No Stupid Questions

If you ever worked on any big corporation, it becomes crystal clear why things suck. Megacorps value money first, second, third, fourth and fifth. Sixth comes avoiding being caught by their crimes.

So, Microsoft doesn't have a vision for Windows as an operating system, it sees Windows as a way to maintain a stranglehold in office computers the world over. It doesn't matter that most people on lemmy will say "switch to linux", they're not companies, they're not bosses - these are the vast majority of Windows users and South America + Asia + Africa make up a fuckhuge market. Sure, Europe and USA have more money, but the rest have sheer numbers.

Another thing that matters a lot is that many decisions come from the top and are enforced. If Satya Nadella or the director of whatever bullshit says something, those below have to comply. If the order from above is "cram bullshit ads in Windows Explorer, this has the highest priority", that has to happen.

Regarding resources, having them and allocating them in a decent manner are not the same thing. The same could be argued about USA having trillions of tax dollars and having so many people living in poverty without healthcare or even basic education. Lots of that money go to keeping their armed forces. Microsoft is not too different, they have to pay people who keep their datacenters up, pay for the energy of said datacenters, maintain several other apps they have - oh, and the CEOs bonuses, because he's such a great leader who totally deserves billions every year!!!!! Of those 300bn, how much are they diverting for Windows in general? 50b? 20b? 1b? Of that, how much is going straight for security, bug tracking and quality assurance?

Wait.. why is this a question..? I guess it's the same as when people ask my why Adobe is so terrible, why HP is terrible or why Apple is so terrible.

Companies eventually get so big and powerful they only care about companies.

Stop paying for Microsoft, pirate is Stop using Microsoft office, Get libre office Stop using HP, get Lenovo or Dell instead Everyone everywhere should stop using apple.

As much as I hate Apple/OoS and I do truly hate Apple.. Adobe is the worst company on earth.

Easiest way to explain it is that Apple and Microsoft exist just to steal all your money Adobe not only wants to steal all your money but they wanted take it all then make you pay so they can lazily explain why they took your money. HP is in the corner breaking all your furniture so they can charge you a fee to fix it and put Microsoft, apple and Adobe trash on it.

Linux is setting out to make an operating system. Microsoft are setting out to make a data capturing advertising billboard that sometimes runs programs.

Passion vs corporate.

Corporate suits just sell surface promises and support contracts for corporate environments. It's a totally different mindset than Linux engineers have. Theirs is that of passion for excellent software and that's all they care about.

1. Linux isn't driven by a profit-first motive, so user-centric decisions come first
2. There is no number 2

Microsoft has pretty much lost most of their experienced employees, they're sitting on a mountain of spaghetti code with tech debt that goes back to windows 3.1 to maintain compatibility, they've fired their QA team, and their absolutely out-of-touch leadership is trying to force the surviving employees to use AI anywhere they can for developing the OS to pump up the numbers of AI users to prop up their insanely huge AI gamble so shareholders don't lose faith.

They're acting confident because they haven't had to respond to a credible threat to their monopoly for 30 years, and that arrogance combined with everything mentioned above will most likely be their ultimate demise. The corporate system they have created and perpetuated is no longer capable of righting the ship, both technologically and organizationally.

They made a statement years ago now about how they were going to respond to the success of the steamdeck by creating a handheld mode for windows, but they never did, and Valve ate their lunch and allowed Linux to gain a foothold among gamers. They probably couldn't manage building that handheld mode (it's been so many years now, but I read a post from a Microsoft employee detailing how it could take something crazy like a week of work just to add a new menu entry to a drop-down without it introducing major breakages elsewhere).

They haven't been able to develop a killer app or feature for Windows in over a decade, and I don't think there's anything else under their sleeve. I believe we are actively witnessing the downfall of an ossified giant, just as the once great Commodore fell due to incompetence and extreme corporate greed.

They already use Linux for their server division (azure). Eventually, if Linux is able dominate on the desktop in the next decade, they may shift to selling their own Linux distro with a 100% windows compatible container/VM instead, an inversion of their current model of selling Windows with their optional WSL (windows subsystem for Linux).

Linux has devs in charge instead of managers.

Is this a real question ?.One is about maximising profit extraction, one is not.

Different design priorities - MS devs aim to make the OS a marketing tool for other products, which are continuously obsoleted to encourage repeated re-buying. Linux devs aim to make stuff work.

Their business isn't to make an operating system better than linux.

Apart from what everyone here is saying, which is probably mostly true, I want to add that the Windows division in microsoft isn't the biggest either in terms of revenue or funding; it's not even second. The office team is much bigger for instance - so Windows has not been Microslops priority for a good 15 years i'd say. My 2 cents

Easy, their objective is to make money, not develop software. Linux is made and maintained by users, for users...

Their main goal is to extract maximum revenue, not to provide good products. Also, they've grown fat on the monopoly profits they enjoyed for decades. It's very hard to pivot back to competitiveness from that and as of now, they're not really compelled to do that.

Linux was built by engineers and professors based on idealistic values like progress and collaboration. Windows was also built by talented nerds, but at the direction of suits with the goal of making money.

Because their management structure is horrendously overbloated and their internal culture is horrific.

I used to work for them. Every manager, every team lead, at every level, is viciously trying to climb to the top of the crab bucket, and pull every one else down at the same time.

Look at Asha Sharma's recent statment on reorganizing Xbox.

14 levels of management. 14. You have have a boss, who has a boss, who has a... up to fucking 14.

... the entire company is like this, not just Xbox.

Thats why everything is insane broken nonsense.

Oh, that and extreme over reliance on contractors to do most of the actual work. Contractors don't get stock options, you see.

This results in a situation where half of any project's timeline is the new contractors just trying to understand the code the previous contractors made.

That is all wasted time, compared to if you just actually had a consistent team you paid properly... and of course it massively exacerbates technical debt.

Nothing is actually properly documented, there are very, very few people who actually understand a codebase and have been maintaining and growing it for 10 years, no, its 10 years of 10 different sets of contractors, and maybe 3-6 different managers 'overseeing' this.

It is all spaghetti code.

There has never been a totally new Windows, certainly not in this century. That has never happened, and they lie internally to their own employees about that.

There has never been a total refactor of Windows. Windows 11 still has UI menus from Win 7, possibly fucking XP, if you dig deep enough.

Microsoft's mission isn't to improve the public good. Microsoft's mission is wealth extraction for its shareholders.

Windows is worse for you as an individual consumer. But I would argue Windows is a better product for advertisers and other interests that go beyond you. Those interests are at odds with your interests. You need to look at the bigger picture.

Corporate culture. Microsoft may be one company to us outsiders, but internally they are a ton of different divisions divided into teams. All those teams have their own agendas, priorities, and competing visions.

If you just look at the Windows kernel project, it’s really good.

Because with Linux, the software design decisions are made by engineers, not executives.

Windows isn't trying to do what Linux does.

On the server end, Linux beat every competitor out there, including Windows Server, because it was free and development occurred along the lines of educated users making improvements. So, at first Linux was worse to use, but it was cheaper. Then, Linux was about as easy/stable as paid for versions, but it was cheaper. When it became easier to use to educated users and more stable and cheaper, all paid server OS's died.

That said, I bring up educated users because Linux is only a kernel and Windows by itself does more than Linux does by itself. On the consumer end, no one has been able to threaten Windows without a DRM'd app store. Consumers won't do bug fixes at the scale that enterprise users will. Consumers generally need more developed on the UI side to make the OS functional while you can run Linux in terminal mode. Most of Windows' development went into this, making Windows easy/desirable for consumers. In contrast, most Linux development time went to making Linux more easy/desirable for enterprise users/servers.

This is really the first year that Linux for consumers is viable and a lot of that work packaging Linux for consumers came from Valve putting the various pieces of open source software together and sanding down the rough edges. In contrast, Microsoft has been doing that for a generation.

Priorities and objectives.

They’re a B2B company first and foremost. What they’re selling is the Microsoft ecosystem to companies, like their Office suite. Companies don’t care if each individual products sucks - just that they integrate well with other products. In particular, companies want good integration with Active Directory (Microsoft’s permission management system). Companies love controlling who gets access to what.

Consumer operating systems is more of a side hustle for them.

Commercial closed source loses because of the profit motive to cut corners and make anti-features. Plus little to no independent peer review. Also legacy stuff can't just be recompiled or ported by anyone, so ABI has to be stable for a long time. Even new stuff, can't be all compiled to the same one version of every lib, so basically ever program has it's own version each lib it uses.

Plus they have a big user base locked in, so they have to take whatever they are given. So motivation to be good is low.

Just so many reasons!

It's a lot easier to find bugs when literally the whole world can review the source code.

The search bar just doesn't work. It's right in the middle of the screen so I keep clicking it and even type things in but it simply doesn't populate with any results even if you wait. Absolute joke of a company

Microsoft and the like are doing a great job to prove they don't have to release anything quality and people will still throw them buckets of money. It's wild to watch, but hey it's better they stay there than come to Linux in the masses to encourage the enshitification of stuff that's still good.

Bloat and feature creep, and is marketed not only to corporations because sysadmins' existing experience with that platform, but also towards the mainstream as much as Apple and Google (through ChromeOS).

Profit some times makes terrible decisions. In other cases, where cost has a relation to efficiency, profit does great. See also: capitalism.