“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server

It is until it isn't, but I think this is the same trap as not training up junior engineers. The consumer market is often where future engineers and professionals first interact with technology, being exposed to Windows early and being able to use it at school and at home have always been major drivers of adoption at work.

Linux is another perfect example - devs who wanted a unix-ish system landed on it early in their own work and education (partly due to the BSD licensing stuff too) - and over time it became one of the most commonly used server operating systems.

I think this is Microsoft optimizing for predictable growth, just like everyone else is doing right now, but this is shortsighted and ultimately a defensive posture, not one suited for the future.

I'm surprised they haven't given up on xbox and games but perhaps there's enough money there to keep it going.

What I find difficult to understand is the amount of effort and money that Microsoft puts towards making life painful for the B2C user; if your focus is on B2B, let the fucking user create offline accounts and let them crack the license and let them do whatever they please, as that would likely be less of a burden to you than a way to ensure market domination. You take care of the security, the UX, and availability parts and let the general public carry on with whatever it does. I am, of course, oversimplifying things here for the sake of the argument, but surely I can't be part of a tiny minority of people who see things this way.

At the end of the day, there are multiple and interconnected rational, irrational, economic, legal, social, political, strategical etc. reasons for why a company emerges as the dominant player in their respective niche, it's never down to the quality or convenience of the system alone. Microsoft stands more to lose than gain from their toxic attitude towards users, especially in the context of US playing the bully, and the EU considering disentangling itself from what is perceived a dangerous relationship that could undermine its very existence.

Nowadays phones, tablets and game boxes are the consumer products. Currently they outnumber consumer windows desktops by about 6 or 7 to 1 [0]. 5 years ago, it was about 3.5 to 1.

Microsoft doesn't seem to have much control over this. They are executing a pivot in response.

[0] https://learn.g2.com/operating-system-statistics#:~:text=Mic...

> Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities.

This does not explain why Microsoft then does not consider the consumer products as "stable (somewhat 'legacy') platforms", i.e. no deep changes and improvements will happen anymore (mostly bugfixes, security fixes and smaller improvements) - at least for the next years.

Considering that

- many Windows users would rather prefer a Windows 7 with small iterative improvements to handle new hardware (including performance improvements for new hardware)

- by quite many Windows users even Windows 2000 is celebrated (and many users would still love to use it if it included support for more modern hardware features and some convenience features that were introduced with newer Windows versions)

I can easily imagine that that this development path for Windows and Office would actually be liked by quite a lot of users.

Instead what Microsoft provides is an enshitification of Windows (and Office) with spyware, telemetry, AI slop, ads, changes for the sake of change, ...: this is clearly not what most users want.

I even have a feeling that this development path would be much cheaper for Microsoft than the AI integrations for Windows and Office for which Microsoft has clearly spent an insane amount of money.

You might wonder why, if businesses are the target, why not just make Windows a no-frills, solid base for the other offerings? Why slop it up?

The answer there is cultural. Windows needs a large team just to keep supporting it at scale. All those engineers and PMs need career paths, and shiny things with which to sway their managers into promoting them. The strong, experienced, leaders have largely left because they know this isn't a company priority. So you end up with B players promoting C players for slop.

Time goes on and the Bs become Cs, and so on.

So the dynamic is that something that isn't a priority doesn't merely slop evolving, it devolves. We're now several iterations into this process, which will accelerate due to AI.