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.
Apple is at least in part operating like they are a fashion brand. Functionality and usability are secondary to looks. Both in their devices and their software. It's hard to argue they aren't successful with that.
It probably helps that Microsoft has also abandoned usability, just for very different reasons
Are you complaining that Apple is releasing computers that are fast, quiet and with a ridiculous long battery life that are well built as “not functional”?
I thought it was an Ive problem but once he left nothing really changed. Sure the Mac got some functionality back but that’s about it. They really need to just not do a redesign and flesh out their software.
You mean alienate their desktop users by making chips specifically targeting them that are fast, run cool, quiet and have ridiculously long battery lives?
You’ve seen much more frequent updates in the Mac line post ARM than you did in the Intel era.
> What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market.
It actually kind of makes sense. Apple has stopped caring but Microsoft is actively hostile. You then have people who can afford it switching to Apple, but the higher price deters everyone who can't, which in turn reduces the pressure on Microsoft to clean up their act.
The interesting thing is Linux. It's starting from a smaller base but in the last couple of years the growth rate is even higher than macOS.
I didn't really get it until I Airdropped a shipping label PDF to the guy at the UPS store to print from his phone, which was already set up for the label printer.
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.
The question is not whether MacOS is ahead of Windows. As an Apple user since the Apple IIe, I agree it's still the best OS by a mile.
But that has basically always been true, at least since Mac OS X. (I liked the earlier OSes too, but they really did crash all the time and have no memory protection, so arguably Windows had some compelling advantages.)
The interesting question is whether recent MacOS releases are ahead of their previous versions. Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about. Maybe dark mode?
The hardware keeps better, and the experience of third-party apps I care about (VS Code and Ableton) is superior to Windows. But the OS and first-party apps seem completely stagnant.
Which, arguably, is OK. Maybe the OS should just be a commodity. But I have to imagine that there are user experience improvements they could make at the OS but I certainly haven't seen any.
Granted it's not a giant list, but each release does have little refinements here and there, and Claude may have missed some (it didn't mention container CLI, for instance; that was from my memory). I also omitted some features I don't care about (like Safari profiles and some other window management stuff).
What features are you hoping for? Aside from a tiling WM, which won't happen, I'd be happy just with refinements and bug fixes.
I bought a MacBook last year. The amount of stupid bugs is insane. Safari eating text input, Safari simply not connecting to internet after several days (while chrome is working well). I have to restart my Mac more often than I had to restart my last Windows machine, because it simply grinds to a halt (with a frickin' M4 Max processor)
Yea, Safari 26.1 is really buggy for me on macOS 15. Google searching the issue, lots of my issues are fixed int he 26.2 beta, I had to download beta from apple developer website.
After two decades of relentless effort, Apple has finally managed to make Spotlight as broken and useless as Windows Search where it doesn't find local files and just returns web results.
macOS daily driver for last 5 years because the hardware is better; I can stay unplugged for almost my entire workday.
Lots of things irk me about macOS UX. Finder's lack of tree view sidebar really irks me. Having to disable the silly animations and sounds when I get a new machine irks me. The absolutely terrible window tiling system irks me. When I minimize a window, I can no longer tab into it. The settings dialog's weird behavior with respect to resizing on both axes irks me. Can't use 3 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and the secondary monitors end up with limited refresh rate options. Meanwhile, I can just plug just about any dock into my 5 year old Windows laptop and multiple monitors just work. Still can't find anything as good as IrfanView (as old and dated as it is, it made working with image libraries a breeze).
Finder and the poor external monitor support somehow irks me the most because now I end up typing into the CLI 90% of the time because the navigation experience is so bad and for me this is a work machine and the difficulty in using 3+ monitors is silly.
I get being an Apple Stan (love the hardware), but the software UX is 100% bottom of the barrel stuff. Basic OS stuff like Explorer is just light years ahead of Finder.
I use a Mac for work, but also use windows and Linux machines.
The best experience hands down when it comes to specific things would be Linux, for very niche things because it's way less clunky than it used to and people have figured things out in the meantime.
My mac is the only system that I can mount (without too much pain because people have figured it out) any filesystem, I can virtually open every document from Mac to Windows to Linux. I have something close to package control with homebrew. The M chips are ridiculously good at both being decently performant while low energy consumption.
Sure it has its host of issues and I would be the first one in line to dunk on Apple for many many... many many, reasons, but there are things to like with their laptops...
In comparison, recently, Windows has been more and more aggressive towards their users and their data, attempting to lock people in for some spreadsheet editor... Gone are the days of Lotus1-2-3...
Snapping and switching windows is light-years ahead of Windows? It only recently became a little more reasonable, and even then they still kept that idiotic full screen mechanic.
> MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas
At least Windows dignifies you with an error message (even if a hex code and badly tanslated text) when something is wrong. macOS mocks you with a dumb and utterly useless message like "Something went wrong, try again" or "A USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it". Or just flat out not showing the button for the thing you're looking for if prerequisites aren't filled (iPad screen extending, unless the iPad is on the same Apple ID, and has been restarted since, the button just isn't there and there is nothing you can do to debug it other than tryingn to guess what is missing).
Also, Windows allows you to install whatever with a clear UX (this might be dangerous for random crap from the internet vs having to jump through a weird non-existing UX to get it to open, or flat out being blocked from using downloaded libaries).
> The only thing of note they have added to Windows in the last five years is Copilot
That's a quite unfair take, especially when it fails to compare it with what things of note Linux distros have added over the last five years. Valve made Windows emulation better, yes. That's it. What else?
Actually, I wouldn't even call Copilot a thing of note. It's just ChatGPT-in-a-popup at the moment. A real thing of note is WSL2. It's a total game changer.
Windows has got many quality of life improvements over the recent years such as an extremely polished web browser, clipboard history, Windows Sandbox, screen recording, OCR, automatic private info redaction, Markdown support in Notepad and many more. None of those exists on most distros.
Most distros lack the features below, out of the box, which Windows has supported for years:
- "reset this PC" functionality
- a built-in anti-malware
- Touch/Face login
- Ability to enable FDE post-installation
- Hybrid-sleep
- Fast fractional HiDPI scaling
- Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
I agree that Microsoft needs to stop letting product groups get their way with screwing up user comfort on Windows for the sake of their arbitrary goals (like shoving Microsoft accounts, Teams, and anything Electron-based down our throats) and keep it as a solid, bloat-free system that everyone can safely rely on. But, dismissing the existing pros of Windows is just unfair. Despite all the cons, it's still a very good OS.
Disclaimer: I had to switch to Fedora on my old machines because Windows 11 weren't supported on them. That's an exceptionally rare incident where Microsoft dropped the ball on backwards compatibility. But that doesn't mean Windows itself is bad.
Another useful W11 feature (that later got backported to W10) is seamless integration with graphical Linux apps. You can just double click an icon on your desktop and it opens up in a window like any other app. Passkey support was added which made securely signing into site easier. Dev drive was added that makes it so building on windows is faster. Support for low latency Bluetooth was added.
If Windows was "a very good OS", us Windows sysadmins would've been out of a job a long time ago! A good portion of our job involves trying to fix or workaround things that Microsoft breaks every Patch Tuesday, logging tickets with Microsoft, dealing with the asinine Microsoft Support (who don't even know how to extract .cab files from the logs generated by the Microsoft Support Tool!), and implementing fixes and workarounds for unwanted "features" they manage to sneak into the latest update.
Actually, I concede that it is "a very good OS" - it is very good for keeping me employed!
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.
> Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing
While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet. It'll have to happen soon enough that other companies aren't able to pivot in time, and despite what Altman says, I just don't see it happening at that timescale.
> While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet.
And yet, one that Microsoft has the best chances. Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams. Google has its Workspaces thing plus its web wannabe-equivalents to Office, but that's it. And AWS is an infrastructure provider.
Microsoft in contrast? They're everywhere and most importantly, whatever is in Office 365 automatically has the "compliant" checkboxes ticked for auditors. And MS can easily ride the time until AGI or something coming reasonably close to it is marketable on that moat.
> Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams.
Not from my experience. I see product managers/owners and software engineers using Macs more than Windows where I work, and it’s in healthcare, not SV. This move to Mac was gradual, starting ~10 years ago, and I believe a part of this was moving away from native apps to web apps.
"Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams"
Bad take. Apple has a strong presence within the tech and digital agency world. At every company i've worked for (3 tech companies, 1 digital agency), the Macbook is the default issued workstation unless you formally request a Windows laptop.
Some roles, like finance, tax, 3D design, favor Windows but that is generally because certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world.
Microsoft totally dominates non-tech companies though.
Apple's footprint in BigCorp is a drop in the ocean compared to MS. You said it yourself, "certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world". That is intentional and the reason is because of MS dominance in BigCorp. Most makers don't find it worthwhile to spend so much time and resources building software for Apple when it has so few users at that level.
> Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams
Depends on the BigCorp. One of the most quentessential BigCorps out there, IBM, is deep into Apple stuff. As far as publicly shilling for Macs with extremely questionablly extrapolated data - they did a pilot with power users for a year, and came out saying Macs cost less in hardware and support than equivalent Windows Lenovos over the full lifecycle of the machine; which is literally impossible to know a year in a pilot with power users compared to the 4 year lifecycle for all sorts of people.
For the average office task they don’t seem far off being competent, at least to the average workers quality.
Ai builder with gpt5 + workflow triggers is very capable already. 1-2 more model generation hops needed plus a bit more “agent” plumbing before its game over for the excel and word jobs.
Which average office tasks would those be? Writing project proposals? Putting budget numbers into a shared spreadsheet? Composing a progress report? Preparing presentation slides for an executive status update meeting? Writing performance reviews? Taking mandatory compliance training? Going to planning meetings?
One or two of these, I could see. Automated progress reports would be nice. But a lot of them aren’t about document generation, but about human accountability, about being a person who commits to something in writing. Automating away paper pushers means all the accountability lands on their bosses, leaving them nowhere to hide. It will be quite something if we manage to rewrite the corporate social context like this.
I'm very happy that "AGI office workers" will use Microsoft products - so I don't have to do it anymore... But: they will not pay a dime for the licenses...
I prefer fusion power as the go-to vapourware technology. It’s been “10-20 years out” for 70 years and counting.
I don’t see any reason to believe that “AGI office workers” will be ready to go by 2030. All signs right now are pointing to a looming plateau in their capabilities.
> Since we're basically getting flying cars next year at the World Cup
That's so funny. Regular people can't hahndle regular cars. Self-driving cars barely handle 2 dimensional space within very specific confines and rules, in good weather. Existing airspace is congested to the point of being problematic in most metro areas around the world.
"Flying cars" might be replacing some private heliopters, maybe. But they aren't going mainstream any time soon.
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 going to end up like DEC or Xerox so you get things like Windows 8, really a lot of what Microsoft has done since then has been in the same vein. We’re yet to see a “big tech” company die from the FOMO dilemma but maybe 20 years back we’ll see Google or Facebook or Microsoft in that frame.
This more recently happened to IBM (as a computer manufacturer). If your platform is not accessible to hobbyists, the next generation will not be familiar with it, and when they go get a job, it probably won't be with the technology they don't know. Then, assuming there is a credible alternative, the inaccessible technology will die out in a generation, as we've seen with IBM mainframes.
> Then, assuming there is a credible alternative, the inaccessible technology will die out in a generation, as we've seen with IBM mainframes
Unfortunately IBM mainframes are still around. No new customers, but existing ones are too afraid of touching it because it's usually the result of decades of spaghetti hence they're locked in for the forseeble future. So they'll keep renewing contracts and refreshing hardware periodically. IBM prints money with this stuff, and use some of it for all their acquisitions of various software companies (biggest one was Red Hat) to leverage their massive B2B sales org to sell oher stuff to those existing customer relationships.
It sounds like your CTO took the opposite message of the book. Well the modern interpretation anyway. But can't really argue with not rewriting working code, even the Oracle licensing is probably is probably nothing in terms of cost. Might wanna update to a supported version though.
Well, almost the entire book is about how companies like DEC and Xerox just could not move to the new technology, whatever their decision makers decided.
I really don't understand the executives that read it and decide that "yeah, we are doing that impossible thing, disregard the sensible alternatives the book shows or thinking of something new!"
You see this happening right now with LLMs. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc are incredibly worried about being disrupted. But all they can really do is try to shoehorn AI into their existing products (OSes, search, social media), which is a difficult sell to their existing customers.
Ultimately, LLMs will probably find their place in a new product category instead.
Bazzite has been great for me so far except for a few exceptions to okay with friends. With the end of support for 10 and the hostile crap Windows has become, I'm trying to see how to transition. Anti-cheat and business agreements seem to be the only real remaining barriers.
And to the original question: no, consumers are moat to the enterprise licensing pot of gold.
Yes, Microsoft is shifting away from consumer technology.
The difference is Microsoft is squeezing every last drop of profit from consumers on their way out. That’s not debt, that’s an asset.
In 25 years Microsoft will be similar to Oracle. Maybe they’ll have investments in some consumer brands, but largely they will be selling to enterprises and governments.
It might be just a remote UI over "Windows Cloud Eternal" at that point but if by then we've moved to "Apple Forever OS" or "The Eternal Year of the Linux Desktop" I'll make a balanced diet out of hats
If the last 15 years are any indication, in less than 15 years, Microsoft will make Azure Linux their main OS and they'll skin the desktop edition to resurrect Lindows. It'll take a 2-5 years campaign to move most of the remaining Windows user base to it. Oh and also, it'll probably be free.
In 15 years, Windows will still be running hospitals and governments and Linux will have dropped back well below 5% desktop usage because using Linux on the desktop in the modern day is an ideological decision and literally never a technical one
Consumers are leads and beta testers. Microsoft's business is licensing and reselling -- directly and via Azure. Their primary concerns are keeping businesses and developers happy. Consumers are a distant third.
There is value in training consumers on Windows & Office so they are familiar when coming to the office. MS needs to retain endpoint dominance in the workplace. They can't survive on server alone. Windows & Office endpoints are essential to their business. This is the leads channel.
They add pizazz to features and beta test them to consumers . Consumer licensing is moderate revenue but minimal income for Microsoft. Thus consumers are really beta testers.
So Microsoft will continue to provide low quality consumer experiences that don't fit the consumer market that well. The consumer market isn't their goal. It's a means to their actual business.
I agree that a cheap MacBook and the steam machine are presenting a perfect storm situation for windows to lose some serious marketshare with casual/consumer users. Itll be interesting to see how or even if Microsoft reacts to this.
> Microsoft has never been a consumer tech company.
The Zune wasn't consumer tech?
Windows 95 was definitely consumer tech.
Windows XP was about making the Windows NT line accessible for home users going forward.
Weirdly, Windows Phone was aimed at consumers at a time when they really could have leveraged integrations with products like Exchange and Office to stand out.
> Weirdly, Windows Phone was aimed at consumers at a time when they really could have leveraged integrations with products like Exchange and Office to stand out.
This is because a completely under-appreciated apsect of the iPhone revolution was that it basically created the consumer smartphone market. Until then the only smartphone market that existed was the enterprise smartphone market, which was already locked up by BlackBerry and to a significant extent, Windows Mobile (with all the corporate integrations you mention), the predecessor to Windows Phone.
But that market was constrained to the phones that corporations would buy for specific employees, typically execs or senior employees, because the average consumer could not afford those at all. That's a tiny number.
And then the iPhone was originally released at the same price point.
This is why Ballmer was actually right to laugh at the iPhone at the time. The revolutionary UI could not overcome its fundamental unaffordability. I know because I had one through my employer, and I was the object of envy because none of my well-paid, tech-savvy peers in a relatively cosmopolitan major city could afford one.
What happened then was Apple or AT&T figured out that dropping the upfront price to $200 and amortizing the rest of the cost in the data plan suddenly made it accessible to the consumer market. If you look at smartphone sales, that is the point the hockeystick starts curving updwards.
They already had Windows CE and ActiveSync, the bane of many an IT support worker. It might be they expected phones to remain consumer-only, and the business world to keep using PDAs.
Indeed. Previously, every Patch Tuesday we used to pray that nothing would break in that patch cycle. Now we expect that things _will_ break, but hope that that whatever Microsoft breaks won't affect us, or is something minor, or gets patched quickly.
Also, thelast few months have been a nightmare for or us as we were doing our migrations to Windows 11 and found how much of a steaming pile of poo it was - I mean, we already had an inclination, but it was even worse than the rumours. Never seen a shittier OS in my life, and that's even after considering Windows ME.
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 opportunity open for a new desktop OS. Would anyone dare offer a commercially supported consumer Linux OS?
How I see it is, of course you won't have a good time with Linux if you don't have compatible hardware. The stuff you're mentioning (flaky Wifi and Bluetooth) is a hallmark symptom of incompatible hardware, or newer hardware with immature drivers.
I personally use Linux for all my devices, but I'm also very intentional on making sure ALL my hardware is compatible with Linux.
If you have all hardware compatible with the mainline Linux kernel, generally you can achieve a ChromeOS-level of system stability and reliability.
But as soon as you introduce incompatible hardware, all of that goes out the window. It's why I only recommend Linux to users that have compatible hardware.
> But WiFi dies after waking from sleep, and bluetooth worked once then died.
That sounds like a hardware compatibility bug to me and not Bazzite's fault - I don't have those issues on my ThinkPad Z13, nor on my GPD Win Mini 2024.
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.
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.
I don't think gaming is really bigger than windows. Gaming revenue is 23B in 2025 and Windows+Devices is 17B, so just in this metrics they're already close; but you have to factor how much of their 120B Office+Productivity line on their annual report only exist because people use Windows. If you take LinkedIn and Dynamics out of the equation you get approximately 100B in Office, Teams, SharePoint and stuff like that and people only use these product at scale because they're on Windows.
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.
Yeah there's lots of complaining but until they move to linux, stop buying their games and cancel their subscriptions nothing will change in the enshittification path.
What does it mean specifically for the OS? What were the exciting improvements you've noticed that would entice that switch? Is the liquid glass design that is making it harder to read text "costumer first"?
> The third thing is gamers. Gamers use Windows largely because they have to
But also not entirely to game, so the case for an OS where almost all the basics/apps are even worse, why would they switch?
I think of it a different way. The consumer market (if Microsoft doesn’t value it) is holding them back from paying tech debt. The fear of regressions is a good reason to not touch stuff.
If you do value a market and ignore this, the consequences can be fatal (see Sonos). But if you don’t, then doing the minimum is rational.
I actually think Microsoft is often ahead of it's time with it's consumer-facing products, but executes very poorly. So they have good foresight, but "very bad taste" when it comes to execution.
Microsoft was early to making tablets, smartphones, living room PCs, etc. They just royally screw up the execution of each product category every time.
Maybe it'd be a fun idea for to take some of Microsoft's failed consumer ideas, and revisit them 10-15 years later to see if some other company successfully executes on it.
The way Microsoft are ruining Windows makes it seem like enterprise users are the tech debt they want to get rid off. Like making their servers non-deterministic by serving random ads or leaking secret content to their AI. It makes sense that they would rather have their customers run Linux on Azure, so they don't have to do R&D for their own OS.
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).
> VSCode (polished, fast, ...) and Explorer (paleolithically slow,
In what world is VSCode fast when its startup time is multiples of Explorer (which had in recent news decided to preload itself to mask that issue) and they are the result of exactly the same fundamental shift from native to web native
VSCode starts up the same as any other IDE, and is responsive and snappy when using it. Explorer starts up about 100 times slower than any other file explorer, and is exceptionally while using it too.
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.
Did you turn off Microsoft Defender for the relevant directories? Otherwise you might be measuring malware scan performance more than compiler performance.
Fifteen years ago every piece of hardware supported windows and windows was arguably more friendly for casual developers than Linux with things like Visual Basic and Delphi so a lot of novel and very custom software was written (guilty as charged). The good thing is that most of these still work, as windows has thankfully not fucked with the underlying Win32 libraries. The bad thing is that this one piece of custom software was probably written by someone of retirement age and it is probably what's running the company.
This is just life, the same will happen to your latest wiz-bang program you wrote today in ten or fifteen years, good companies insist on the source code and/or plan for obsolescence, others become cash cows for the software industry or die.
People need to have realistic expectations of large corporations.
The old microsoft is dead. It's not coming back. I'm sorry if you used to like what they did - all those people are gone now. Just the name is the same.
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.
Apple is at least in part operating like they are a fashion brand. Functionality and usability are secondary to looks. Both in their devices and their software. It's hard to argue they aren't successful with that.
It probably helps that Microsoft has also abandoned usability, just for very different reasons
Are you complaining that Apple is releasing computers that are fast, quiet and with a ridiculous long battery life that are well built as “not functional”?
I thought it was an Ive problem but once he left nothing really changed. Sure the Mac got some functionality back but that’s about it. They really need to just not do a redesign and flesh out their software.
You mean alienate their desktop users by making chips specifically targeting them that are fast, run cool, quiet and have ridiculously long battery lives?
You’ve seen much more frequent updates in the Mac line post ARM than you did in the Intel era.
> What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market.
It actually kind of makes sense. Apple has stopped caring but Microsoft is actively hostile. You then have people who can afford it switching to Apple, but the higher price deters everyone who can't, which in turn reduces the pressure on Microsoft to clean up their act.
The interesting thing is Linux. It's starting from a smaller base but in the last couple of years the growth rate is even higher than macOS.
> 1. The Apple experience, at least on the OS side, matters less and less in the webapp world.
I see it the opposite. At least for iPhone owners Universal Clipboard and file sharing with Airdrop are killer apps.
On android, KDE Connect felt great for basic copy/pasting/file transfer between devices.
https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
On iOS, KDE Connect feels like its running a potato sack race with both arms tied behind its back.
I didn't really get it until I Airdropped a shipping label PDF to the guy at the UPS store to print from his phone, which was already set up for the label printer.
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.
The question is not whether MacOS is ahead of Windows. As an Apple user since the Apple IIe, I agree it's still the best OS by a mile.
But that has basically always been true, at least since Mac OS X. (I liked the earlier OSes too, but they really did crash all the time and have no memory protection, so arguably Windows had some compelling advantages.)
The interesting question is whether recent MacOS releases are ahead of their previous versions. Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about. Maybe dark mode?
The hardware keeps better, and the experience of third-party apps I care about (VS Code and Ableton) is superior to Windows. But the OS and first-party apps seem completely stagnant.
Which, arguably, is OK. Maybe the OS should just be a commodity. But I have to imagine that there are user experience improvements they could make at the OS but I certainly haven't seen any.
> Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about.
They all kind of blend together, so I asked Claude to give me a list of major features since 2020. Here are those that I've enjoyed:
* Universal control * iPhone mirroring * Stage Manager * Container CLI
Granted it's not a giant list, but each release does have little refinements here and there, and Claude may have missed some (it didn't mention container CLI, for instance; that was from my memory). I also omitted some features I don't care about (like Safari profiles and some other window management stuff).
What features are you hoping for? Aside from a tiling WM, which won't happen, I'd be happy just with refinements and bug fixes.
I bought a MacBook last year. The amount of stupid bugs is insane. Safari eating text input, Safari simply not connecting to internet after several days (while chrome is working well). I have to restart my Mac more often than I had to restart my last Windows machine, because it simply grinds to a halt (with a frickin' M4 Max processor)
Yea, Safari 26.1 is really buggy for me on macOS 15. Google searching the issue, lots of my issues are fixed int he 26.2 beta, I had to download beta from apple developer website.
After two decades of relentless effort, Apple has finally managed to make Spotlight as broken and useless as Windows Search where it doesn't find local files and just returns web results.
macOS daily driver for last 5 years because the hardware is better; I can stay unplugged for almost my entire workday.
Lots of things irk me about macOS UX. Finder's lack of tree view sidebar really irks me. Having to disable the silly animations and sounds when I get a new machine irks me. The absolutely terrible window tiling system irks me. When I minimize a window, I can no longer tab into it. The settings dialog's weird behavior with respect to resizing on both axes irks me. Can't use 3 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and the secondary monitors end up with limited refresh rate options. Meanwhile, I can just plug just about any dock into my 5 year old Windows laptop and multiple monitors just work. Still can't find anything as good as IrfanView (as old and dated as it is, it made working with image libraries a breeze).
Finder and the poor external monitor support somehow irks me the most because now I end up typing into the CLI 90% of the time because the navigation experience is so bad and for me this is a work machine and the difficulty in using 3+ monitors is silly.
I get being an Apple Stan (love the hardware), but the software UX is 100% bottom of the barrel stuff. Basic OS stuff like Explorer is just light years ahead of Finder.
It's telling that to defend Apple against the charge of stagnation you immediately attacked Windows.
They only attacked Windows at the very end of their statement.
And I mean... They're not wrong.
I use a Mac for work, but also use windows and Linux machines.
The best experience hands down when it comes to specific things would be Linux, for very niche things because it's way less clunky than it used to and people have figured things out in the meantime.
My mac is the only system that I can mount (without too much pain because people have figured it out) any filesystem, I can virtually open every document from Mac to Windows to Linux. I have something close to package control with homebrew. The M chips are ridiculously good at both being decently performant while low energy consumption.
Sure it has its host of issues and I would be the first one in line to dunk on Apple for many many... many many, reasons, but there are things to like with their laptops...
In comparison, recently, Windows has been more and more aggressive towards their users and their data, attempting to lock people in for some spreadsheet editor... Gone are the days of Lotus1-2-3...
And the second sentence.
Windows 7 is the last good one. And that is only... Oh, almost 20 years ago. Never mind.
Windows 7 was supported until 10 years ago.
If light years means not inundate the OS with ads, shove AI down our throats and redesign every app with regressed UX, then sure.
Snapping and switching windows is light-years ahead of Windows? It only recently became a little more reasonable, and even then they still kept that idiotic full screen mechanic.
> MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas
At least Windows dignifies you with an error message (even if a hex code and badly tanslated text) when something is wrong. macOS mocks you with a dumb and utterly useless message like "Something went wrong, try again" or "A USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it". Or just flat out not showing the button for the thing you're looking for if prerequisites aren't filled (iPad screen extending, unless the iPad is on the same Apple ID, and has been restarted since, the button just isn't there and there is nothing you can do to debug it other than tryingn to guess what is missing).
Also, Windows allows you to install whatever with a clear UX (this might be dangerous for random crap from the internet vs having to jump through a weird non-existing UX to get it to open, or flat out being blocked from using downloaded libaries).
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> The only thing of note they have added to Windows in the last five years is Copilot
That's a quite unfair take, especially when it fails to compare it with what things of note Linux distros have added over the last five years. Valve made Windows emulation better, yes. That's it. What else?
Actually, I wouldn't even call Copilot a thing of note. It's just ChatGPT-in-a-popup at the moment. A real thing of note is WSL2. It's a total game changer.
Windows has got many quality of life improvements over the recent years such as an extremely polished web browser, clipboard history, Windows Sandbox, screen recording, OCR, automatic private info redaction, Markdown support in Notepad and many more. None of those exists on most distros.
Most distros lack the features below, out of the box, which Windows has supported for years:
- "reset this PC" functionality
- a built-in anti-malware
- Touch/Face login
- Ability to enable FDE post-installation
- Hybrid-sleep
- Fast fractional HiDPI scaling
- Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
I agree that Microsoft needs to stop letting product groups get their way with screwing up user comfort on Windows for the sake of their arbitrary goals (like shoving Microsoft accounts, Teams, and anything Electron-based down our throats) and keep it as a solid, bloat-free system that everyone can safely rely on. But, dismissing the existing pros of Windows is just unfair. Despite all the cons, it's still a very good OS.
Disclaimer: I had to switch to Fedora on my old machines because Windows 11 weren't supported on them. That's an exceptionally rare incident where Microsoft dropped the ball on backwards compatibility. But that doesn't mean Windows itself is bad.
Another useful W11 feature (that later got backported to W10) is seamless integration with graphical Linux apps. You can just double click an icon on your desktop and it opens up in a window like any other app. Passkey support was added which made securely signing into site easier. Dev drive was added that makes it so building on windows is faster. Support for low latency Bluetooth was added.
Clipboard history? Screen recording? Polished web browser? And none of these are available on most distros?
I think you ought to try "most distros" before making such claims.
> Despite all the cons, it's still a very good OS.
I disagree, "a very good OS" wouldn't leave major issues unfixed for 5+ months and counting: https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-finally-admits-almost-...
If Windows was "a very good OS", us Windows sysadmins would've been out of a job a long time ago! A good portion of our job involves trying to fix or workaround things that Microsoft breaks every Patch Tuesday, logging tickets with Microsoft, dealing with the asinine Microsoft Support (who don't even know how to extract .cab files from the logs generated by the Microsoft Support Tool!), and implementing fixes and workarounds for unwanted "features" they manage to sneak into the latest update.
Actually, I concede that it is "a very good OS" - it is very good for keeping me employed!
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.
Relevant: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsofts-head-of-ai-do...
> Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing
While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet. It'll have to happen soon enough that other companies aren't able to pivot in time, and despite what Altman says, I just don't see it happening at that timescale.
> While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet.
And yet, one that Microsoft has the best chances. Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams. Google has its Workspaces thing plus its web wannabe-equivalents to Office, but that's it. And AWS is an infrastructure provider.
Microsoft in contrast? They're everywhere and most importantly, whatever is in Office 365 automatically has the "compliant" checkboxes ticked for auditors. And MS can easily ride the time until AGI or something coming reasonably close to it is marketable on that moat.
> Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams.
Not from my experience. I see product managers/owners and software engineers using Macs more than Windows where I work, and it’s in healthcare, not SV. This move to Mac was gradual, starting ~10 years ago, and I believe a part of this was moving away from native apps to web apps.
"Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams"
Bad take. Apple has a strong presence within the tech and digital agency world. At every company i've worked for (3 tech companies, 1 digital agency), the Macbook is the default issued workstation unless you formally request a Windows laptop.
Some roles, like finance, tax, 3D design, favor Windows but that is generally because certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world.
Microsoft totally dominates non-tech companies though.
Apple's footprint in BigCorp is a drop in the ocean compared to MS. You said it yourself, "certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world". That is intentional and the reason is because of MS dominance in BigCorp. Most makers don't find it worthwhile to spend so much time and resources building software for Apple when it has so few users at that level.
> Bad take. Apple has a strong presence within the tech and digital agency world.
Oh I'm aware, working at a digital agency myself. But that's not the "bigco" world aka S&P 500, DAX and the likes.
> Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams
Depends on the BigCorp. One of the most quentessential BigCorps out there, IBM, is deep into Apple stuff. As far as publicly shilling for Macs with extremely questionablly extrapolated data - they did a pilot with power users for a year, and came out saying Macs cost less in hardware and support than equivalent Windows Lenovos over the full lifecycle of the machine; which is literally impossible to know a year in a pilot with power users compared to the 4 year lifecycle for all sorts of people.
For the average office task they don’t seem far off being competent, at least to the average workers quality.
Ai builder with gpt5 + workflow triggers is very capable already. 1-2 more model generation hops needed plus a bit more “agent” plumbing before its game over for the excel and word jobs.
Which average office tasks would those be? Writing project proposals? Putting budget numbers into a shared spreadsheet? Composing a progress report? Preparing presentation slides for an executive status update meeting? Writing performance reviews? Taking mandatory compliance training? Going to planning meetings?
One or two of these, I could see. Automated progress reports would be nice. But a lot of them aren’t about document generation, but about human accountability, about being a person who commits to something in writing. Automating away paper pushers means all the accountability lands on their bosses, leaving them nowhere to hide. It will be quite something if we manage to rewrite the corporate social context like this.
I'm very happy that "AGI office workers" will use Microsoft products - so I don't have to do it anymore... But: they will not pay a dime for the licenses...
Why don't we see companies adopting this setup with offshore workers if it's that "seamless" and easy to get started?
> when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing
How many more weeks? Also, is this before or after flying cars?
Looking like 2028-2030 but it's a moving target.
Since we're basically getting flying cars next year at the World Cup, I guess it's going to be after flying cars.
I prefer fusion power as the go-to vapourware technology. It’s been “10-20 years out” for 70 years and counting.
I don’t see any reason to believe that “AGI office workers” will be ready to go by 2030. All signs right now are pointing to a looming plateau in their capabilities.
Fusion is always years away because funding has been at or below the minimal "fusion never" levels since the '70s: https://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion_plan_1976.pdf
Fusion has halved the "interval until we get it" on those 50 years. AGI has doubled the "interval until we get it" twice already since 2022.
Those things are not the same kind of vaporware.
Ok Elon.
> Since we're basically getting flying cars next year at the World Cup
That's so funny. Regular people can't hahndle regular cars. Self-driving cars barely handle 2 dimensional space within very specific confines and rules, in good weather. Existing airspace is congested to the point of being problematic in most metro areas around the world.
"Flying cars" might be replacing some private heliopters, maybe. But they aren't going mainstream any time soon.
A new Turing test: when all the AGI worker bots would rather gargle razor blades than use Microsoft Teams, we might be close.
>use Microsoft Teams
Shit like this make rogue AI scenarios totally plausible. I won't wish that on my worst enemy
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 going to end up like DEC or Xerox so you get things like Windows 8, really a lot of what Microsoft has done since then has been in the same vein. We’re yet to see a “big tech” company die from the FOMO dilemma but maybe 20 years back we’ll see Google or Facebook or Microsoft in that frame.
This more recently happened to IBM (as a computer manufacturer). If your platform is not accessible to hobbyists, the next generation will not be familiar with it, and when they go get a job, it probably won't be with the technology they don't know. Then, assuming there is a credible alternative, the inaccessible technology will die out in a generation, as we've seen with IBM mainframes.
Yes, many companies even start with hobbyist tools. IBM proves that going all B2B is not a good idea.
The other end of the problem is Apple which is a consumer company, but they prohibit companies to use their hardware for building new things.
Both approaches suck for consumers and/or startups, but Apple's approach at least works for them from a business perspective.
> Then, assuming there is a credible alternative, the inaccessible technology will die out in a generation, as we've seen with IBM mainframes
Unfortunately IBM mainframes are still around. No new customers, but existing ones are too afraid of touching it because it's usually the result of decades of spaghetti hence they're locked in for the forseeble future. So they'll keep renewing contracts and refreshing hardware periodically. IBM prints money with this stuff, and use some of it for all their acquisitions of various software companies (biggest one was Red Hat) to leverage their massive B2B sales org to sell oher stuff to those existing customer relationships.
The “CTO” at my small employer used this book to explain why we needed to stick with Perl and Oracle 9i in 2020.
It sounds like your CTO took the opposite message of the book. Well the modern interpretation anyway. But can't really argue with not rewriting working code, even the Oracle licensing is probably is probably nothing in terms of cost. Might wanna update to a supported version though.
Well, almost the entire book is about how companies like DEC and Xerox just could not move to the new technology, whatever their decision makers decided.
I really don't understand the executives that read it and decide that "yeah, we are doing that impossible thing, disregard the sensible alternatives the book shows or thinking of something new!"
You see this happening right now with LLMs. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc are incredibly worried about being disrupted. But all they can really do is try to shoehorn AI into their existing products (OSes, search, social media), which is a difficult sell to their existing customers.
Ultimately, LLMs will probably find their place in a new product category instead.
Link to Worldcat book information: https://search.worldcat.org/title/1423132421
Alibris link: https://www.alibris.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-When-New-Tech...
thanks, gp's google link was unusable for me (apparently my activity is unusual)
> a version of Linux that is optimized for gamers
Bazzite has been great for me so far except for a few exceptions to okay with friends. With the end of support for 10 and the hostile crap Windows has become, I'm trying to see how to transition. Anti-cheat and business agreements seem to be the only real remaining barriers.
And to the original question: no, consumers are moat to the enterprise licensing pot of gold.
No, consumers are not tech debt to Microsoft.
Yes, Microsoft is shifting away from consumer technology.
The difference is Microsoft is squeezing every last drop of profit from consumers on their way out. That’s not debt, that’s an asset.
In 25 years Microsoft will be similar to Oracle. Maybe they’ll have investments in some consumer brands, but largely they will be selling to enterprises and governments.
I'm young, I'll take that bet. In 25 years windows will still have greater than 50% consumer computer marketshare out of sheer momentum.
I'd be very surprised if "consumer computer" will be anything but a niche thing in 25 years.
I have been hearing the same for the last 20 years, if not longer, and yet the consumer computer remains strong.
It might be just a remote UI over "Windows Cloud Eternal" at that point but if by then we've moved to "Apple Forever OS" or "The Eternal Year of the Linux Desktop" I'll make a balanced diet out of hats
What are you calling a consumer computer? Microsoft does not have >50% market today, I don't think it will actually grow its marketshare.
If the last 15 years are any indication, in less than 15 years, Microsoft will make Azure Linux their main OS and they'll skin the desktop edition to resurrect Lindows. It'll take a 2-5 years campaign to move most of the remaining Windows user base to it. Oh and also, it'll probably be free.
In 15 years, Windows will still be running hospitals and governments and Linux will have dropped back well below 5% desktop usage because using Linux on the desktop in the modern day is an ideological decision and literally never a technical one
Consumers are leads and beta testers. Microsoft's business is licensing and reselling -- directly and via Azure. Their primary concerns are keeping businesses and developers happy. Consumers are a distant third.
There is value in training consumers on Windows & Office so they are familiar when coming to the office. MS needs to retain endpoint dominance in the workplace. They can't survive on server alone. Windows & Office endpoints are essential to their business. This is the leads channel.
They add pizazz to features and beta test them to consumers . Consumer licensing is moderate revenue but minimal income for Microsoft. Thus consumers are really beta testers.
So Microsoft will continue to provide low quality consumer experiences that don't fit the consumer market that well. The consumer market isn't their goal. It's a means to their actual business.
I agree that a cheap MacBook and the steam machine are presenting a perfect storm situation for windows to lose some serious marketshare with casual/consumer users. Itll be interesting to see how or even if Microsoft reacts to this.
Microsoft dropping the ball on smartphones is their real problem.
Desktops are on the way out for consumers.
> 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 thinks it was different at any time in the past.
> Microsoft has never been a consumer tech company.
The Zune wasn't consumer tech?
Windows 95 was definitely consumer tech.
Windows XP was about making the Windows NT line accessible for home users going forward.
Weirdly, Windows Phone was aimed at consumers at a time when they really could have leveraged integrations with products like Exchange and Office to stand out.
> Weirdly, Windows Phone was aimed at consumers at a time when they really could have leveraged integrations with products like Exchange and Office to stand out.
This is because a completely under-appreciated apsect of the iPhone revolution was that it basically created the consumer smartphone market. Until then the only smartphone market that existed was the enterprise smartphone market, which was already locked up by BlackBerry and to a significant extent, Windows Mobile (with all the corporate integrations you mention), the predecessor to Windows Phone.
But that market was constrained to the phones that corporations would buy for specific employees, typically execs or senior employees, because the average consumer could not afford those at all. That's a tiny number.
And then the iPhone was originally released at the same price point.
This is why Ballmer was actually right to laugh at the iPhone at the time. The revolutionary UI could not overcome its fundamental unaffordability. I know because I had one through my employer, and I was the object of envy because none of my well-paid, tech-savvy peers in a relatively cosmopolitan major city could afford one.
What happened then was Apple or AT&T figured out that dropping the upfront price to $200 and amortizing the rest of the cost in the data plan suddenly made it accessible to the consumer market. If you look at smartphone sales, that is the point the hockeystick starts curving updwards.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
They already had Windows CE and ActiveSync, the bane of many an IT support worker. It might be they expected phones to remain consumer-only, and the business world to keep using PDAs.
They’re angering corporations too.
Those risk-adverse behemoths are slowly coming to terms with Microsoft breaking their platforms and bread-and-butter applications.
Indeed. Previously, every Patch Tuesday we used to pray that nothing would break in that patch cycle. Now we expect that things _will_ break, but hope that that whatever Microsoft breaks won't affect us, or is something minor, or gets patched quickly.
Also, thelast few months have been a nightmare for or us as we were doing our migrations to Windows 11 and found how much of a steaming pile of poo it was - I mean, we already had an inclination, but it was even worse than the rumours. Never seen a shittier OS in my life, and that's even after considering Windows ME.
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 opportunity open for a new desktop OS. Would anyone dare offer a commercially supported consumer Linux OS?
How I see it is, of course you won't have a good time with Linux if you don't have compatible hardware. The stuff you're mentioning (flaky Wifi and Bluetooth) is a hallmark symptom of incompatible hardware, or newer hardware with immature drivers.
I personally use Linux for all my devices, but I'm also very intentional on making sure ALL my hardware is compatible with Linux.
If you have all hardware compatible with the mainline Linux kernel, generally you can achieve a ChromeOS-level of system stability and reliability.
But as soon as you introduce incompatible hardware, all of that goes out the window. It's why I only recommend Linux to users that have compatible hardware.
> But WiFi dies after waking from sleep, and bluetooth worked once then died.
That sounds like a hardware compatibility bug to me and not Bazzite's fault - I don't have those issues on my ThinkPad Z13, nor on my GPD Win Mini 2024.
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.
2026 will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop!
With Android 17 coming with desktop mode, there is a good chance of that.
I am, unironically, considering this for my dad's computer: https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/
ChromeOS just works, go for it.
Because Windows 11 has ads in the start menu, we decided to switch to an OS made by the biggest online ad company. /s
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.
I don't think gaming is really bigger than windows. Gaming revenue is 23B in 2025 and Windows+Devices is 17B, so just in this metrics they're already close; but you have to factor how much of their 120B Office+Productivity line on their annual report only exist because people use Windows. If you take LinkedIn and Dynamics out of the equation you get approximately 100B in Office, Teams, SharePoint and stuff like that and people only use these product at scale because they're on Windows.
Microsoft is pushing the web-based O365 really hard tho.
Yes, the article should really be titled "Is Windows just tech debt to Microsoft?" and could have been published five or six years ago.
It would be a short article.
“Yah”
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.
Yeah there's lots of complaining but until they move to linux, stop buying their games and cancel their subscriptions nothing will change in the enshittification path.
> Considering Apple’s focus on consumers first
What does it mean specifically for the OS? What were the exciting improvements you've noticed that would entice that switch? Is the liquid glass design that is making it harder to read text "costumer first"?
> The third thing is gamers. Gamers use Windows largely because they have to
But also not entirely to game, so the case for an OS where almost all the basics/apps are even worse, why would they switch?
Most people I know under 30 are either running games or chrome. Word-processing etc (the odd tune they need it) is all in the browser
I think of it a different way. The consumer market (if Microsoft doesn’t value it) is holding them back from paying tech debt. The fear of regressions is a good reason to not touch stuff.
If you do value a market and ignore this, the consequences can be fatal (see Sonos). But if you don’t, then doing the minimum is rational.
I think it’s just like Steve Jobs said: they have no taste. That never changed and it causes them to fail time and again with innovations
I actually think Microsoft is often ahead of it's time with it's consumer-facing products, but executes very poorly. So they have good foresight, but "very bad taste" when it comes to execution.
Microsoft was early to making tablets, smartphones, living room PCs, etc. They just royally screw up the execution of each product category every time.
Maybe it'd be a fun idea for to take some of Microsoft's failed consumer ideas, and revisit them 10-15 years later to see if some other company successfully executes on it.
The problem with the last 15 years of Windows is the way that Microsoft did touch it, a lot.
Not rick roll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZSkM-QEeUg
The way Microsoft are ruining Windows makes it seem like enterprise users are the tech debt they want to get rid off. Like making their servers non-deterministic by serving random ads or leaking secret content to their AI. It makes sense that they would rather have their customers run Linux on Azure, so they don't have to do R&D for their own OS.
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).
> VSCode (polished, fast, ...) and Explorer (paleolithically slow,
In what world is VSCode fast when its startup time is multiples of Explorer (which had in recent news decided to preload itself to mask that issue) and they are the result of exactly the same fundamental shift from native to web native
VSCode starts up the same as any other IDE, and is responsive and snappy when using it. Explorer starts up about 100 times slower than any other file explorer, and is exceptionally while using it too.
The competition is IntelliJ, which can be slow as molasses.
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...
Did you turn off Microsoft Defender for the relevant directories? Otherwise you might be measuring malware scan performance more than compiler performance.
These are interesting results! You should post this without burying the lede that a 4 yo M1 outperforms a top of the line new intel laptop.
Some of that may be due to cpu architecture differences. What you have done is more or less an apples to oranges comparison.
No, Microsoft products are the tech debt everywhere
Someone should come up with an alternative
Fifteen years ago every piece of hardware supported windows and windows was arguably more friendly for casual developers than Linux with things like Visual Basic and Delphi so a lot of novel and very custom software was written (guilty as charged). The good thing is that most of these still work, as windows has thankfully not fucked with the underlying Win32 libraries. The bad thing is that this one piece of custom software was probably written by someone of retirement age and it is probably what's running the company.
This is just life, the same will happen to your latest wiz-bang program you wrote today in ten or fifteen years, good companies insist on the source code and/or plan for obsolescence, others become cash cows for the software industry or die.
If the government forced Microsoft to divest itself from Windows, I'm not sure Microsoft wouldn't be thankful for the excuse to jettison it.
People need to have realistic expectations of large corporations.
The old microsoft is dead. It's not coming back. I'm sorry if you used to like what they did - all those people are gone now. Just the name is the same.