really sure what you could be referring to when you say “stagnation”. Every OS ever released has issues at launch, not sure if that’s what you mean by “regression”.

But man… windows has been garbage for the better part of 2 decades now.

Re: Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

#20

> Number one is that Microsoft just does not feel like a consumer tech company at all anymore. At least in terms of Windows/Office, Microsoft has never been a consumer tech company. They've always been focused on corporate sales. There have always been consumer-focused side areas, from Bob to Encarta to MSN to Xbox. But Microsoft's bread and butter has always been corporations. I don't understand how the author think…

They’re angering corporations too.

Those risk-adverse behemoths are slowly coming to terms with Microsoft breaking their platforms and bread-and-butter applications.

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