what's the business strategy here
Capatilism.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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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 ??
Yeah, they are making games, though usually at the cost of the devs they bought
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
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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.
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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.
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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..
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It’s called “number go up”. Every quarter, all the time, until the heat death of the universe. Extremely sustainable
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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"
I think it is an actual business tactic. I thi k they're buying up good devs so they won't be bought up by other companies who might use them to make bank.
Eh, I've had a number of coworkers who ended up working for Microsoft. They were all either terrible programmers or utterly unmotivated to do much actual work. One of them was a guy who did not show up even once at my company for more than a year but wasn't fired, for some unknown reason. Microsoft's inability to produce much of anything in the way of good software is no surprise to me.
Personally, I think it has a lot to do with Microsoft's being one of the pioneers of TDD (Test-Driven Development). The idea is that you have a small number of good, experienced developers writing suites of automated tests, coupled with a large number of inexperienced or inept developers who try to write code that passes these tests. Whatever code happens to be good enough is kept and the rest is tossed away. In this model, there is some advantage to sheer numbers even when most of the people you're hiring are pretty terrible at what they do (although these are exactly the kind of employees that can be - and are being - easily replaced by AI).
It's funny to imagine real-world engineering using an approach such as this. Like, imagine a world where they let anybody off the street attempt to build bridges, while the experienced civil engineers spend their time trying to knock them down. You might get a few bridges that actually worked, but your rivers would be clogged with the remains of all the failures.
I've never heard TDD described like this. I cannot even understand how this works from a project standpoint.
"We need a new feature. Todd's written the test already, so everyone just have at it with your fastest implementation; whoever passes first, gets to go to prod!"
Reminds me of MCMC sampling, or straight up rejection sampling.
It's insane, but it almost makes sense. If you have good tests, code that passes them should be a good enough start. Spend good money on devs that can write said tests, and then you can use them to drive productivity evaluation for those who aren't. As a bonus, if you need to "shed" "controllable" expenses, you can fire the cheap devs.
I hate it.
Is it well known that this is how Microsoft practices TDD? Because that’s not the normal practice for TDD. TDD just means you write tests first, but normally the same person writes the tests and then makes them pass.
I was gonna say, that's not like any form of TDD I've ever come across.
My biggest issue with this kind of "TDD" is, you pay two people to write the same code twice. Test-driven can work if done correctly, but this just stupid.
I had a coworker who was obsessed with writing unit tests. He was the lead developer on a project which was supposed to take three months and at one point had gone past the two year mark without producing working code. At one point during a meeting with the increasingly (and legitimately) unhappy client, he blurted out "but we've written six times as much test code as actual code!" He was not exaggerating either. Believe it or not, this made the client even less happy.
I think my last programming job (a couple of years ago) had a healthy relationship to tests. You had to do meet a certain coverage percentage, and if you had particularly interesting pieces of code, they should better be tested. But they acknowledged that 100% is just stupid, and that testing the same boilerplate over and over was a waste of time.
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Extend Embrace Extinguish
Such efficiency, they're now skipping extend because it takes competency and straight going from embrace (purchase) to exterminate (shut down).
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I don't see it as Ms deciding not to make games, more like their field of failure spreading and infecting all the developers they own
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