The MS of today is actively reaping the benefits of the EEE & openly shady business years.
Their behavioural changes can be framed as an intentional reformation, but also as exhausting high-value targets, losing monopolies, and settling into profitable equilibrium out of necessity.
Modern competitors to MS are effectively immune to MS-EEE, in some cases by being way better at every aspect of it (MS IE is now delivered by Google based on forked Apple tech, and Office uses React, for quick examples…). MS pivoted to Azure-entanglements for their entrenched customers, which remains highly profitable, but have also had a marked decrease in engineering clout in certain key areas and still have a fragmented client/GUI ecosystem.
I’d contend they haven’t changed, they’re just cornered in ways they never were before so we see different behaviour. If MS controlled iOS or Facebook or WebKit or Search we’d see more classic plays reminding us who owns what.
Their behavioural changes can be framed as an intentional reformation, but also as exhausting high-value targets, losing monopolies, and settling into profitable equilibrium out of necessity.
Modern competitors to MS are effectively immune to MS-EEE, in some cases by being way better at every aspect of it (MS IE is now delivered by Google based on forked Apple tech, and Office uses React, for quick examples…). MS pivoted to Azure-entanglements for their entrenched customers, which remains highly profitable, but have also had a marked decrease in engineering clout in certain key areas and still have a fragmented client/GUI ecosystem.
I’d contend they haven’t changed, they’re just cornered in ways they never were before so we see different behaviour. If MS controlled iOS or Facebook or WebKit or Search we’d see more classic plays reminding us who owns what.