Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has distracted the company from its relevance to the world’s most prestigious investment. However, the sacrifices required to achieve this goal are problematic.
Microsoft is at the forefront of AI teams with things like Microsoft Copilot, which corporations around the world will leverage as a component of what some have touted as a new business revolution. The uproar is real. Integrated with Azure, Copilot, and other similar language models, it will increase the speed of code generation and production of artistic assets, and enable the creation of new business models that would never have been dreamed of before.
Despite the hype surrounding Microsoft’s leadership in this category, what’s less talked about is how far along Microsoft would be if Satya Nadella and the Microsoft team hadn’t made a series of confusing and short-sighted decisions in recent years. Whether it’s the death of Windows Phone and the creation of a cellular duopoly through Apple and Google, cutting investments in Xbox for years until it’s too late, or announcing wonderful Surface products only to cancel them out, Microsoft’s biggest consistency is that it’s inconsistent. . The lack of investment to win over consumers with raw quality affects Microsoft in a variety of ways, but the company doesn’t seem to be learning from those mistakes.
In 2015, surrounded by holograms for the HoloLens reveal, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, “We want to go from being other people who want Windows to those who want Windows and then to those who love Windows. That’s our goal. ”
I enjoyed those comments. Comments like this encouraged me to start writing about Microsoft. As a user of the Microsoft ecosystem, I felt that Satya Nadella understood where Microsoft had gone wrong and where they could start to take the plunge. The latest in HoloLens technology Sci-fi technology, set against a backdrop of Windows mobile devices and engaging new Surface devices, is complemented through a world-class Xbox gaming and entertainment ecosystem. Microsoft even had its own retail outlets where consumers can get assistance and look at products. It was the promise of an overall ecosystem where Microsoft installations would be the first and where other people would need to use them because they were good.
Nearly a decade later, that vision turns out to have collapsed: Satya Nadella’s Microsoft is burning long-term goals for short-term gains, shifting from a tech fad to tech-like lobsters, arriving at the party too late and burning mountains. of cash. Microsoft had a genuine opportunity to become another mega-company that invested first in social responsibilities, employees, and visitor satisfaction. This can simply set an example and show that you can be kind and successful. Maybe you can even succeed being good. When I started blogging nearly a decade ago, in my younger naivety, I believed Microsoft would do it.
I deplore my naivety, but most of all, I deplore the customers, partners, and workers that Microsoft deals with after the fact. Microsoft is now a company with myopic goals, where it seems that each and every corner is being cut to make a profit. .
Recently, CEO Satya Nadella sent out a memo imploring staff to prioritize protection above all else. “If you’re faced with a balance between security and some other priority, your answer is clear: make security,” the memo says. In some cases, this will mean prioritizing security over other things we do, such as releasing new features or offering ongoing features for existing systems. This is critical to improving the quality and features of our platform so that we can protect virtual assets. in our systems. customers and build a safer world for all. You’d think that one of the world’s largest cloud corporations would have prioritized security, however, this memo claims that this is not the case.
This is the result of a pretty colossal hacking scandal that’s been going on for almost a year now, and honestly, even longer. Microsoft provides email responses and cloud computing to thousands of corporations around the world, as well as governments, nation-states, and even military installations. Microsoft has revealed that Russian hackers have recently hacked into several of its systems, adding source code, emails from Microsoft executives, and even emails from U. S. government entities. U. S. Naturally, this is a gross violation of acceptance as true with at least at the expense of Microsoft’s reputation in this area, but it also indicates how insufficiently Microsoft invests in this area.
I wonder if Microsoft is actively employing its own products. Recently, I bought a new smartphone and found that Microsoft 365 accounts are not stored in the Microsoft Authenticator cloud backup. It’s potentially my fault, but there’s not much caution in the app. Anyway, I no longer have access to my Microsoft 365 emails that I use for my (awesome) XB2 podcast on Xbox. What followed was a nightmare: a roughly three-week attempt to explain the challenge to the various members of Microsoft support. .
Calling the UK phone number for Microsoft 365 took me through a maze of automated answers. Eventually, I managed to make it to a call center, only to describe the problem to an employee on the other end of the line who didn’t speak English. as their first language. Through no fault of his own, he made communication incredibly difficult. I was then completely cut off from the random call, either because of his frustration at not understanding my non-London accessory or simply because of the distance involved in relaying the call medium. On a new call, my calls were automatically rejected without explanation. Had I activated an automatic spam blocker? I only had to call several times because I was constantly being interrupted.
In the end, I managed to reach someone who took it upon themselves to contact me via email to keep in touch, who then escalated the case to determine if I was the account holder, so that the authenticator could be removed. It’s just one account, but you don’t have to go far on Reddit to find mountains of similar experiences.
I was grateful that I solved my problems after all, but I also couldn’t help but think about how easy it was for me to remove the authentication layer in the first place. I think it would be pretty simple for a done person. We decided the attacker to trick an external call broker into cutting off this layer of security, and the lack of cloud backups for Microsoft Authenticator here turns out to be a simple vulnerability to patch. Microsoft’s passwordless authentication layer is also easy for a would-be attacker to exploit. , as it returns 3 numbers to the authenticating device. All it takes is for someone to get and click on the wrong number to allow an attacker to access your account if they only needed your email address.
When I first started in the Microsoft ecosystem, getting visitors for virtually every single product was incredibly straightforward. I’ve done this many times for Surface, Xbox, and Office 365 devices. Today, you’re dragged into a Kafkaesque maze of bots. and outsourced call centers, the latter of which doesn’t seem to be fit for purpose.
Microsoft has loosely linked its salary incentives at senior levels to “security milestones” as a component of projects unveiled last year, but the main points remain sparse. I’m sure it’s more cost-effective to wait not to be hacked so you can save. money that would otherwise be invested in security, but the long-term damage of this attitude is obvious. Microsoft itself warned investors about “cyberattacks and security breaches that can lead to lower revenue, higher costs, liability lawsuits, or damages. “our reputation or competitive position” in its latest quarterly results. In fact.
Last year, Satya Nadella lamented the death of Windows Phone, calling it a mistake. In fact, Microsoft acquired Nokia’s phone department for more than $7 billion, then Satya Nadella canceled it and halted the whole task shortly after becoming CEO. Shortly after, Satya Nadella posted a photo shoot between himself and then-Nokia CEO Stephen Elop while claiming to be fully committed to the platform.
Why did Satya Nadella call installing Windows Phone on the floor a mistake?Well, as I mentioned in the introduction, they’ve now passed all the keys to mobile computing to Apple and Google, who won’t stop anything from hindering Microsoft’s efforts. across consumer-facing search, social media, games, and AI products. Defining the characteristics of AI and the functions of computing paradigms will leave Microsoft at the same time as Apple, Google, and Samsung roll out their efforts toward consumers and shape an industry. At the same time, Microsoft will have to stay on the sidelines. It didn’t have to be this way. that way.
Increasingly, corporations are looking to figure out how to “mobilize” AI tools. We’ve noticed some unimpressive products, such as the Rabbit R1 wearable that comes with ChatGPT and nothing else. But I feel like there’s something to be said for a device that doesn’t absorb all your time and would possibly be a healthier match than today’s distraction-prone black hollow devices. Anyway, smarter than me probably could have solved all of this as well, however, Microsoft has lost some of its biggest hardware innovators in recent years.
As far as I can tell, the Surface Studio announcement was removed entirely from Microsoft’s YouTube, giving you an idea of what Microsoft thinks today about its hardware and the communities it builds around it.
Panos Panay, Alex Kipman and others known for their innovation in Microsoft hardware are no longer with the company for a variety of reasons. Panos Panay designed the entire Surface range, while Kipman was responsible for the creation of Kinect and HoloLens. Beyond Windows Phone itself After Microsoft’s efforts in cellular computing, Microsoft also ended its innovation efforts in desktops, laptops, and tablets.
The upcoming Surface event is touted as a low-key affair. Microsoft is doing some interesting things with the ARM processors in the Surface, however, the overall design of the Surface line has changed slightly in recent years. Some more innovative and spectacular models have been removed entirely. , such as the Surface Duo, Neo, Studio, and Book, in favor of more classic form points like the Surface Pro and laptop. This is a completely separate article about the decline of the Surface in recent years. Still, if you’d noticed the No investment and confidence in development and Surface, you probably would have abandoned shipping like Panos did too.
For customers, this means the future of the Surface looks equally bleak. The Surface Duo was a frustrating product in some respects, but it’s no surprise that Microsoft didn’t offer an Android phone in the first two iterations. Samsung has struggled to create a high-quality Android edition for many years and has recently taken off. Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio was a wonderful replacement for the Book, unless there were some drawbacks like a lack of I/O and the Desktop Studio was too expensive for the strength it contained. One might imagine that both were relatively undeniable solutions, but Microsoft has thrown in the towel.
While I’m excited about the Snapdragon X Elite Surface iterations, as a customer, my confidence in the long-term of the Surface couldn’t be any lower. Surface suffers from the same visitor attendance restrictions as Microsoft 365, with closed retail outlets and marketing expenses. almost non-existent. Microsoft’s mercurial attitude toward its products doesn’t motivate the kind of customer it accepts as loyal to the competition that Apple or Dell enjoy and want because of their short-sighted designs.
Gaining acceptance as true in the customer area is incredibly difficult. Over the past few years, Microsoft had invested a lot of time and effort into maintaining goodwill and prestige around the Surface brand. However, today, the company is ruining everything due to inconsistency and a degraded presence, in addition to a lack of innovation. The death of the Surface won’t just be the death of the Surface; It will be the death of accepting it as true if Microsoft tries something like this again, to the extent of the damage already caused by the death of Windows Phone.
It’s perhaps ironic that Microsoft is fighting with regulators over mobile devices from Google and Apple, while abusing its position on Windows 11 to trap everyone into using its products on PCs.
It’s possible that Microsoft would have been in control of its future phone, without having to plead with regulators, as well as Apple and Google, to open up their platforms, if it had stuck with Windows Phone. Yet, through it all, Microsoft has made its bed. Microsoft is applying double popularity and hypocrisy to Windows 11 itself, which is struggling to claim a market share from Windows 10, which is barely a decade old, by some measures.
Users have been complaining about “ads” in Windows for years. Whether it’s pre-installed software you may not want to use or “recommendations” on the lock screen. Generally, you can uninstall or disable ads as much as possible from Windows 11, however, Microsoft has become more competitive in recent years.
Microsoft will start blocking apps in the Start menu, as shown above. It will be rolled out gradually over the next few weeks and it looks like some of them will be turned off quite easily.
However, Microsoft has also become incredibly competitive in marketing Microsoft Edge on Windows 11 recently, going beyond simply “hey, Microsoft Edge is pretty good” to simply resetting your browser to defaults when you run major updates. Microsoft will remove pop-ups to warn you not to install Chrome and ask you to stay in Microsoft Edge when you search for Chrome on Bing.
I use Microsoft Edge and I really like it. The password manager is incredibly easy to use and syncs well between Edge on my desktop and Samsung Galaxy. But punishing users who don’t need to use it is blatant and is a challenge attributable to Microsoft. Google has created a browser that is simply better through innovation and hard work. Microsoft hasn’t invested enough in its browser generation and has excluded itself from the market by putting consumers last. Notice a trend here?
I love my Xbox Series X; It’s an amazing kit that does exactly what I want it to do, but as with Microsoft Edge, it’s possibly too late.
Xbox hardware sales are down about 30% year-over-year, two years in a row. This is partly due to poor game diversity and inconsistent delivery from Xbox. This is partly due to the overall slowdown of the game. Another component of this is Microsoft’s catastrophic Xbox One reveal in 2013, which has since cast a cloud of doubt over the brand.
Despite all this, Xbox has posted record revenues, even before Activision-Blizzard joined the fray. In fact, Microsoft needs to stay in the video game business and therefore spent $72 billion on Activision-Blizzard last year, giving it control of Call of Duty. World of Warcraft and other major franchises on PC, consoles, and mobile devices. I had this potentially naïve view that Activision on Xbox would gain advantages for everyone involved. However, it immediately led to many layoffs, game cancellations, reduced budgets, and studio closures. and divestments. From the outside, it’s hard not to see what’s happening at Xbox as completely chaotic and, as with the above, chaos and inconsistency have characterized Microsoft’s playbook in the years I’ve covered the brand.
Most of Xbox’s life over the past ten years has been about catching up, and the fact that it’s still in the game is a miracle. Innovations like Xbox Game Pass, the support of Phil Spencer and his team, and the creation of more consoles like the Xbox Series S have helped Microsoft stay in the race. But now, Microsoft’s corporatism is infecting the goodwill and momentum generated through Xbox in recent years, threatening to derail the difficult rebuilding jobs.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said in the past that he “doesn’t like” the world of console-only games. A few months later, Nadella is now celebrating with investors his strategy of moving Xbox-exclusive games to PlayStation, a strategy that has sparked widespread fear among Xbox users and confusion among experts.
There’s some console war tribalism in some corners, but there are plenty of valid reasons to worry if you’re already an Xbox customer. It’s understandable that you’ll be moving your exclusive games like Halo, Gears, or Forza to PlayStation. You have no reason to buy an Xbox console. If you’re right to buy an Xbox console, you’re once again entrusting the keys to your future to other platforms, a challenge Microsoft has been having lately with Google and Apple. Also, remove an endpoint to gain users through Xbox Game Pass. Lately, the cloud is prohibitively expensive and protected by Apple and Google, once it re-blocks in-app purchases or, in some cases, blocks them entirely. It’s also reducing its footprint for game developers, who will increasingly see Xbox versions as a waste of time. It’s gearing up for a freefall into exclusion, to the point where Xbox becomes another publisher of voiceless games in the overall direction of the industry, but maybe that’s the idea.
The plan to move Xbox games to other platforms is codenamed “Latitude,” and I know there’s a debate and unease at Microsoft about whether or not it’s a smart concept. Other Microsoft-owned games planned for PlayStation are already in development. At least for now, those are potentially apparent games you’d probably expect. And yes, while it’s true that Microsoft is already a prolific PlayStation publisher, it revolves around express franchises like Minecraft. From what I’ve heard, Microsoft insists that there’s no “red line” on which games might be coming to PlayStation, and it’s about Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood’s mandate to increase each department’s margins.
Obviously, putting Halo Infinite on PlayStation will increase profit margins. Sea of Thieves took the top spot on PlayStation Store last week. And at its best, it’s fantastic that more people can play those games. But we don’t live in a perfect world where platform holders, thankfully, collaborate for the good of consumers while competing for natural value. Like many other recent Microsoft strategies, pursuing this strategy is helping to increase margin in the short term with long-term consequences. Yes, the industry is struggling, and Microsoft is the only hardware manufacturer that is experiencing a decline. But destroying the basic explanation of why you buy an Xbox isn’t the answer you can give if you’re worried about the long term.
Microsoft’s net source of revenue in the last quarter exceeded $20 billion. A lot of that is due to the cloud, and I’m not saying Azure wants to help its other businesses, but there’s a lot to be said for betting the game on it for the long haul. Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates once came up with a variation of a quote attributed to dozens of other people, which goes something like this: “People overestimate what’s going to happen in the next two years and underestimate what’s going to happen in ten. Microsoft doesn’t seem to be learning from those lessons.
It’s possible that there is simply a wave of new AI cellular technologies. Devices that Microsoft could have taken advantage of if it had at least managed to gain a foothold in cell phones. There may be a blockbuster viral game just around the corner that would replace the Xbox console’s fortunes if Microsoft doesn’t kill its short-sighted hardware platform soon. A Microsoft competitor may emerge that takes investments in security and visitor service more seriously and works to undermine acceptance as true in Microsoft’s products through the weaknesses Microsoft has. It is allowed to accumulate. Perhaps Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar bet on the metaverse will eventually pay off.
In hindsight, it’s 20/20, and in fact, I’m not aware of all the points that influence some of Microsoft’s decisions. But after ten years, the effects tend to speak for themselves. I hear that Microsoft “learns, learns, learns” from its mistakes, but never manages to do it. They get corporations at breakneck speed, invest little in integrations, and then shut down those divisions and products while wondering what went wrong. We’ve noticed it time and time again: mass layoffs, poorly prepared integrations, low investment, and taking consumers for granted.
I wondered why many Microsoft journalists seemed jaded, but after at least a decade, I feel like I’m starting to get it. There’s still a lot to like here, and I’m actually not denigrating Americans’ efforts on those teams: I need them to have more support and for consumers to be treated more carefully. I like Windows 11 for its maximum component, and I like the ability to use Surface with ARM. Xbox happens to have an impressive list of upcoming games. But because of the models that Microsoft continues to provide us, all of this comes with a cloud of doubt. The question is simple: it’s hard to build trust, and Microsoft hasn’t learned that yet.
Jez Corden is an editor at Windows Central and focuses primarily on all things Xbox and gaming. Jez is known for his exclusive news and research related to the Microsoft ecosystem while feeding through tea. Follow @JezCorden on Twitter and keep an eye out for their XB2 podcast, dedicated, you guessed it, to Xbox!
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