I think the biggest revelation of the last 3 years or so is that Microsoft does not have either the will or the talent (or both) to effectively execute anymore. Everything it currently stands on is a legacy product with roots in the Ballmer or Gates eras. They owe their Azure footprint and "success" today to Ballmer.
Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the largest example of this, but there are others. They are getting lapped by a ~300 person software company in the race to consumer-ize an x86 PC a into turnkey gaming platform, even with $100 billion in game studios and owning the API that every major game is developed against. Their footprint in education is gone, completely replaced by Google who not only produced an operating system that could be effectively run and managed on commodity hardware, but also developed the centralized functions for school administrations to use to manage classrooms at scale.
The consumer situation for Microsoft right now might be even worse than it was when Nadella took over.
Another example: the complete surrender of the Xbox platform. They spent the last 10 years buying up game studios and then closing them, failing to develop any good exclusive titles, and letting Sony eat their lunch. Now they are officially giving up and will just let Sony own the console space altogether.
Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago. Playstation was always a contender but Xbox Live was synonymous with the online console gaming experience. Halo was an untouchable juggernaut of a series for the first 3 titles.
It's mind boggling that Microsoft just let all that die without a fight. Worse, they seem to have actively shot themselves in the foot and then given up.
Playstation/Sony always a contender? They were the clear leader. The PS2 is still the best selling console of all time. 160M units to Xbox's 24M. Xbox360 caught up but the PS3 still sold more units. PS4 sold twice as many as Xbox One. The console wars has been mostly Sony vs Nintendo for a long time.
These predictions about the decline of Microsoft are like the Year of Linux on the Desktop; neither is going to happen anytime soon. Y'all can start predicting doom when there's a multi-year trend of declining revenue for MSFT and then maybe there's something to discuss.
By that time, it will already be too late. I'd argue it's probably already too late... dead man walking kind of situation. Definitely true for consumers, it might survive out of inertia in the corporate environment for decades.
I don't have data to support it and I know AD was a gamechanger but I feel like Microsoft pumping free software to educational institutions was the main driver for it's adoption in the corporate world. When every person who kind of knows how to use the computer, can use MS windows and office and has to be retrained to use anything else, it's a no brainer to just give users what they know.
Don't you think this is why alarm bells should be going off right now about Google's complete domination of primary school systems? Google Classroom and Chromebooks are everywhere. Google Docs is the lingua franca, not Microsoft Word
The main benefit of Google Docs is that, at least, Google is a better steward. Not good, but better.
And also, their software is exceedingly simple, which is great for breaking vendor lock-in. Microsoft got away with murder because none of their shit works like it should and every single product they make is the "black sheep" in the category it's in.
Yes, I miss the Windows developer experience from Balmer era, "Developers, Developers, Developers" certainly doesn't apply to Windows native development experience.
The only thing good from Satya era on Windows development experience, is the improved terminal, and that now I don't have to install VMWare Workstation any longer.
There was a honeymoon period after Nadella took the reigns where it looked like they were putting out good products - Edge before enshittification, VS Code, buying GitHub.
Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the largest example of this, but there are others. They are getting lapped by a ~300 person software company in the race to consumer-ize an x86 PC a into turnkey gaming platform, even with $100 billion in game studios and owning the API that every major game is developed against. Their footprint in education is gone, completely replaced by Google who not only produced an operating system that could be effectively run and managed on commodity hardware, but also developed the centralized functions for school administrations to use to manage classrooms at scale.
The consumer situation for Microsoft right now might be even worse than it was when Nadella took over.