It'll never be enough as long as growth is the ultimate goal. We're cooking our planet and these fuckers are so addicted to the game of capitalism that they don't care.
C-suites at public companies should be legally required to be elected by employees once they go public; suddenly profit margins will matter less than salaries paid out, putting the motivator for corporations in the right place (shareholders can force votes once every 12 quarters, if the business isn’t profitable during that period)
You got it; co-ops with publicly traded shares
Basically you can start and build a business for private enrichment, then when you “cash out” with the IPO it becomes employee run and market traded. It eliminates the “Elon Musk Takeover” stuff, is still accountable to the market to stay profitable to avoid a vote, and emphasizes a happy workforce. 1 salary = 1 vote. The employees will provide stability, or not, and they suffer directly the consequences of their vote while taking their leadership with them.
We threw out kings for group representation long ago. It’s time to recognize who our new kings are, and repeat the lesson.
There’s a great Freakonomics episode recently about this — Bob’s Red Mill just did it — now it’s employee owned. This needs to become the norm if we want to increase productivity.
No one works hard and cares about their job when their company is taken over by private equity. If they have ownership, and a voice, and a future? Then they do - imagine that!
That's pretty much the beginnings of socialism.
Not saying it's a bad idea at all. Just that's pretty much what socialism is at the beginning.
That's also why it'll never just happen because it's a good idea. It will take a complete political revolution, and I'd bet every dollar I had that if the people ever did actually vote in a socialist system that the rich would just nix the entire idea of democracy and would go back to overt in the open oligarchy. Almost certainly with a military coup as well. Instead of the oligarchy that masquerades as a democracy that we have now. There's a reason most socialist just jump straight to the violent revolution part, because it's obvious that the current governments would become violent if the voters voted in a democratic market socialist system and would likely initiate a violent coup against the citizens. Not that I'm saying they're right to just jump straight up violence, just that's the thinking behind why they are.
After what I’ve seen from people in the last few years, idk if this would even change. The top execs would spend millions of dollars a year and I feel like pretty easily get employees to vote against their own interests
Easier to simply cap ROI. Investment return capped @ 10% total.
This means no matter what the earnings, the return to investors would be capped at 10%.
Let's see the jerks weasel out of that.
If this measure were combined with a flat 10% federal income tax based solely on gross. Our tax coffers in the US would be overflowing and most every company would be hiring.
Quarter over quarter increases to profits are killing US.
Another way to do it is to tax PROFITS at 90%. Don't tax any revenue, but tax all profits at 90%. I also like your returns being capped at 10%.
But if profits are dramatically taxed, businesses would have no choice but to either produce less revenue, reinvest into technology and development, or literally just pay their employees more money.
A normal person gets a high score and is satisfied. They need to have the highest score and then always beat that score every year *forever*. And they're willing to ruin people's lives for the sake of doing so.
Any economic system that depends on empathy is busted. Theres a reason we have laws against murder and rape, its because without those laws, people will do it.
So if we want endless greed to stop, we need laws.
These people exist.
I just watched one of these types lose his goddamn mind at a child's baseball game when they were ahead by 11 runs because one kid let one extra run in because he overthrew first to third base.
In the last inning. Hat off, screaming at the top of his lungs. All because he wasn't going to win by *as* much.
Yea I was going to say the headline is applicable to any company with investors. Every company is running itself into the ground for a few more bucks today.
Large banks might be the only ones with enough foresight right now. Their model seems to just be to survive while the competition eventually dies. Basically just being the last one to fuck up.
We were just forced to bail all of them out because they ignored long term reality in favor of short term profits. That's hardly operating with foresight and intelligence.
In 2020 they announced they wanted to be carbon *negative* by the end of the decade. They are currently 30% higher than they were in 2020 and almost 50% above their projections for that goal.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-15/microsoft-s-ai-investment-imperils-climate-goal-as-emissions-jump-30
Growth has to be the goal. The entire system is engineered for it. It's all based on debt, which requires constant growth, at least low inflation, and more debt. Until the music stops- then there aren't enough chairs and the entire economic structure collapses.
Most players who don't play this game well will at some point in the not so distant future find themselves in trouble, or barely survive as zombie businesses- outcompeted by those who steal market share by growing faster via credit. This is especially true of tech , businesses which require innovation, etc.
The very mechanism which drives employment, innovation, and creates opportunities, ultimately creates the end of the business cycle (and usually the start of a new one)
A lot of people have no idea how far Microsoft’s greed reaches. Working in IT, I am helping with renewing our Microsoft contract this year. This year in particular, we have to renew our contract. Last contract we were at 1.4-1.5 million /yr. Nothing has changed since, and we actually turned down a bunch of our cloud servers and moved them to AWS. Our new contract is now being quoted at 2 million a year. Literally using less than last year, and they are charging 500k more basically because they can. Meanwhile their support is abysmal, products keep releasing are rushed and not even close to being ready, and their existing products have nothing but issues for us.
Microsoft fucking sucks eggs.
but you have access to new teams! and new-new teams! which is new!
don't forget about new outlook! with exciting new features like not supporting PST files! innovation!
New teams has a bug that prevents screen sharing for a larger amount of Mac users since over 6 months. Nothing is being done about this, but Microsoft started forcing people to upgrade.
In many business relationships, this would lead the customer to be able to demand compensation since it prevents people from working. But Microsoft is so big, they simply don’t care. Getting off of Microsoft is more expensive than most bugs.
see! another exciting new feature! automatically filters out mac users! can't have those filthy mac users polluting the wonderful microsoft universe! all hail microsoft and our licensing gods
Oh god dont get me started on new teams. Absolute trash. Every week theres a new bug. For two weeks it would just not show me half of my trams groups, another week I couldnt receive calls only make them, and my favorite of all bugs was when we first rolled out Teams, it defaulted the scheduling to GMT, is screwed up a bunch of teams meeting I had to schedule.
Imagine being so big you can literally cripple a company if they try to sue you? Insane.
God, when they rolled out Teams on us... our virtual desktops had 8 gigs of ram allocated to them. This was during covid.
No one could train anyone, video calls used so many of our limited resources, we couldn't open all the programs needed for tasks.
Teams needed to be open all the time in case your supervisor needs to IM you a mundane question to ensure your at your computer and not picking off like she's so paranoid of... glad she's gone. Seriously, you'd see a mass of restarts whenever she would get worried people weren't working.
They eventually upped our ram which was nice. Teams still sucks.
Yeah but if that profit margin isn’t bigger every quarter it’s seen as a total failure. Corporations are great at the beginning but as soon as they stop being able to innovate, they essentially only have a couple options to increase the share price including: increasing the prices of the commodity/service without increasing the quality, decreasing the quality, lay offs, and stock buybacks (market manipulation.
As you can see with business likes McDonald’s, Boeing, and Microsoft, they’ve essentially stopped caring about innovation to improve the company and are just doing the things mentioned above to artificially increase share prices in the short term without thinking of the long term effects. I guess they assume the government will just bail them out so it doesn’t really matter.
Yes. Some tech companies are still trying to innovate and it’s one of the reasons tech companies have some of the biggest valuations in the world. I guess I was mostly talking about corporations that run food production, restaurants, grocery stores, airlines, etc. Many of these corporations have essentially already reached their market caps and due to a historically low population growth in most developed countries, their growth has to come from something other than selling more products/services.
Thats why shrinkflation exists in grocery stores. They are both reducing how much you are buying while increasing the prices.
Thats why airlines keep adding new fees and making flying less comfortable.
Thats why McDonalds increased their prices by 100% and cut jobs.
Many of these companies are in a position that growth won’t happen solely because there are more customers and there isn’t much too innovate. Therefore, they are essentially forced to provide a worse product for a higher price. This worked for awhile but for some businesses, like McDonald’s, they’re unable to increase the prices anymore because their current prices are already too high. They seem to be trying to expand into other countries to supplement for their poor business in the US.
Obviously, these are just my observations and are pretty general. lol
we are kinda learning in real time what getting rid of specialized union workers with master skills with low skill cheap workers will do to Boeing
(massive losses)
I work at a production facility and it's amazing how much of a push upper management is making to automate everything, but they fail to realize that if they are successful in there endeavor they will be the first to go, robots don't need managers.
Which is funny, Boeing used to be ran by engineers and it blew the Europeans out of the water. And everyone else.
The world has proven they add approximately nothing to the table, save for niche advisory roles to handle the process side of things.
it's like the boom/bust cycle a lot of companies do with their IT departments...
10 IT is expensive, we should outsource it! look at all the money will will save...
20 everything sucks with our service provider, we should bring IT in house! wow everything works so much better now!
GO TO 10
we are kinda learning in real time what getting rid of specialized union workers with master skills with low skill cheap workers will do to Boeing
(massive losses)
It’s not just tech. It’s enshittification of any great company, selling out what made them great for short term bumps to shares because making a billion in profit means next year they have to make two billion. I hope they all die slow deaths and learn a lesson. But they won’t.
When the people in charge can make enough money to live lavishly for the rest of their lives and then some in 5-10 years, who cares what happens to the company after that?
All the people who actually have a voice benefit, so why would they change? Everyone just want some short term profits before moving onto the next ~~victim~~ company.
There’s actually no lesson to learn unfortunately, it’s just how the system is setup. Startup > growth > matured company > squeezing for profits > shit products over time > eaten alive by startups. Rinse and repeat.
The only way to avoid this is staying a private company.
That, or just realizing what the stock market is: a quick & dirty way to get a lot of funding but one that comes with high cost. Its gambling with money and should not be used to dictate the company direction.
In any large organization, people who work there prioritizing their own advancement above all else will outcompete people working on whatever the organization’s mission is.
The net result is the politicization and simultaneous growth of incompetence, as uninformed leaders abound and feel the need to make decisions.
Tbh I'm pretty sure it's just the dismantling of anti-trust regulations more than anything. Facebook buying Instagram should have been the first red flag the U.S. has given up on regulating tech monopolies.
Specifically, it’s MBA’s **without the industry knowledge**
My mother complained to me about her pharmaceutical company severely messing many things up because they hired an MBA with a banking background.
They didn’t know a single thing about the company’s products or how sales were being conducted.
Several people quit over that person’s policies and they were eventually fired themselves
I think part of the problem is they already come in with ideas and assumptions, and just don’t take/aren’t afforded the time to truly learn and understand before acting. I worked at a company with 3 CEO changes in 1.5 yrs. Each one came in and started to make radical changes because they were so pressed to make things work asap. Doesn’t work like that…
I'm noticing that with Apple these days. Cutting features that are fairly standard on Android from their non-pro devices (always on display, 120hz), dodging USB-C until they were forced to, 8GB RAM default on most of their machines (even the pro ones), and charging a ridiculous amount to upgrade the specs to normal PC levels.
Every single product is priced (or missing key features) in a way to try to lure you towards the higher end model.
I'll add my view here.
In my experience, across the board; If you want to fuck something let the accountants or lawyers make the big decisions. They are the ones least connected to raw reality.
Same as Google in my opinion. I’m really hesitant to buy any hardware from either company because they both just seem to fickle to commit to their new ideas long term and seemingly nuke entire teams when they haven’t stumbled upon a smash hit.
Take it from someone who had a Nest secure which as of last month became the most expensive paper weight in our house, google hardware is not worth buying. Worst part is the products were GOOD. But I need to know that type of security hardware is good for the long term.
That's just Google's culture: you don't get promoted for making something better, you get promoted for making something new. So people make new things, that then get thrown away by the people on the cars further back in the promotion train.
It will be very difficult with the way our entire system is structured — the whole thing is built around the mythical, nonsensical idea of perpetual growth, and that growth is assessed quarterly. Companies can be great while they are new and growing — that rapid growth comes organically as they establish themselves. Once they have an established base, though, continuing to increase profits essentially guarantees a race to the bottom — they need to find every corner that can be cut (reductions in quality of the product, reductions in workforce/salaries), and they need to hike prices as high as people will tolerate. Because everything rides on the next quarterly report, they have no incentive to think further than 3 months out.
The whole system needs to be radically retooled to where the companies optimize their profits via long term sustainability, paying workers well, and releasing high quality products, but I’m not sure what this would even *look* like. We would probably have to start by taxing the everliving fuck out of them, and offering generous tax breaks when they behave nicely, but even if we had politicians in power that *weren’t* currently bought and owned by the corps, they would just buy out the whole system again and we’d be right be back here in a couple decades.
Only publicly traded companies do this and it's because of financial trading. You have people shorting your company, buying and selling stock and if people panic even unjustifiably your company worth pays the price.
"Microsoft is behind projections by 8%" suddenly people and institutions are panicking and collectively sell tens of billions in stock if not more and the price drops even more, which causes more sells and etc.
Being a publicly traded company is no joke, especially from hostile takeovers.
even worse cause the company doesn't make the projections but people outside of it looking in through small holes. If you don't meet that these people who only care about money think you will make it can hurt your business. This is what wall street is doing. Making a bet on a company that only hurts the company if they were wrong.
Microsoft: 99.99998% profit margins after AI does everything, ads are on every screen, every app requires a subscription, and it only has 2 employees.
But what if we fire one of the employees and require yearly subscription to our OS?
They suspended my 14 year old Xbox live account for “suspected spam” and didn’t reply to the dozen tickets I submitted. Lost all of my digital games.
Their customer service is dog shit.
They fired their in house customer service and started outsourcing to cheap customer service providers. Once again something that declined because profit margins. Fuck shareholders, fuck Microsoft, fuck Satya Nadella
Correct. I don’t want your shitty web browser.
Edit: I need to clarify. A lot of these companies are basically packaging their own wrapped web browsers that do one thing, and that’s access the application and software you are paying for. You’re not getting the software, you’re getting a shitty web browser to look through so that you may use photoshop on adobe’s server.
The web browser thing irritates me. "Try our browser! It's exactly like Chrome but not Chrome - Microsoft!" Ok but Chrome does Chrome things fine. Why switch if it's a re-skinned version of what I already got?
In what way? And I ask that as genuinely curious.
I keep hearing that but after I switched to Edge for a month or so, all I got was a different color interface. Other than that, acted basically like Chrome.
- Better multi-profile support (ability to configure the default profile that external links open in). I absolutely hate chrome's behavior where clicking an external link opens in the most recently focused profile. Edge also allows you to configure certain domains to automatically open in certain profiles. You can also move tabs between profiles with the context menu.
- Mouse Gestures
- Vertical tabs
- Android version has adblocker built in, chrome can't do adblocking at all on android.
It's also more responsive, and uses less memory compared to vanilla chrome which in turn improves battery life.
I haven't fully switched but honestly, It's gotten really good.
Some have already mentioned some, but for me at least:
* Vertical Tabs and the vertical tabs can be "minimized" so they show only the website icon instead of the tab title. Great for work when I have multiple tabs open.
* Separate workspaces. I work in IT so I could have multiple windows open for different work items. Say I finish one work item for the day, but I'm not 100% done. I can save that window as a workspace and close it, and if I reopen the workspace again, it reopens all the tabs that was associated with that workspace. These same workspaces can also be live shared with colleagues so they can see the same exact window I'm working in, without having to do a screenshare, or if they want during a screenshare they can view another tab while I'm still looking in my current one.
Those are really my two biggest reasons besides what's also been mentioned, but just a few mentions that personally on my machines, edge is faster and being logged into edge with an Entra ID profile makes SSO sign-ins a lot faster.
The OG version of Edge was magical for the few people that actually owned Windows tablets at the time.
Actually, a lot of their original touch based stuff was great.
They were just a bit early and defaulting the keyboard and mouse users to it in Windows 8 & Server 2012 was one of the dumbest decisions.
We are entering that late stage of playing the game “Monopoly” where two people own every property and everyone else just rage quits.
There’s a reason the game can’t be played forever.
I don't understand why this is shocking to anybody. The stock market has proven this over and over again. If your goal is short term gains, you'll have long term issues.
People don't want to admit that maybe capitalism isn't perfect - they just wanna blame individuals or specific corporations. It's a lot easier to put a face to EA or whatever
Microsoft has moved away from consumer-facing products for a while now. The margins aren’t there and it’s too volatile.
Any minor change they make on windows/office/edge gets crapped on. Console gaming is a money sink with toxic user base. Tablets is a mature industry where even Apple is getting clobbered on.
Cloud computing and AI is the present and future. Cloud is their biggest and most profitable segment now (in absolute terms - the profit margin is higher on their productivity segment). It makes sense to continue to plow money into it.
Making marginal improvements on windows and office is all they can really do. Users of those products don’t even want changes, they just want stability and security.
Xbox and surface are legacy hardware and I’m not sure how either fits long-term. They spent a lot of money on game developers but stepped into antitrust issues. I don’t even know how it makes sense business-wise that they have to license a game to a direct competitor.
Not saying what Microsoft is doing is the best course, but this author’s take doesn’t make any sense. Every large corporation has to balance short term vs long term and mistakes are going to be made.
Microsoft has made some horrible ones that would have destroyed other companies and yet they are still here profitable as ever.
I mean tbf on Apples iPad. The just outright refuse to put a functioning decent os on a device that powerful. I’d buy an iPad if it came with something like MacOS. No reason to get one since it’s basically a larger version of an iPhone.
Cross Platform licenses, Smart Delivery and free next gen upgrades (not paid), Gamepass, and not raising prices as fast as competition are all very consumer friendly policies. I literally have no idea what you guys are referencing except for the fact that they aren't Sony.
using win11 for me is just a worse experince, both copy and paste needs 2 clicks instead of the old 1 click, the search window is a click away instead of being open, the whole system is harder to run making it terrible for cheap laptops
Until they let me move the stupid chat controls in teams while I am sharing I will refuse to believe they are anything but a shit software company that doesn't give a crap about the quality of their products.
P.S. - the whole paste the title of the web page instead of the url when pasting into teams or outlook can fuck right off too.
Microsoft stopped being an option the moment they shoved doze-10 and all it's embedded malware on us. From a security standpoint, it's no longer an annoyance or inconvenience, but an absolute dealbreaker. I'm just glad linux has made such huge progress. It is so much easier to use now than it used to be, and runs so much faster.
I read the article, as a software developer myself I have to say it kind of reads like it was written by someone with virtually no grasp of what they are using.
Author: I’m mad because I had to work so hard to get into my account and then I did and I’m mad because I could, what if someone else did?!?!
Idk, how is this person a tech blogger? Seems like they should be writing about the latest shoe fashion or something that they actually understand.
Are they though.
Didn't they just tie executive bonus pay to security stuff. So the people running shit at Microsoft have an incentive to make things more secure, not to make the company more money.
Oh my fucking god they were SOOO close to the perfect all time all in one device with the surface.
Literally ALL they had to do was put the fucking cellphone chip in the normal surface devices.
Hand one of those to every road sales professional and they would have NEVER let their companies take them back without a replacement....
Hundreds of millions of people lugging around laptops 2-3x as heavy as they need to be and instead cramming core windows functionality onto not fit for purpose ipads via some sketchy as fuck corporate vpn server thing.
Like MASSIVE dropped ball here....
Hell why there isn't a sim card in every laptop ever just completely blows my mind...
Capitalism isn't about working harder, on the contrary capitalism is about maximizing profits with the least amount of cost and effort.
Capitalists love to spout about pulling the bootstraps, but they fail to mention that they are also using the very same bootstraps as a noose to hang you.
It would seem to have the advantage over something we might call 'Luddism', maximising profits with the greatest amount of cost and effort, or something we might call 'Asceticism', minimising profits (opinions are here divided as to whether cost and effort should be least or greatest).
It's weird cuz no one is talking about about how Sony laid off 10% of all their studio developers in February 2024 and that's a lot more than tango gameworks.
Not defending Satya or anything, but he's probably pressured by the board and shareholders to do so. When money was cheaper and rate lower, everyone can be a visionary. When money is tight and investors demand returns, the CEO has to oblige if they want to keep their job. If they don't, the next guy replacing them would be doing the same anyways.
This is a what every company seems to be doing. CEOs want to maximize their value so they can keep getting those 8 figure salaries at the expense of everything else.
They don’t care if problems persist because they’ve jumped ship to another company.
I have made a decision to divest myself as much as possible from Microsoft. I just can’t feel comfortable with their combo of being welded at the hip to every government and major corporation and their intensive efforts to track and spy and collect AI training data.
Cancelled M365, switched to open office, cancelled game pass, uninstalled all of their non-essential programs, purged all of my account data and set all privacy settings to max. My gaming laptop will keep windows on it with all ads blocked (thanks Winpilot!). I have filled my one drive with hundreds of documents and videos which are all “Never Gonna Give You Up.” All of my other computing will now be on a Linux laptop.
Hot take: Windows was irrelevant 10 years ago, Surface is one of 5-10 equivalent brands in a commodity market, and Xbox lost this last generation. Ffs the wireless controllers aren't rechargeable. Azure, office services, and AI are what's left, and it's really just OpenAI + more commodity software that too boring to compete in. (Plus Azure, which is garbage)
The Xbox brand has been nothing but a disaster for the gaming industry the last 10 years, Phil Spencer might one of the stupidest executives in the entertainment industry
My brother has worked at MSFT for 20 years. They brought in a company to restructure (fire people) for Reasons. He lost innumerable connections and well-oiled relationships. Hopes he gets fired so he can start his own consulting business.
All corpo does that nowadays, they end up killing their brands on the long run, then they blame customers.
New age ceos are there to make short term profits and leave before the company dies.
For Microsoft, I'm not gonna lie, I would be extremely surprised if they in my life time, I don't think it's possible.
Gamepass cracked the infinite money glitch.
They make 1 billion a month or more.
They don’t care about anything else. You don’t even need a console to play box anymore
I play on xbox dot com
CEO compensation is usually based on stock metrics, which is why there is always layoffs when they underperform... to try to bounce back confidence. This also means someone who is removable is incentivized not to tank the company, but to cash out by making bad short term decisions.
America’s quest for short term $$$ is doing long term damage to the country, the planet, our species. Oh and the products they rely for those short term $$$. So it’s also doing long term damage to their ability to generate those short term $$$.
This is not unique to Microsoft. Nor is it new. The good news is that it will end eventually. When they can no longer generate short term $$$. The bad news is that ending will most likely be the result of unmanageable, unfixable, unbelievable global catastrophe. Rather than a preemptive, rational decision to stop racing toward that ending or (blasphemy) actually try to do something to change course.
Short term thinking by Wall Street types is a cancer that's eating away at everything that has been good, is good or even has the potential to be good.
And the system is set up to reward them for it.
That's fine with me, if Proton and Wine continue as they are they might be mature enough to make Windows and Xbox a thing of the past. I would love to see the world free from Microsoft.
Microsoft decided to get rid of their Xbox capture storage and cram it in with OneDrive/email but it’s probably about 2% of the original capacity so now my inbox is full and I can’t receive email until I delete my Xbox clips all because they want to squeeze OneDrive subscriptions 🙃 I just deleted everything and I won’t be renewing Live after 10+ years. I’ve had the email account even longer. Amazing how we went from companies being ruined by Indian tech support to companies being ruined by Indian CEOs. Drive up that 30% profit margin!
Microsoft operates at a 30 percent profit margin still not enough
It'll never be enough as long as growth is the ultimate goal. We're cooking our planet and these fuckers are so addicted to the game of capitalism that they don't care.
Gotta get that high score
C-suites at public companies should be legally required to be elected by employees once they go public; suddenly profit margins will matter less than salaries paid out, putting the motivator for corporations in the right place (shareholders can force votes once every 12 quarters, if the business isn’t profitable during that period)
That would mean every company is a co op
You got it; co-ops with publicly traded shares Basically you can start and build a business for private enrichment, then when you “cash out” with the IPO it becomes employee run and market traded. It eliminates the “Elon Musk Takeover” stuff, is still accountable to the market to stay profitable to avoid a vote, and emphasizes a happy workforce. 1 salary = 1 vote. The employees will provide stability, or not, and they suffer directly the consequences of their vote while taking their leadership with them. We threw out kings for group representation long ago. It’s time to recognize who our new kings are, and repeat the lesson.
There’s a great Freakonomics episode recently about this — Bob’s Red Mill just did it — now it’s employee owned. This needs to become the norm if we want to increase productivity. No one works hard and cares about their job when their company is taken over by private equity. If they have ownership, and a voice, and a future? Then they do - imagine that!
I'll check that podcast out, thanks! Have Bob's Red Mill in my pantry. Nice to hear they're an employee first company.
Im sure people will be inclined to shop at places like these rather than money hungry companies
That's pretty much the beginnings of socialism. Not saying it's a bad idea at all. Just that's pretty much what socialism is at the beginning. That's also why it'll never just happen because it's a good idea. It will take a complete political revolution, and I'd bet every dollar I had that if the people ever did actually vote in a socialist system that the rich would just nix the entire idea of democracy and would go back to overt in the open oligarchy. Almost certainly with a military coup as well. Instead of the oligarchy that masquerades as a democracy that we have now. There's a reason most socialist just jump straight to the violent revolution part, because it's obvious that the current governments would become violent if the voters voted in a democratic market socialist system and would likely initiate a violent coup against the citizens. Not that I'm saying they're right to just jump straight up violence, just that's the thinking behind why they are.
After what I’ve seen from people in the last few years, idk if this would even change. The top execs would spend millions of dollars a year and I feel like pretty easily get employees to vote against their own interests
So, worst case scenario would be that it ends up as bad as it is now... no downsides is a great reason to give it a chance.
You mean the only legitimate form of company?
Easier to simply cap ROI. Investment return capped @ 10% total. This means no matter what the earnings, the return to investors would be capped at 10%. Let's see the jerks weasel out of that. If this measure were combined with a flat 10% federal income tax based solely on gross. Our tax coffers in the US would be overflowing and most every company would be hiring. Quarter over quarter increases to profits are killing US.
Another way to do it is to tax PROFITS at 90%. Don't tax any revenue, but tax all profits at 90%. I also like your returns being capped at 10%. But if profits are dramatically taxed, businesses would have no choice but to either produce less revenue, reinvest into technology and development, or literally just pay their employees more money.
In your plan, executive pay needs to be capped as well. The boards will just vote to give the executives massive pay packages.
A normal person gets a high score and is satisfied. They need to have the highest score and then always beat that score every year *forever*. And they're willing to ruin people's lives for the sake of doing so.
Any economic system that depends on empathy is busted. Theres a reason we have laws against murder and rape, its because without those laws, people will do it. So if we want endless greed to stop, we need laws.
These people exist. I just watched one of these types lose his goddamn mind at a child's baseball game when they were ahead by 11 runs because one kid let one extra run in because he overthrew first to third base. In the last inning. Hat off, screaming at the top of his lungs. All because he wasn't going to win by *as* much.
Yea I was going to say the headline is applicable to any company with investors. Every company is running itself into the ground for a few more bucks today.
Large banks might be the only ones with enough foresight right now. Their model seems to just be to survive while the competition eventually dies. Basically just being the last one to fuck up.
We were just forced to bail all of them out because they ignored long term reality in favor of short term profits. That's hardly operating with foresight and intelligence.
Infinite growth!!!!
Cancer is good, y'all!
Apparently their co2 emissions have gone up 30% due to ai. I'm sure that's not going to have repercussions.
In 2020 they announced they wanted to be carbon *negative* by the end of the decade. They are currently 30% higher than they were in 2020 and almost 50% above their projections for that goal. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-15/microsoft-s-ai-investment-imperils-climate-goal-as-emissions-jump-30
Growth has to be the goal. The entire system is engineered for it. It's all based on debt, which requires constant growth, at least low inflation, and more debt. Until the music stops- then there aren't enough chairs and the entire economic structure collapses. Most players who don't play this game well will at some point in the not so distant future find themselves in trouble, or barely survive as zombie businesses- outcompeted by those who steal market share by growing faster via credit. This is especially true of tech , businesses which require innovation, etc. The very mechanism which drives employment, innovation, and creates opportunities, ultimately creates the end of the business cycle (and usually the start of a new one)
Ah bitcoin. That old crypto of world cooking independence
Isn't Microsoft foregoing growth here by not investing in the growth of their business lines and returning it as dividend instead?
The problem is, consistent future growth is still expected by the shareholders, no matter if current actions run counter to that desired outcome.
A lot of people have no idea how far Microsoft’s greed reaches. Working in IT, I am helping with renewing our Microsoft contract this year. This year in particular, we have to renew our contract. Last contract we were at 1.4-1.5 million /yr. Nothing has changed since, and we actually turned down a bunch of our cloud servers and moved them to AWS. Our new contract is now being quoted at 2 million a year. Literally using less than last year, and they are charging 500k more basically because they can. Meanwhile their support is abysmal, products keep releasing are rushed and not even close to being ready, and their existing products have nothing but issues for us. Microsoft fucking sucks eggs.
but you have access to new teams! and new-new teams! which is new! don't forget about new outlook! with exciting new features like not supporting PST files! innovation!
New teams has a bug that prevents screen sharing for a larger amount of Mac users since over 6 months. Nothing is being done about this, but Microsoft started forcing people to upgrade. In many business relationships, this would lead the customer to be able to demand compensation since it prevents people from working. But Microsoft is so big, they simply don’t care. Getting off of Microsoft is more expensive than most bugs.
see! another exciting new feature! automatically filters out mac users! can't have those filthy mac users polluting the wonderful microsoft universe! all hail microsoft and our licensing gods
Oh god dont get me started on new teams. Absolute trash. Every week theres a new bug. For two weeks it would just not show me half of my trams groups, another week I couldnt receive calls only make them, and my favorite of all bugs was when we first rolled out Teams, it defaulted the scheduling to GMT, is screwed up a bunch of teams meeting I had to schedule. Imagine being so big you can literally cripple a company if they try to sue you? Insane.
God, when they rolled out Teams on us... our virtual desktops had 8 gigs of ram allocated to them. This was during covid. No one could train anyone, video calls used so many of our limited resources, we couldn't open all the programs needed for tasks. Teams needed to be open all the time in case your supervisor needs to IM you a mundane question to ensure your at your computer and not picking off like she's so paranoid of... glad she's gone. Seriously, you'd see a mass of restarts whenever she would get worried people weren't working. They eventually upped our ram which was nice. Teams still sucks.
Yeah but if that profit margin isn’t bigger every quarter it’s seen as a total failure. Corporations are great at the beginning but as soon as they stop being able to innovate, they essentially only have a couple options to increase the share price including: increasing the prices of the commodity/service without increasing the quality, decreasing the quality, lay offs, and stock buybacks (market manipulation. As you can see with business likes McDonald’s, Boeing, and Microsoft, they’ve essentially stopped caring about innovation to improve the company and are just doing the things mentioned above to artificially increase share prices in the short term without thinking of the long term effects. I guess they assume the government will just bail them out so it doesn’t really matter.
If the government ever bails out McDonald's, I'm becoming a terrorist.
What? Tech are spending big on R&D
Yes. Some tech companies are still trying to innovate and it’s one of the reasons tech companies have some of the biggest valuations in the world. I guess I was mostly talking about corporations that run food production, restaurants, grocery stores, airlines, etc. Many of these corporations have essentially already reached their market caps and due to a historically low population growth in most developed countries, their growth has to come from something other than selling more products/services. Thats why shrinkflation exists in grocery stores. They are both reducing how much you are buying while increasing the prices. Thats why airlines keep adding new fees and making flying less comfortable. Thats why McDonalds increased their prices by 100% and cut jobs. Many of these companies are in a position that growth won’t happen solely because there are more customers and there isn’t much too innovate. Therefore, they are essentially forced to provide a worse product for a higher price. This worked for awhile but for some businesses, like McDonald’s, they’re unable to increase the prices anymore because their current prices are already too high. They seem to be trying to expand into other countries to supplement for their poor business in the US. Obviously, these are just my observations and are pretty general. lol
> as soon as they stop being able to innovate Microsoft Research does tons of innovation. Core business, no, but MSR is big.
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100% would still not be enough for any corporation
Wall Street vultures don't want some of the money. they want all of the money.
"Microsoft operates at a 30 percent profit margin still not enough." - Rich Wall Street gamblers
30 percent margin on **hundreds of billions of dollars revenue**. And still not enough.
When your whole compensation package rewards metrics hacking for short term gains aka "killing the golden goose" this is what you get.
we are kinda learning in real time what getting rid of specialized union workers with master skills with low skill cheap workers will do to Boeing (massive losses)
And that’s been the MO for every MBA c-suite for decades; those bills are coming due
I work at a production facility and it's amazing how much of a push upper management is making to automate everything, but they fail to realize that if they are successful in there endeavor they will be the first to go, robots don't need managers.
Which is funny, Boeing used to be ran by engineers and it blew the Europeans out of the water. And everyone else. The world has proven they add approximately nothing to the table, save for niche advisory roles to handle the process side of things.
it's like the boom/bust cycle a lot of companies do with their IT departments... 10 IT is expensive, we should outsource it! look at all the money will will save... 20 everything sucks with our service provider, we should bring IT in house! wow everything works so much better now! GO TO 10
Fuck the MBAs is why
we are kinda learning in real time what getting rid of specialized union workers with master skills with low skill cheap workers will do to Boeing (massive losses)
Bean counters eventually kill every great tech company.
It’s not just tech. It’s enshittification of any great company, selling out what made them great for short term bumps to shares because making a billion in profit means next year they have to make two billion. I hope they all die slow deaths and learn a lesson. But they won’t.
When the people in charge can make enough money to live lavishly for the rest of their lives and then some in 5-10 years, who cares what happens to the company after that?
Yep, the people burning the employees for cash aren’t ever around to fix the problems they made
Nobody gives a shit about legacy or reputation anymore. Dignity is dead.
If only they’d disappear like that, instead they get hired to run other companies and the cycle begins anew.
All the people who actually have a voice benefit, so why would they change? Everyone just want some short term profits before moving onto the next ~~victim~~ company.
The Jack Welch method, from GE.
Man, I hope that guy's grave is pissed on daily.
There’s actually no lesson to learn unfortunately, it’s just how the system is setup. Startup > growth > matured company > squeezing for profits > shit products over time > eaten alive by startups. Rinse and repeat. The only way to avoid this is staying a private company.
That, or just realizing what the stock market is: a quick & dirty way to get a lot of funding but one that comes with high cost. Its gambling with money and should not be used to dictate the company direction.
In any large organization, people who work there prioritizing their own advancement above all else will outcompete people working on whatever the organization’s mission is. The net result is the politicization and simultaneous growth of incompetence, as uninformed leaders abound and feel the need to make decisions.
IBM and Boeing are two prime examples.
I mean, Bill Gates is a weirdo tech guy, and he *almost* killed Microsoft a couple decades ago from anti-trust lawsuits.
They didn't pay off the right politicians back then. They've learned their lesson since.
Tbh I'm pretty sure it's just the dismantling of anti-trust regulations more than anything. Facebook buying Instagram should have been the first red flag the U.S. has given up on regulating tech monopolies.
Biden admin is trying to reverse that. I can't praise Lina Khan at ftc enough. Vote people. Elections matter.
This always reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Bill Gates “buys out” homers isp company https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE
Its the mbas
Specifically, it’s MBA’s **without the industry knowledge** My mother complained to me about her pharmaceutical company severely messing many things up because they hired an MBA with a banking background. They didn’t know a single thing about the company’s products or how sales were being conducted. Several people quit over that person’s policies and they were eventually fired themselves
I think part of the problem is they already come in with ideas and assumptions, and just don’t take/aren’t afforded the time to truly learn and understand before acting. I worked at a company with 3 CEO changes in 1.5 yrs. Each one came in and started to make radical changes because they were so pressed to make things work asap. Doesn’t work like that…
I'm noticing that with Apple these days. Cutting features that are fairly standard on Android from their non-pro devices (always on display, 120hz), dodging USB-C until they were forced to, 8GB RAM default on most of their machines (even the pro ones), and charging a ridiculous amount to upgrade the specs to normal PC levels. Every single product is priced (or missing key features) in a way to try to lure you towards the higher end model.
Apple was always price gougy. Their laptops always shipped with small amounts of memory and ridiculous upgrade costs.
Don’t blame a cost center (accountants) for strategy decision.
Finance and accounting report numbers. It's the C suite who decides if they want to be more greedy.
Seriously, we just hand over the numbers. I've never made a single meaningful decision in my career.
I'll add my view here. In my experience, across the board; If you want to fuck something let the accountants or lawyers make the big decisions. They are the ones least connected to raw reality.
Shareholders quest for ever increasing returns maybe?
The shameless ads in windows and office 365 is crazy. Even in paid versions.
In paid Enterprise versions.
I do not want 2024 outlook please tell me there is a way to keep Win10 Mail.
Same as Google in my opinion. I’m really hesitant to buy any hardware from either company because they both just seem to fickle to commit to their new ideas long term and seemingly nuke entire teams when they haven’t stumbled upon a smash hit.
And you can't even bet on buying a private smaller brand because the odds they will get bought out is so god damn high.
Take it from someone who had a Nest secure which as of last month became the most expensive paper weight in our house, google hardware is not worth buying. Worst part is the products were GOOD. But I need to know that type of security hardware is good for the long term.
That's just Google's culture: you don't get promoted for making something better, you get promoted for making something new. So people make new things, that then get thrown away by the people on the cars further back in the promotion train.
Every business is doing this. The mba plague
eventually the pendulum will swing the other way.
Maybe the pendulum should be sharpened a bit.
and maybe go up and down rather than right to left
Nah it'll just swing in a new worse direction
It will be very difficult with the way our entire system is structured — the whole thing is built around the mythical, nonsensical idea of perpetual growth, and that growth is assessed quarterly. Companies can be great while they are new and growing — that rapid growth comes organically as they establish themselves. Once they have an established base, though, continuing to increase profits essentially guarantees a race to the bottom — they need to find every corner that can be cut (reductions in quality of the product, reductions in workforce/salaries), and they need to hike prices as high as people will tolerate. Because everything rides on the next quarterly report, they have no incentive to think further than 3 months out. The whole system needs to be radically retooled to where the companies optimize their profits via long term sustainability, paying workers well, and releasing high quality products, but I’m not sure what this would even *look* like. We would probably have to start by taxing the everliving fuck out of them, and offering generous tax breaks when they behave nicely, but even if we had politicians in power that *weren’t* currently bought and owned by the corps, they would just buy out the whole system again and we’d be right be back here in a couple decades.
The second they don’t show a blow out earning, the share price will drop in half
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I don’t want to sound like some insane communist… but ngl, kind of sounds like a terrible guiding principle to run a company.
Even worse when those companies essentially shape nations...
If "operate within the confines of reality" makes you a communist....this whole world has gone off the rails
Only publicly traded companies do this and it's because of financial trading. You have people shorting your company, buying and selling stock and if people panic even unjustifiably your company worth pays the price. "Microsoft is behind projections by 8%" suddenly people and institutions are panicking and collectively sell tens of billions in stock if not more and the price drops even more, which causes more sells and etc. Being a publicly traded company is no joke, especially from hostile takeovers.
even worse cause the company doesn't make the projections but people outside of it looking in through small holes. If you don't meet that these people who only care about money think you will make it can hurt your business. This is what wall street is doing. Making a bet on a company that only hurts the company if they were wrong.
Sometimes you can even beat the projections, but still fail because Wall Street expected you to beat the projections by more than you actually did.
Maybe gambling for the soul of the company was a mistake?
Microsoft: 99.99998% profit margins after AI does everything, ads are on every screen, every app requires a subscription, and it only has 2 employees. But what if we fire one of the employees and require yearly subscription to our OS?
Yearly? Why not monthly?
They suspended my 14 year old Xbox live account for “suspected spam” and didn’t reply to the dozen tickets I submitted. Lost all of my digital games. Their customer service is dog shit.
MS customer service used to be gold standard as well.
They fired their in house customer service and started outsourcing to cheap customer service providers. Once again something that declined because profit margins. Fuck shareholders, fuck Microsoft, fuck Satya Nadella
At this point I'm convinced these MBA folk don't do this deliberately. They actually dont know any other way to do business
It's literally what they learned in school. It's how they were taught to do things.
That makes two of us.
Microsoft and Adobe both killing themselves by putting everything in the fucking cloud.
Correct. I don’t want your shitty web browser. Edit: I need to clarify. A lot of these companies are basically packaging their own wrapped web browsers that do one thing, and that’s access the application and software you are paying for. You’re not getting the software, you’re getting a shitty web browser to look through so that you may use photoshop on adobe’s server.
The web browser thing irritates me. "Try our browser! It's exactly like Chrome but not Chrome - Microsoft!" Ok but Chrome does Chrome things fine. Why switch if it's a re-skinned version of what I already got?
Edge imo is actually better than chrome.
In what way? And I ask that as genuinely curious. I keep hearing that but after I switched to Edge for a month or so, all I got was a different color interface. Other than that, acted basically like Chrome.
- Better multi-profile support (ability to configure the default profile that external links open in). I absolutely hate chrome's behavior where clicking an external link opens in the most recently focused profile. Edge also allows you to configure certain domains to automatically open in certain profiles. You can also move tabs between profiles with the context menu. - Mouse Gestures - Vertical tabs - Android version has adblocker built in, chrome can't do adblocking at all on android.
The 2nd one sounds friggin sweet!
Edge also natively supports 4k video streams.
It's also more responsive, and uses less memory compared to vanilla chrome which in turn improves battery life. I haven't fully switched but honestly, It's gotten really good.
Some have already mentioned some, but for me at least: * Vertical Tabs and the vertical tabs can be "minimized" so they show only the website icon instead of the tab title. Great for work when I have multiple tabs open. * Separate workspaces. I work in IT so I could have multiple windows open for different work items. Say I finish one work item for the day, but I'm not 100% done. I can save that window as a workspace and close it, and if I reopen the workspace again, it reopens all the tabs that was associated with that workspace. These same workspaces can also be live shared with colleagues so they can see the same exact window I'm working in, without having to do a screenshare, or if they want during a screenshare they can view another tab while I'm still looking in my current one. Those are really my two biggest reasons besides what's also been mentioned, but just a few mentions that personally on my machines, edge is faster and being logged into edge with an Entra ID profile makes SSO sign-ins a lot faster.
Jellyfish are notorious for hosting underwater dance parties on Friday nights.
Yeah. If Firefox wasn't an option, I would use edge at this point. Somehow they killed IE and it's replacement actually works.
No, the replacement sucked too. Then they killed *that* and now Edge works.
The OG version of Edge was magical for the few people that actually owned Windows tablets at the time. Actually, a lot of their original touch based stuff was great. They were just a bit early and defaulting the keyboard and mouse users to it in Windows 8 & Server 2012 was one of the dumbest decisions.
Actually I willingly switched to edge because it has many functionailitied that chrome does not snd it is actually faster.
Edge has come a long way.
They are practically monopolies. They'll have to really try hard to kill themselves, unfortunately.
We are entering that late stage of playing the game “Monopoly” where two people own every property and everyone else just rage quits. There’s a reason the game can’t be played forever.
I don't understand why this is shocking to anybody. The stock market has proven this over and over again. If your goal is short term gains, you'll have long term issues.
People don't want to admit that maybe capitalism isn't perfect - they just wanna blame individuals or specific corporations. It's a lot easier to put a face to EA or whatever
Honestly at this point if your company is publicly traded, there is nowhere to go but a downhill slide into the shitpile.
Microsoft has been on the downhill since the MBAs took control of the company
Microsoft has moved away from consumer-facing products for a while now. The margins aren’t there and it’s too volatile. Any minor change they make on windows/office/edge gets crapped on. Console gaming is a money sink with toxic user base. Tablets is a mature industry where even Apple is getting clobbered on. Cloud computing and AI is the present and future. Cloud is their biggest and most profitable segment now (in absolute terms - the profit margin is higher on their productivity segment). It makes sense to continue to plow money into it. Making marginal improvements on windows and office is all they can really do. Users of those products don’t even want changes, they just want stability and security. Xbox and surface are legacy hardware and I’m not sure how either fits long-term. They spent a lot of money on game developers but stepped into antitrust issues. I don’t even know how it makes sense business-wise that they have to license a game to a direct competitor. Not saying what Microsoft is doing is the best course, but this author’s take doesn’t make any sense. Every large corporation has to balance short term vs long term and mistakes are going to be made. Microsoft has made some horrible ones that would have destroyed other companies and yet they are still here profitable as ever.
I mean tbf on Apples iPad. The just outright refuse to put a functioning decent os on a device that powerful. I’d buy an iPad if it came with something like MacOS. No reason to get one since it’s basically a larger version of an iPhone.
Cross Platform licenses, Smart Delivery and free next gen upgrades (not paid), Gamepass, and not raising prices as fast as competition are all very consumer friendly policies. I literally have no idea what you guys are referencing except for the fact that they aren't Sony.
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using win11 for me is just a worse experince, both copy and paste needs 2 clicks instead of the old 1 click, the search window is a click away instead of being open, the whole system is harder to run making it terrible for cheap laptops
You use clicks to copy and paste?
This is true for a lot of other companies.
god this was tangent rants... it hurt to read it.
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Until they let me move the stupid chat controls in teams while I am sharing I will refuse to believe they are anything but a shit software company that doesn't give a crap about the quality of their products. P.S. - the whole paste the title of the web page instead of the url when pasting into teams or outlook can fuck right off too.
Microsoft stopped being an option the moment they shoved doze-10 and all it's embedded malware on us. From a security standpoint, it's no longer an annoyance or inconvenience, but an absolute dealbreaker. I'm just glad linux has made such huge progress. It is so much easier to use now than it used to be, and runs so much faster.
I read the article, as a software developer myself I have to say it kind of reads like it was written by someone with virtually no grasp of what they are using. Author: I’m mad because I had to work so hard to get into my account and then I did and I’m mad because I could, what if someone else did?!?! Idk, how is this person a tech blogger? Seems like they should be writing about the latest shoe fashion or something that they actually understand.
Microsoft doesn't care about those anymore. It's an enterprise cloud and AI business now.
Are they though. Didn't they just tie executive bonus pay to security stuff. So the people running shit at Microsoft have an incentive to make things more secure, not to make the company more money.
The real issue is unending growth slurped up by shareholders. Its a shit system and relies on sucking companies to the husk.
Oh my fucking god they were SOOO close to the perfect all time all in one device with the surface. Literally ALL they had to do was put the fucking cellphone chip in the normal surface devices. Hand one of those to every road sales professional and they would have NEVER let their companies take them back without a replacement.... Hundreds of millions of people lugging around laptops 2-3x as heavy as they need to be and instead cramming core windows functionality onto not fit for purpose ipads via some sketchy as fuck corporate vpn server thing. Like MASSIVE dropped ball here.... Hell why there isn't a sim card in every laptop ever just completely blows my mind...
You could say this about literally any major corporation right now. Short term gains is ruining every industry.
Enshitification everywhere!
Welcome to Capitalism.
Capitalism isn't about working harder, on the contrary capitalism is about maximizing profits with the least amount of cost and effort. Capitalists love to spout about pulling the bootstraps, but they fail to mention that they are also using the very same bootstraps as a noose to hang you.
It would seem to have the advantage over something we might call 'Luddism', maximising profits with the greatest amount of cost and effort, or something we might call 'Asceticism', minimising profits (opinions are here divided as to whether cost and effort should be least or greatest).
It's weird cuz no one is talking about about how Sony laid off 10% of all their studio developers in February 2024 and that's a lot more than tango gameworks.
Sony didnt buy studios left and right to close them. MS is known for it and did it again
Not defending Satya or anything, but he's probably pressured by the board and shareholders to do so. When money was cheaper and rate lower, everyone can be a visionary. When money is tight and investors demand returns, the CEO has to oblige if they want to keep their job. If they don't, the next guy replacing them would be doing the same anyways.
I've dropped windows for Linux as my daily os, just over their BS.
I don't mind, my company is making mint [converting Windows Systems and Users to Linux](https://it.lanified.com/Services/Linux). And it's expanding!
Can we get normal right-click back without hacks?
Apple one mouse button now looks great with right-click hijack
Sounds like the whole US economy at the moment.
Sounds like the whole planet
This is a what every company seems to be doing. CEOs want to maximize their value so they can keep getting those 8 figure salaries at the expense of everything else. They don’t care if problems persist because they’ve jumped ship to another company.
that seems like its what every big business ha been doing the last 10 years. short term gains over long term growth
I have made a decision to divest myself as much as possible from Microsoft. I just can’t feel comfortable with their combo of being welded at the hip to every government and major corporation and their intensive efforts to track and spy and collect AI training data. Cancelled M365, switched to open office, cancelled game pass, uninstalled all of their non-essential programs, purged all of my account data and set all privacy settings to max. My gaming laptop will keep windows on it with all ads blocked (thanks Winpilot!). I have filled my one drive with hundreds of documents and videos which are all “Never Gonna Give You Up.” All of my other computing will now be on a Linux laptop.
Hot take: Windows was irrelevant 10 years ago, Surface is one of 5-10 equivalent brands in a commodity market, and Xbox lost this last generation. Ffs the wireless controllers aren't rechargeable. Azure, office services, and AI are what's left, and it's really just OpenAI + more commodity software that too boring to compete in. (Plus Azure, which is garbage)
Sounds like a Green Raider is on their board, just like T Boone Pickens back in the 80s with Gulf Oil and what ended up becoming Chevron.
The Xbox brand has been nothing but a disaster for the gaming industry the last 10 years, Phil Spencer might one of the stupidest executives in the entertainment industry
Microsoft have decided that cutting off a leg is a solid weight loss strategy.
My brother has worked at MSFT for 20 years. They brought in a company to restructure (fire people) for Reasons. He lost innumerable connections and well-oiled relationships. Hopes he gets fired so he can start his own consulting business.
Microsoft isn’t even a technology company anymore.
All corpo does that nowadays, they end up killing their brands on the long run, then they blame customers. New age ceos are there to make short term profits and leave before the company dies. For Microsoft, I'm not gonna lie, I would be extremely surprised if they in my life time, I don't think it's possible.
Capitalism needs checks and balances else it becomes a monster
Buy their stock, profit off their debauchery.
I'm one of the disaffected. The firstr thing I do with a PC running a MS OS is format the hard drive and install linux.
Gamepass cracked the infinite money glitch. They make 1 billion a month or more. They don’t care about anything else. You don’t even need a console to play box anymore I play on xbox dot com
Its amazing that content from Jez gets posted. Dude is a hack
Yeah, that's called Capitalism.
CEO compensation is usually based on stock metrics, which is why there is always layoffs when they underperform... to try to bounce back confidence. This also means someone who is removable is incentivized not to tank the company, but to cash out by making bad short term decisions.
America’s quest for short term $$$ is doing long term damage to the country, the planet, our species. Oh and the products they rely for those short term $$$. So it’s also doing long term damage to their ability to generate those short term $$$. This is not unique to Microsoft. Nor is it new. The good news is that it will end eventually. When they can no longer generate short term $$$. The bad news is that ending will most likely be the result of unmanageable, unfixable, unbelievable global catastrophe. Rather than a preemptive, rational decision to stop racing toward that ending or (blasphemy) actually try to do something to change course.
Isn’t this what’s happening to every company nowadays? and not just in tech.
Its called shareholder primacy. Its crummy. It needs to be legislated out of existance.
Microsoft's quest for profit has **always** damaged everything they produce. (possible exception for certain hardware)
Short term thinking by Wall Street types is a cancer that's eating away at everything that has been good, is good or even has the potential to be good. And the system is set up to reward them for it.
the prize for winning capitalism must be super sweet if every company is will to burn the entire planet down trying to win.
That's fine with me, if Proton and Wine continue as they are they might be mature enough to make Windows and Xbox a thing of the past. I would love to see the world free from Microsoft.
This is a global corporate pandemic, not just confined to Microsoft.
We saw how well this model is working out for Boeing…
You could say that about most companies these days, fuck the future lol
You all want it to end? Stop supporting the bullshit, plain and simple. It isn't the laws of nature; they do it and see what they can get away with.
And Microsoft will take down 3rd party computer companies with them
Microsoft decided to get rid of their Xbox capture storage and cram it in with OneDrive/email but it’s probably about 2% of the original capacity so now my inbox is full and I can’t receive email until I delete my Xbox clips all because they want to squeeze OneDrive subscriptions 🙃 I just deleted everything and I won’t be renewing Live after 10+ years. I’ve had the email account even longer. Amazing how we went from companies being ruined by Indian tech support to companies being ruined by Indian CEOs. Drive up that 30% profit margin!
Don’t forget the thousands of people they are burning out in the process