Reprinted with permission from Ryan

PornHub Insights for 2022 [NSFW] show Microsoft’s Consumer Division in Shambles.

For people who don’t want to click through to PornHub, here are the “SFW” highlights on the technology front.

Normally, I wouldn’t cite them but they collect a large sample of very high quality data about people from all over the world. I feel that they are uniquely, errrm, positioned, to tell us what’s going on.

In light of the 11,000 layoffs just announced at Microsoft, and rumors of a bigger round later this year (the 11,000 were rumors until they weren’t), it’s worth considering why this is happening.

Microsoft’s consumer division is, in a word, collapsing.

Desktop PC usage is down 6% from 2021 to 2022, and Windows is only 64.7% of that.

XBOX fell to only 1/4 of the gaming console market, vs Playstation at nearly 3/4ths, by browser hits. (2021 was 60.6% Playstation and 36.8% XBOX)

Microsoft has no operating system for Mobile, unless you count bribing / threatening Samsung to destroy their brand by preloading crapware that pissed everyone off, and Samsung Internet (the preloaded browser on their phones) has lost over 25% of its mobile marketshare YoY, which I’d suppose is probably a proxy for all of the people ditching annoying buggy Samsung phones with Microsoft garbage, like I did.

Microsoft has been missing the boat on everything, and is a reactive, not proactive, company. Had Windows Mobile been a priority before Android and iPhone, they might have a presence now, but they’ve been reduced to paying off and threatening Spammy Samsung into including their sad “apps”.

Samsung phones are very slow and glitchy, and a lot of that is, you know, not moving in the right direction. It has become a common carrier for malicious software that you can’t get rid of, including hidden Facebook system services that spy on people, even without Facebook accounts. I switched to a Google Pixel last year, and they’re much better. You lie down with dogs, you get fleas. So much for Spamsung.

In Microsoft’s reduced circumstances, they’ve decided to “force the issue” and “discontinue Internet Explorer”.

This Edge thing turned out to be a major strategic blunder that they are now committed to. It’s still there, rotting in the guts of Windows 11 and adding security problems, but they’ve removed all of the convenient ways to launch it.

Despite Internet Explorer falling 69% 🙂 in a single year, Microsoft Edge failed to budge on the desktop. Firefox and Safari actually took a meaningful share on the desktop.

This appears to be because people are buying Macs or not even getting a desktop computer at all and are heading straight to an iPhone.

Since PC sales are in the dumps, (6% drop in hits to PornHub in 2022) and with them Windows license revenues drop even if it remains at 64.7% on the desktop, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a lot of those 11,000 layoffs at Microsoft were in Windows.

We already know that a lot of them happened to the Microsoft Edge team because it leaked out on Twitter.

Teams Impacted by Layoff on 1/18/2023

@tomwarren Twitter is reporting Microsoft’s layoffs today have affected employees in the following divisions:

● HoloLens
● Microsoft Edge
● marketing
● 343 Industries
● Bethesda

-TheLayoff.com

This is the second round of Microsoft Edge layoffs.

The first round was last year, when they whacked a bunch of XBOX people at the same time.

There’s really no use for Edge except to route people to their crappy off brand search engine and give them 3 screens of advertisements before any “results” and they scooped out Google’s spyware and put in Microsoft spyware.

They marketed Edge as “saving you money with price comparisons”, and it’s usually offering you the wrong thing on some other site, and that’s an aside anyway because it’s just another way that their browser is obviously spying on you, keylogging, and password stealing. (There was a scandal a while back where Windows gives all your passwords from Firefox or Chrome to Edge anyway even if you said no.)

Things are going so badly for Microsoft right now that they sacked their paid army of “come back to Windows trolls” last year, over 200 of them on their official payroll.

Things aren’t just “getting” bad at Microsoft, this is 1990 in the Soviet Union. The Berlin wall had come down and there was still denial, there were still a lot of people projecting confidence that “reforms” would make the whole thing go on somehow, but it was on borrowed time.

Very soon, they may even have to stop running the welfare programs for their army of unofficial trolls, like ZDNet and “Debian Stabbers”.

The situation in Azure/”Cloud” isn’t very good. They shuffle money around like Ted Beneke’s company on Breaking Bad to obscure where things are good and where things are bad. By shoving everything under “Cloud” they can absorb things that only cost money, including failed acquisitions like Skype, which….when is the last time anyone used that?

But nobody asks questions of these sorts of things until it falls apart and the dam of investor-oriented propaganda busts open.

Stay tuned. ⬆