It's not a strategy, it's a recognition that the Windows org has decayed and they apparently don't know how to turn it around. Apparently simple projects take forever, new code they launch is often filled with bugs, different parts of the org don't talk to each other and they can't explain why anyone should write an app that targets the Windows API. I support customers shipping apps to every platform and Windows is nowadays 90% of the pain, it's worse even than Linux. Microsoft just don't care either, you can tell the devs who work on it are overwhelmed by the sheer size and tech debt levels of the codebase. Decades of compounding bad decisions have well and truly caught up with them :( This is a pity in a way, the desktop OS market could use more competition.
Nadella de-prioritizing Windows was the right thing to do for the business because it had a monopoly, so after PC sales saturated the market the best they could achieve was treading water, but also because the strategy of tying everything to Windows assumed the Windows team would continue to execute well and these things would all be mutually reinforcing. In the 90s Windows did execute well but by 2010 that had stopped, and so the tying strategy also had to stop. A better CEO than Ballmer could possibly have turned the Windows situation around and avoided the need for the disconnection, but instead it was left to drift.
It is in "everything is cloud" and "most of software runs in browsers anyway" world where operating systems don't matter .
I would not say it was by any means one or the other CEO "insightful" choice but it was more of market choosing on its own. Microsoft had to make own cloud or die that was the choice and better to put loads of investment in that. Ballmer started Azure because Amazon of course was first and Google did the same so Nadella was just playing cards he was handed by the world.
Running a cloud and developping an operating system are two separare activites that don't need to be tied together. There is a lot of proprietary software in companies around the globe that rely on windows low level APIs and it will last for decades. There is a lot of things that are running outside the browser. The whole gaming industry is still tied to Windows directx.
The thing is that OS is not important these days as you can apps on thin clients now and a lot of folks are spending most of the time within apps and doing nothing else.
I think that it is not exact. OS is as important as yesterday since you need them to run your containers that provide your services used by your thin clients. This is still the backbone of everything. But you have a point windows kinda lost the servers battle.
Selling licenses is not where the money is. Selling subscriptions to corporations so that every corporate-supplied computer (including Macs) pay Microsoft for something, be it Office or a full Windows+Office+Sharepoint license. All things considered, they can give Windows for free and they'll still profit from it as an enabler for further Microsoft lock-in.
mike_hearn|1 year ago
Nadella de-prioritizing Windows was the right thing to do for the business because it had a monopoly, so after PC sales saturated the market the best they could achieve was treading water, but also because the strategy of tying everything to Windows assumed the Windows team would continue to execute well and these things would all be mutually reinforcing. In the 90s Windows did execute well but by 2010 that had stopped, and so the tying strategy also had to stop. A better CEO than Ballmer could possibly have turned the Windows situation around and avoided the need for the disconnection, but instead it was left to drift.
ozim|1 year ago
I would not say it was by any means one or the other CEO "insightful" choice but it was more of market choosing on its own. Microsoft had to make own cloud or die that was the choice and better to put loads of investment in that. Ballmer started Azure because Amazon of course was first and Google did the same so Nadella was just playing cards he was handed by the world.
Hypergraphe|1 year ago
chucke1992|1 year ago
Hypergraphe|1 year ago
belter|1 year ago
rbanffy|1 year ago