what’s the business strategy here
Capatilism.
Sales here. I know people who sell Azure and I can tell you for a fact that Microsoft’s sales srategy is literally “well, you’re already familiar with Windows/Office, so you might as well…”
Meanwhile, it was my familiarity with their products that drove me to Linux.
Embrace, Extend and Extinguish…
Its a Microsoft strategy.
The studio I was just laid off from was super successful and Microsoft has now gutted it with the last layoffs. I don’t think it’ll be successful for that much longer, morale is now non existent and people don’t want to work.
Business decisions made by C suites rarely make sense on the ground.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Its genuinely crazy how the biggest software compsny on the planet is genuinely completely and utterly incompetent at making software. Like xbox is one thing, but even their core PC software is a complete fucking joke.
I unfortusntrly have to work with microsoft enviroments and if youre using a sharepoint list to store data and you hide a column, then want to unhide it, you need to go into the the kegacy version of sharepoint, then into the list settings, columns, then unhide the colum from there. And the “new” version of shsrepoint is like 3-4 yesrs old at this point, but still diesnt have all the basic features.
Then theres powerapps, which is genuinely just awful. Like say you have an app with multiple buttons you want to change the colour of. You cant select more than one at a time and change the colour en mass, you have to do each one individually.
Or when importing a project from another enviroment, you cant import multiple power automate workflows at once, you have to do each individually.
And that not even touching on fucking windows.
If they djdnt have the desktop PC market held completely hostage, they would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.
I use a feature in Microsoft Outlook called “quick parts” every day to insert pre-configured tables into emails and “new Outlook” doesn’t have this feature.
This strategy is called putting all your eggs into the AI basket and then panic when the basket starts rip. So you patch it up with Xbox money because everyone says that basket will be awesome one day. This strategy only works when you have successful developers to sacrifice.
Embrace Gaming, Extend Gaming, Extinguish Gaming.
make 0 games ??
Speaking of, hope ToW2 has a longer campaign.
Control but also opportunity
every week, MS announces record profits, cuts devs by the thousands.
Call of Duty is doing gangbusters? Fire a bunch.
Ho-lee-sheeeeeit that remastered hot garbage Oblivion rejiggering is selling like HOTCAKES! Aw yiss, fire a shitload of them.
Maintain dominance, fire some people.
Oh fuck, let’s spend a shitfuckton on AI! That’s always profitable! And fire some devs.
Oh shit it’s a day that ends in -Y? FIRE 'EM UP.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck we fired too many people, hire a third of linked-in.
Then fire most of 'em.
Welcome to hyper capitalism, where the valuations are made up and long term sustainability doesn’t matter
I fear for all those studios after the husk has been entirely cored out and all that remains is the IP.
Because that’s what we’re seeing.
The why is really simple. The regular cuts are to keep salaries low by keeping the job market flush with candidates so salaries are suppressed across MS’s competitors too.
yer not wrong.
Hiring a third of linkedin would cause even Saudi oil to go bankrupt.
don’t worry, their stock offerings - like all the cuts - won’t vest and will all return to the mothership.
now fire this thread
Strategy of capitalism. You have to shoot for short term hail-marry profits at the expense of, well, every thing else.
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”
strategy is look like you’re doing stuff so investors get excited and your stock goes up. Then close a bunch of studios and layoff a bunch of people so it looks like you’re “maximizing efficiency” so investors get excited and your stock goes up
Somewhere along the way we built a system that doesn’t actually require you to do or make anything. And that’s been absolutely horrible.
It was Jack Welch, and it was during the 1980s ‘Yuppie’, ‘Greed is Good’ era.
Fiduciary duty is cancerous in a way that has really accelerated Capitalism. It encourages businesses that would otherwise be entirely sustainable at a small size attempt to grow until they are incompetent, which causes a consistent breakdown/selloff cycle.
Imo this is a function of pensions being purposefully replaced with 401ks. It pinned more and more retirement funds to the performance of a stock market, ostensibly to encourage employees to feel staked in the company stock performance. But it was just a clever way to get away from direct-deposit pension funds.
We decided to do everything in the fake-world economy because the real world is too complicated.
It was purposeful. The people in charge of capital are known to not produce anything, and that infects ever person down the line. Until of course you get to the actual producer, who gets paid the least while doing literally all the work.
It is inherited wealth. Business acumen is not hereditary. Without a meritocratic social structure, exploitation is the only way the incompetent maintain hegemony. Like 47 could have stayed on Epstein island fucking kids his entire life after putting all of his inheritance in US government bonds and would have far more wealth now than in real life.
I’m so happy my early alpha forever Minecraft Mojang account I tried to log into a couple weeks ago is DELETED ENTIRELY because I didn’t tie it into a Microsoft bullshit account before an arbitrary point THANK YOU MICROSOFT I WILL DEFINITELY INSTALL WINDOWS 11 EVER
It was a pure money grab to not have done this for everyone automatically. I lost my Minecraft copy too because of this. But no way in hell I’m going to give them the satisfaction of buying it again… I had it since the Minecraft beta/early access(?) too…
They a little less pro-trump on the servers at least?
That’s really cool but it’s just not quite the same. Luckily I found ElyPrismLauncher so I can play Minecraft without giving Microsoft any money.
Same, I had that exact Mojang account and I no longer have it
It’s funny because the legacy Minecraft accounts could be migrated to mojang accounts from the time they made that option available to the time Microsoft killed migrating altogether.
I even tried to migrate mine, and it failed. After deleting my Mojang account.
Tech support made a token attempt to help me and then gave up. So much for my capes, I guess…
It’s called “number go up”. Every quarter, all the time, until the heat death of the universe. Extremely sustainable
What a lovely coincidence.
“…it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization”
