Microsoft has made a range of baffling decisions and awful mis-steps recently. You can trace everything back to insatiable desire for money.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has turned the company away from declining relevance to the most prestigious investment in the world. Still, the sacrifices required to achieve this goal are becoming increasingly problematic.
Microsoft is on the cutting edge of A.I. tools with stuff like Microsoft Copilot, which businesses worldwide will leverage as part of what some have touted to be a new industrial revolution. The hype certainly is real. Baked into Azure, Copilot, and other similar language models will accelerate the speed of code generation and art asset production and enable new business models that have never been dreamt of before.
Despite the hype surrounding Microsoft's lead in this category, what's often less talked about is how much further ahead Microsoft would be if Satya Nadella and the team at Microsoft hadn't made a range of baffling, short-sighted decisions in previous years. Whether it's Windows Phone's death and handing Apple and Google a mobile duopoly, short-changing Xbox investment for years until it was too late, or announcing awesome-looking Surface products only to cancel them — Microsoft's biggest consistency is that it's inconsistent. The lack of investment in winning over customers with raw quality is returning to haunt Microsoft in various ways, yet the company doesn't seem to learn from these mistakes.