Microsoft Death Spiral: Microsoft’s latest layoffs (there have been many thousands and entire divisions in the past two years) fires 200 employees “working to win back customers”.
They were told to find another open job at Microsoft (during a hiring freeze) or take the severance pay.
The customers who they were trying to “win back” were apparently the ones who fled to the Mac, Chrome OS, and GNU/Linux. It’s been enough to reduce the Windows desktop marketshare to only 64.4% according to PornHub’s statistics from the end of 2021.
My guess is they’ve probably lost another percentage point or two since then.
The Windows 11 rollout was such a disaster that Macs, Chrome OS, and GNU/Linux are converting more Windows 10 users than Windows 11 is.
On top of being the biggest piece of shit operating system from Microsoft in decades, in ways that even Windows 10 wasn’t, Windows 11 also set high system requirements like TPM 2.0 and Intel processors no older than 2018, which has further hampered uptake.
More people are on to this scheme than ever. Wondering why they should throw out a computer that’s plenty fast, during a dead economy where they could be the next layoff (and even if they aren’t, their landlord, utility companies, and the grocery store want ~11% more money this year), just so that Microsoft and Intel can stick it to them again.
Microsoft always downplays how bad things are really going. They’re basically on a hiring freeze, so the tens of thousands of layoffs only tell part of the story.
(Chicago was doing the same thing as it went broke from years of horrible Democrat mismanagement. As people left their city jobs, the mayors have quietly come back and cut the open position so they can get payroll down without fighting the union or making it obvious what they did.)
The article also mentions that Microsoft brought in a former Uber executive (Uber broke the laws all over the world to illegally undercut public transit and cabs and then jack up prices, then destroyed the evidence) to manage the Consumer products division.
The Microsoft brand is already toxic. They bought Skype and people stopped using it for the most part. I haven’t had a Skype video call in years.
They lock Firefox out of it (even though a user agent hack lets you back in) and behave like it’s a product people are actually using, but it’s basically a failed acquisition.
If they buy Discord or TikTok the same thing is going to happen. Trump tried to destroy TikTok to force a Microsoft acquisition at fire sale prices so that Microsoft could be hoarding your data and misusing it instead of the Chinese government.
Discord is a malicious mess.
IRC can’t “centrally ban” you. You could be banned from a “server”, but since IRC has real servers and real people own them, you can still use the rest. Discord already does nasty things to spy on their users and mistreat them, and would not likely get better under Microsoft.
I get greatly annoyed when Mom sends me something on Pinterest assuming I can access it on my phone. It wants me to install an app, which is even worse than their Web site, which is a pile of JavaShit that demands you to log in and identify yourself, like Twitter.
Microsoft tries to paint a rosy picture of XBOX and “Office 365”, however their Office division lead told hiring managers that they’re on lockdown too and be very careful how many you hire. Why do that if you’re doing well?
When I had an XBOX 360, I went through 8 consoles before finally selling my eighth refurbished unit on Craigslist. I wrote about it on my old blog.
The things were overheating junk. But the XBOX One is actually even worse. Now they want you to download or install entire games which won’t work on other consoles (DRM) and where you can’t have an unlimited number of them (due to hard drive space).
The other day on one of my chats, someone said he was looking to buy a used XBOX One “if someone still has one that works”.
My Sega Genesis still works and it’s more than 30 years old and this guy is going “if it still works” to describe something that can’t be more than 9 years old even if it was a launch unit, which they have “updated” several times and still sell.
In addition to Microsoft infesting the XBOX division with “SKU-itis” like they do with Windows and most of their other products, they encourage you to use battery-operated controllers so the controller can randomly go dead.
(I still use an XBOX 360 Wired Controller with my PC.)
PC gaming (most XBOX games are bad PC ports) has become a soulless cash grab. We used to be madder than Hell if we spent money on a game that was just bad or needed to be debugged some more, but now they’re usually $80 and then require micro-transactions as well.
Many of my games on the PC are classic console emulators.
Unfortunately, everyone who has sat down to rewrite the Genesis stuff in modern C or C++ and release it under some sort of Free Software license has given up and KEGA Fusion is proprietary and abandoned and does not appear to recognize my controller, forcing me to drop the Windows version into Wine, which can map the controller to whatever it is shit API Windows is using this year.
Some others are Steam games that have been “broken” by me deliberately such that they can’t reach out to the network and self-update.
I think Microsoft’s days of growing consumer markets are over, and that’s why they fired this entire division. They’ve been paying them for 4 years already and it hasn’t helped them on any front yet.
XBOX division has got to be capped by now and their entire strategy for growing profit is to grab the same consumers they already have by the balls and squeeze harder.
It’s difficult for the public to actually know what “Cloud” computing is, so Microsoft has rebranded everything to say “Cloud” so they can disguise what’s doing poorly from their financial reports.
US taxpayers are being forced to repeatedly bail Microsoft products out. They fired their entire “HoLOLens” division after Biden’s plan to make the US Army buy “HoLOLens” units it didn’t want fell through, but they can keep figuring out ways to shove billions into Microsoft like that bullshit “JEDI” program the Pentagon (which has unlimited funding with no scrutiny) has in mind while our actual military readiness continues to suffer.
In many ways, the “big picture” of Microsoft, to me at least, is failing company that’s still sitting on some cash, but is radically downsizing by stealth and staggered layoff rounds to try to keep the act up for a while longer.
Successful companies don’t slam the brakes on hiring, shut down division after division, and tell allegedly successful business units to be “very careful” about hiring while saying in their SEC report that they expect that division to do well in the future.
They have been busy committing public corruption and trying to shuffle things around to become Too Big To Fail.
So in that regard, they probably won’t go out of business even with a seemingly endless parade of consumer product disasters like Windows RT, Windows Phone, Kin, Kinect, Skype, the entire Microsoft Retail division, “HoLOLens”, Zune, Groove Music, TerraServer, Band, Bing (which bribes people to use it and still can’t gain marketshare), dozens of others big and small, and the declining revenue stream (and relevance) of Windows itself. (Wine and Proton copied most of the important Windows APIs and let you use them on a reliable OS base.)
However, their consumer market outlook is laughable because consumers have choices now and they don’t like the products they’re being offered, and they’re not a government that can steal Other People’s Money and use it to buy things that aren’t any good.
When I evaluate something for my own use, it obviously has to work. I don’t want halfassed operating systems full of decades of bloat and virus-enabling cruft like Internet Explorer, which is STILL there. So apparently, there’s enough people who think like I do that Microsoft realized they were wasting their time.
Intel and companies like Lenovo are married to Microsoft because they’d only sell replacements for hardware that broke down if everyone switched to GNU/Linux. Profits would be halved overnight. They’d be ruined without all of the e-waste that Microsoft causes.
This is why they’ve been such a reliable partner in crime with things like UEFI and “Secure Boot”.
But finally, at long last, even that’s not enough. ⬆