Hint: It’s not desperation that’s making them become a gaming company.
Nobody was more surprised than me when I read Microsoft’s Q2 report which showcased a 21% increase in profit from a 20% rise in revenue. This is Microsoft, the company that has delayed a full rewrite of their operating system for the past 20 years. The one whose implementation of HDR has made people who use it move towards anything else. The company that doesn’t know how to show you your wi-fi strength on all your screens, still has scaling issues within even their first-party applications and whose Windows 11 rollout was so forgettable that the highlight was that it nerfed AMD processors by as much as 20%.
Their ARM tablet looks like a laughingstock compared to Apple’s. People who have claimed Microsoft’s demise since Dave Cutler’s remarks about Unix are just as annoying as people who claim that Apple will really die this time and almost as much as getting into an OS debate itself. My “Windows needs a rewrite” jar is already full and yet here they are, spending billions of dollars in Activision/Blizzard, Azure, and generally just chuckling at anyone that thought that crowdsourcing QA department was really going to be the thing that did them in.
All of it is indicative of a change in priorities. The idea of Windows as a service never did quite work as well as they hoped for. And it doesn’t matter how much money they funnel at the problem, UWP’s remain very unlikely to replace good, old-fashioned executables anytime soon. Windows for ARM remains a bit of a joke compared to MacOS and the now gold-standard architecture transition performed by Apple. But you know what actually worked? Everything else.
I personally dislike SAAS for things that would not immediately break or become unsustainable without it. Evidently I am quickly becoming a minority as Microsoft reports that they are providing Microsoft 365 services to more than 56 million people. More people than ever have decided they want to continue working from home, so Windows OEM revenue increased by 25%. Even the Surface, which surprises me every time I am reminded it’s profitable, grew by 8%. All of this is before the expected increases in revenue provided by their cloud division.
Windows is not the problem. Windows is just as functional as it needs to be. Microsoft can continue to happily make money off of everything else. And what does it matter that their market share is decreasing in the OS field when people will still use word on their mac or download the app on their phone? They are already making plenty of money on the PaaS side of things. Quite honestly compared with this, that they are selling every single xBox that they can possibly manufacture seems like a positively minuscule source of revenue.
Windows is aging badly…and they could not care any less.
