With Microsoft bodging the operating system by disabling offline accounts, cramping AI in everything and obviously don’t giving a flying f*** about your personal data: how far did you come sweeping that company from your or your family members life?
For me, it is still hard to evade Microsoft, as for reasons, companies and governments are still buying into that ecosystem (Teams, OneDrive, Office, Azure, …).
Did you manage to cut or phase Microsoft out?
Let’s be real. Microsoft hasn’t given a fuck about consumers in decades. They were useful as long as they were buying cheap ass laptops en masse so the big M could strangle manufacturers with anticompetitive mass licence deals.
Consumers don’t buy software, consumers don’t buy licences. Companies do. Companies buy Office licences and pro windows licences that get more expensive for each enshittified “feature” removed from the consumer version, and more importantly Azure compute and storage. Cloud computing has been the sole driver of growth for the last 5-10 years, and everybody there are just hoping their massive gamble on AI will magically pay off.
Consumers don’t give a fuck about AI. Our corporate overlords pray every night that it will succeed so they can churn slop with a skeleton crew of developers, just as the almighty cloud allowed them to layoff an entire ops department. All in the name of our Lord and Savior Profits for the Blessed Shareholders
FTFY
Nah, up to the 2000s Microsoft actually had a product people wanted. A platform to work and play on, biggest range of programs, open hardware standards companies could develop products for and mass market adoption to pull software developers in. The developers at MS designed software they wanted and needed, and most professional MS products I worked with hat an awesome documentation that explained features well and encouraged you to try it out with short and relatable examples.
Apple was expensive and mostly incompatible hardware and low market share. Amiga had better graphics, but was mostly a gaming system and had a lower market share. PC was a something people already knew from work, and everyone was pirating programs and games, so the “cost” of buying into the PC was relatively low for the consumer.
However today Windows sales are a small part of Microsoft profits. The bigger share is cloud computing or office subscriptions. That’s why they push Copilot into everything, and they annoy you to use a Microsoft account for everything so they can push you into their subscriptios.