[bustling-noose]

While the majority of revenue of Microsoft is not Windows anymore, I think Windows defines the brand much like how iPhone and Mac define Apple even though that might be part of the revenue not all of it.

What I am curious about is what happens when the original product that makes the company popular starts to experience poor quality. Take Google for example, its search has been on a decline in the last decade or so and needless to say the company is experiencing problems as well in the last few years. While GCP and GSuite are significant, people have lost faith in Google which probably started with search.

Windows 11 and the iPhone seem to be heading towards same fate as Google search imo.

[art0rz]

The only people losing faith in Google (search) are power users such as us. Regular users haven't noticed the decline, and search may even have improved for them. We are not Google Search's target audience. We need to stop pretending all products are built for the power user niche.

[jajko]

My wife is an opposite of power user and she now uses mostly chatgpt for anything more complex. The ease with fluent sentence search compared to trying to fit those few right terms that google search would understand, not overdo it, avoid over-SEO-ed pages... google search has been gamed for so long it became victim of its own success. It just has momentum but thats waning.

Plus often first results are pure ads, fuck that and fuck them. Maybe LLMs will one be gamed similarly, then we move to something else but right now its night and day even for common folks. Who cares knows it.

Just recent case - we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner. Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in google search like nytimes with their paid very selective biased reviews, went over quite a few reliable ones, user reviews etc and came to my wife with list of preference vs cost vs reliability vs other aspects. She puts a short sentence in chatgpt and its the same freakin' list, in 20s.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Regular users have absolutely noticed the decline. A number of people I know have mentioned it to me unprompted. None of them are power users or even particularly tech-oriented.

[surajrmal]

I'm a so called power user and don't really understand why everyone says it's worse. Google is better than ever. The problem I've seen is folks using older techniques for searching that don't really make sense anymore.

[kenjackson]

A lot of non-power users are complementing Google search with ChatGPT. The main reason is that it will give an answer to more specific questions. Like “what are some quotes famous athletes have said about Usain Bolt”.

[nyarlathotep_]

Beyond that--most non-technical people associate "web search" or search engines with Google. There's nothing else to them, even those old enough to remember the 90s/2000s before dominance was established.

[Ylpertnodi]

Most people I know are now using deepseek. I don't even have to show them a filtered ad-free web, anymore (that most didn't even notice the lack of cruft).

[tiffanyh]

> While the majority of revenue of Microsoft is not Windows anymore

It’s hasn’t been for 25+ years (more than 50% of Microsoft existence).

  1998 Revenue Breakdown
  —————————————————————-
  $7.04B Productivity Apps
  $6.28B Windows
  $4.72B OEM
  $1.94B Consumer

https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar00/mdna.htm

[throwaway2037]

    > Productivity Apps

MS Office?

    > OEM

Combination of Windows and MS Office licenses purchased by OEMs?

    > Consumer

What is this? People who buy shink-wrapped software at retail stores?

[scarface_74]

Google’s product is ads and GCP is an insignificant player in the cloud space. When I was at AWS ProServe, we never took GCP as a serious competitor.

GSuite still hasn’t made any inroads into the enterprise of governments where the money is.

[umeshunni]

Google Cloud revenues were $48B in 2024 vs $109B for AWS. It's silly to call that insignificant.

[pjmlp]

Still, from all computing platforms that I have used since my humble Timex 2068 in 1986, Windows is where I have most fun, despite all the ongoing issues.

[paxys]

> how iPhone and Mac define Apple even though that might be part of the revenue not all of it

iPhone defines Apple, and that is justified considering the single product makes up 55% of the company's revenue.

[RajT88]

When I first heard that, I thought it was an insane factoid.

But then I realized that slowly over time, iPhones grew to get into the price range of full-on computers. And also, even the cheaper iPhones add in up sales when you sell over a billion of them.

[mc3301]

How is iPhone headings towards a similar fate?

[MPSFounder]

The iphone has lacked innovation under Cook. Last 3 iterations (since 13) have been virtually identical. Also, the failure of Apple Intelligence (oversold promise) has seriously hurt the brand. I am an avid iphone user, and will likely continue to be for the next 3 years. But innovation is suffering. Anecdotally, the least talented ML engineers are currently at Apple (the best engineers I know in the field are at Google and OpenAI). I don't expect Apple to be innovating much in that regard, given a lack of talent (just look at Siri for instance).

[ErigmolCt]

The flagship product may no longer be the main revenue driver, but it still defines the brand in people's minds