what's the business strategy here
Capatilism.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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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.
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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 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.
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.
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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
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 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..
It’s called “number go up”. Every quarter, all the time, until the heat death of the universe. Extremely sustainable
That's a good book! Fascinating that the author was hoping to write about the rise and fall of Tether, but it never quite fell, so he ended up with the climax being SBF's downfall
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
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.
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"
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.
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!"
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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.
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Layoffs also look good to investors (so consider this from the point of a roughly human-shaped scum-sucking parasite) on financial reports because we need to cut costs, those filthy little humans never deliver anything and only cost us money, they need to go.
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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No more online competitive minesweeper for you!
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
Make shareholders happy.
The inhuman monoliths.
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.
"Killing morale" would me my guess.
It's been reported that a lot of cuts to Xbox studios were due to losses in MS's AI business.
I had always viewed Xbox game studios and game pass as a platform dominance thing. Like, keeping players on Windows/Xbox products and keeping a large amount of the games industry under their control.
In general, just trying to keep players on the Windows ecosystem.
Take out the competition rule.
I don't know anything about financial markets, but Microsoft seems like the tech equivalent of Lehman Bros
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make 0 games ??
Yeah, they are making games, though usually at the cost of the devs they bought
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