I believe the core reason to be different: Microsoft lost the will to compete.
You can say any number of negative things about Steve Ballmer, but at least the guy tried. He tried. He may fail, but he would try, again and again, no matter how many time he would experience losses.
When he got replaced by a bean counter Microsoft stopped trying. It isn't just browser engines they've abandoned. There is no Windows Phone anymore. Windows 11 is worse on tablets than 10. Closing down their Apple Music competitor (Groove) etc.
Recently, they've been arguing for less exclusivity on gaming consoles and releasing their games on Playstation.
If we anthropomorphized corporations, modern Microsoft is the thin skinned loser who will fold at the slightest provocation.
There is no world no matter how much money Microsoft spent that it was going to out Apple Apple when it came to selling phones or convince manufactures to use Windows Mobile instead of Android with a lot larger third party app ecosystem.
Windows is not irrelevant. But it’s not where the growth is. Neither is selling phones really. Both of those markets are saturated. What benefit is their of Microsoft focusing on its own engine instead of using Chromium?
Tablets were overhyped. Even Apple realize that and publicly admitted more or less they took their eye off the ball and came back and started refocusing on the Mac in 2018. Google has basically abandoned any tablets and is focusing on ChromeOS.
The entire business model of selling subscription music and giving the label 70% of revenue is horrible. Spotify isn’t exactly a raging success. Apple Music exists as an ecosystem play to work well with their other devices as was iTunes before for selling iPods. Do you remember the disaster of the Plays4Sure platform and then the Zune?
Microsoft was right to focus on selling O365 everywhere and Azure.
> Apple Music exists as an ecosystem play
And so? Are you implying MS doesn't need an ecosystem of their own?
MS has. stopped. competing. That's it. That's all. Azure is not a moat, it's highly profitable but it also highly prone for disruption. Office is all they have left.
Man, they don't even need to have as much marketshare as Apple for their presence to be meaningful in the mobile market. They just need enough to be sustainable on their own and keep the competitors "honest".
The more MS transitions to cloud stuff and browser based apps the more they become Google's sharecroppers. It is NOT a good thing for markets to consolidate as much as they have over the past decades.
They have tried that for 20 years and failed. Why should Microsoft care about the “open web”? This isn’t the 1990s where the desktop reigned supreme. Microsoft makes money from selling operating systems, desktop and mobile office software and cloud services.
From a monetization standpoint, the web isn’t important to Microsoft.
> Azure is not a moat, it's highly profitable but it also highly prone for disruption. Office is all they have left.
Are you actually involved into selling and deploying cloud environments? I can tell you how hard it is to disentangle Microsoft from the enterprise.
“Disruption” by who? It takes billions of dollars to set up regionally redundant hardware at scale not to mention all of the services that run in it. Microsoft’s moat comes from its 40 years of being dominant in the enterprise.
> Man, they don't even need to have as much marketshare as Apple for their presence to be meaningful in the mobile market. They just need enough to be sustainable on their own and keep the competitors "honest".
You realize that Apple makes most of the profit in the mobile market? What use it to have a tiny market share in the unprofitable low end with low margins? Are OEMs going to pay for the operating system? Why should Microsoft care about the client? It’s making money hands over fist selling both zero marginal cost Office365 and much higher margin cloud services.
> They just need enough to be sustainable on their own and keep the competitors "honest"
There is no money by having a low market share and low profit margins product. How would it keep either Apple or Google anymore honest than the Firefox phone?
> The more MS transitions to cloud stuff and browser based apps the more they become Google's sharecroppers
That ship has sailed. There is no real money in selling mobile devices unless you’re Apple and have the premium market or you’re Samsung and also your own biggest supplier for parts.
> more they become Google's sharecroppers. It is NOT a good thing for markets to consolidate as much as they have over the past decades.
The desktop market has been basically Apple with a tiny market share, but the high end (profit wise) and Microsoft with the rest since the 1990s.
Now the desktop market is the same with Microsoft and Apple except for Chromebooks in education and the mobile market being Apple and Google. There is no world where it makes financial sense for MS to have their own engine instead of using Chromium.
> And so? Are you implying MS doesn't need an ecosystem of their own?
Apple’s ecosystem is phones, watches, home devices, and set top boxes.
Who would buy any of those from Microsoft? Hardware is a shitty low margin budinsss for anyone who isn’t Apple. Microsoft as a consumer company is basically dead. Sure they make a little money selling $30 Windows licenses for consumer PCs.
There were around 250 million personal computers sold last year in all. That includes Macs. Selling operating systems into that market is a nothingburger for a company the size of Microsoft. Computer sales only made up 7% of Apple’s revenue and they make a lot more money from selling computers than Microsoft does just from selling operating systems.
I don’t hate MS at all. They made me a good living when I was getting started. They actually spread the wealth (for small and medium sized shops at least).
My post was meant to be an indictment of Google.
This whole html/css layout shit with js sprinkled on top is nothing but a giant moat. Complexity for complexity’s sake.
You could render resolution independent vector art & text with pixel perfect layout orders of magnitude more efficiently. It’d be printable too.
It just laughable to be honest.
