According to their latest annual report, Windows earns them less than half as much as Office and less than a quarter of what they make by selling server products.
They haven't made their money from selling Windows for a very long time, these types of mistakes are gonna have precisely 0 impact on their stock price.
That is true in the short term but most of the rest of their business rests on the fact that windows is the default OS.
If windows ever gets so bad that people actually do defect to macos/linux en masse that absolutely will affect their stock price, but so far it hasn't happened
It's definitely on a very long fuse, but if they lose control of the windows codebase to the point where bugs are regularly getting shipped to production that cause issues for corporate IT departments, and an increasing number of employees use MacOS or Linux at home and need training at work to learn how to use windows, it could change.
Short term no but long term these rotations do happen, otherwise we'd all still be using IBM
Oh trust me, it's not like their server offerings are any better at being bug-free. I can't go into the specifics, but here's how Microsoft truly makes their money:
I'm currently stuck in some sort of an infinite loop where a bug in Microsoft's server offerings causes us to waste some money each month, my management is pushing me towards re-creating the same ticket with Microsoft's support in hopes of getting rid of those extra costs, and Microsoft's support partners waste my time by telling me to check the same 5 things I've already checked before they close the ticket due to "inactivity" once (heaven-forbid) some other task on my plate deserves my attention and I fail to re-check those same 5 things fast enough.
So they treat their corporate customers the same way they treat devs or consumers on their forums?
Lmao. Shifting responsibility is real.
"Actually it is YOUR problem that we broke something*
It's like Dell telling you that CPU voltage/RAID controller alert and server reboot is your fault that will get fixed if you just install EXACTLY the same firmware version you have, or this another firmware update to completely different component. Yes, it's market "optional", but you must have it installed before they actually consider it a hardware problem next time it happens.
I don't disagree with you and in fact I hope there were quicker ramifications. Any company that forgets their customers and assumes such arrogant self serving stance should get a proverbial slap in face rather sooner than later. Unfortunately our mechanism for serving that said slap in the face are rather limited and as a single consumer (or even as a single enterprise) serving that slap only serves to slap ourselves in the face in the process by inconveniencing ourselves given the lack of viable/drop in alternatives. This is why we need regulation to get the corporate greed in check.
You're also right that incentives are misaligned - Satya might well be fully aware that he's running the company into the ground but he doesn't care.
He'll be gone in a few years with all his bonuses and RSUs intact and there'll be absolutely no consequences for him if his actions cause MS to fall apart in 2035
I think that transition, from OS/Desktop company to a Cloud Services Provider, is where the rot comes from.
The financial incentives are to upsell incompetent IT departments onto forever subscriptions. The poor products lead to fat over-engineering in the cloud and huge running bills that are very hard to undo. Sloppy LLM integrations, and sloppy LLM advice about IT needs, would seem to feed into that same strategy.
They haven't made their money from selling Windows for a very long time, these types of mistakes are gonna have precisely 0 impact on their stock price.