Windows has strong engineering bones, but the business cancer has long spread throughout. Microsoft has been ratcheting up the extractive practices and disrespecting user agency since at least Windows 11's release in 2021. It's a lost cause as far as I'm concerned.
> We care deeply about developers. We know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences.
With respect, that's a load of horse crap. This is NOT why so many of your users are upset. They're angry because you've exhibited a long, deliberate pattern of historical abuse: upgrade-style dark patterns, invasive telemetry, advertisements built into Windows, and outright hostility toward users who want to own their OS rather than the other way around. God damn.
Exactly. I simply don't trust Microsoft enough anymore to choose them as my computers operating system provider.
Windows just doesn't feel like something you should do private stuff with due to all that telemetry/data collecting.
If a company says the "care" about something in a public statement (or that something is 'important' or 'our top priority'), its because the opposite is true and the public is unhappy about it. But instead of changing, the easier thing to do is to pretend and gaslight.
Those are not real concerns. People upset about those are not upset for a logical reason, so you will never appease those user by updating the operating system.
People will complain about ads, but when you actually take a look what they are complaining about it is not actually an ad. People just hear a complaint and repeat it without any critical thought.
It's better to instead focus on actual tangible problems and pain points that developers and users are hitting.
The latest Windows has always been the worst for many. They tend to have nostalgic feelings to whatever Windows they used first.
I do share some of the complains but I feel like people get way too much upset about miniscule stuff.
I would rather have Microsoft fix the bugs and weird behavior of the Windows Explorer. I got used to it now after a year but would absolutely prefer a smooth experience for such a core feature.
I would consider the first one to be an ad, but you could disable it and it seems to have only rolled out to a small number of users for a short period of time because it's hard to find many instances of this existing. It's certainlynot on my machone. Yet, you'll probably still see people complain about this. The windows team can't remove something they already have.
The second I would not consider an ad, but an upsell.
An upsell is a FUCKING AD and has no business existing, period.
Nothing should appear on a user's screen that doesn't add value for what the user is trying to get done. This is really, really simple. If you are Microsoft, and you are thinking about whether something should appear on the screen, you should be thinking "Does this advance the user's goals?". If you are instead thinking "Does this advance Microsoft's goals?", then you are doing it wrong.
The same applies to automagically configuring everything to use the cloud (good for Microsoft, usually bad for the user). And, as a special case of that, requiring the user to use a cloud-based account to log into their own local computer.
Cloud storage, and office suite software, does add value to what users are trying to get done with their computer.
The definition of ad you are using is not the common usage. For example if someone asked if ChatGPT had ads they would most likely say no, despite it upselling the subscription.
Possibly too little too late. Even my uninterested family and friends are moving over to MacBooks just due to not enjoying windows 11 or not wanting to upgrade hardware to get a minor OS change. Between that and valve looking to move on the casual / console gaming space with the new steam hardware and devs already being split between macs and linux, they’re going to have a hard time coming back if they fumble this for much longer.
They won’t fix anything other than add more intrusive tracking. Only an existential crisis will make them turn it temporarily around. Even then they will go back to old patterns soon after any emerging competition dies off.
We are like 35 into using windows. It adds more BS with every release. If I could use windows 7 on modern hardware and games worked like normal I would literally never upgrade. Their updates these days are to just justify new tracking measures and forced logins. It’s Microsoft first, government second and customers a distant third. Everybody internally and externally knows this.
I honestly suspect that most of Microsoft have absolutely no idea what the regular, retail Windows experience is like because neither they nor their customers use it.
If you work at Microsoft you are on an ad free, LTSC variant of Windows that behaves more or less reliably. The IT team handle all the OneDrive stuff for you and make sure that it remains unobtrusive.
Re the second part of my statement, Microsoft only really care about the S500 accounts, the big corporations like, say, Toyota or John Deere. Those guys do not get the ad infested version of Windows. They get something much more elegant and Microsoft outsource any drama by getting favored partners like Accenture and Avanade to deliver it.
You can be a billion dollar corp and not register on Microsoft's radar, being relegated to the "small medium biz" segment. As far as retail users or mom and pop businesses, Microsoft has zero interest in them. These are the people griping on techcrunch and Reddit. They get the ad filled, inscrutably weird versions of Windows.
Nothing is likely to change until Linux gets its act together and delivers a credible threat to Microsoft on the desktop. However it's just as likely that Ubuntu see $$$ and start selling ad space on Ubuntu to "preferred OEM" partners like Dell, whereupon we'll be back to the days of PCs filled with bloatware.
This is the bigger problem. There is a financial incentive to make OS suck for everyone but the biggest enterprise clients. If some linux provider started to fill take significant market share from, windows, it would eventually become as bad and for the same reasons. We need a wide field of competition to keep this from happening. The problem is that with all these competing OS variants, none have the resources and user-base to maintain easy compatibility with all the software and hardware being produced. So they all suck a little bit and in different ways. If one did get big enough to manage this, then they will exploit that market dominance through enshittification. It's a never ending battle.
The Microsoft response is very disingenuous because if they knew about the situation and let it get to the current situation, then it means they really didn't care. If they didn't know then, they are clueless.
I think the reality is that they are super confused, don't have a vision, and therefore, no strategy. They are just like a marble bouncing in a pachinko machine.
For example, look at the churn on the UI framework - I think they have gone through three or more frameworks in the last few years.
The constant updates are just huge. I don't think on Linux they use anti-virus software. I'm sure it is nice not losing perf to the AV. I think the windows file system throughput for small files is horrid compared to Linux.
Just waiting for macOS to get their act together in the Business space so that Windows can become a gaming only OS.
I know people always say that macOS purposely don’t target business, and things like this, but at this point.. why not? Honestly? They have the best hardware in the world right now. Catering just to personal use (and these lines are getting blurrier each day with WFH) is just inconvenient.
I don't think Windows keeps gaming if it loses corporate. Valve's very successfully created a PC-like linux based console, has been gently pushing linux PCs, and it has a huge amount of power over the gaming industry. Dedicated gaming computers probably mostly follow Valve to linux. Non-dedicated gaming computers are whatever people have - i.e. in your hypothetical macs.
As someone who doesn’t touch Windows anymore without hazard pay, part of the problem is a lot of the ancillary business apps are Microsoft as well. For example Outlook, which technically exists on Macs, but is missing half the features.
Don’t worry. New Outlook on Windows is rapidly reaching feature parity with the Mac version, and as soon as they remove Classic Outlook from support, all versions will be equal(ly missing half the features).
Outside of margins, Apple also famously said (under Jobs) they had no interest in the enterprise because the users don’t choose the products there. They want to sell direct to their customers, and the way the OS works and behaves shows that. There’s MDMs, yeah, but you just don’t get the level of control you can with Windows at scale and it’s very much on purpose.
With enterprise, the users aren’t the ones choosing or even configuring their computers.
Which is a bit strange because at NeXT, Jobs initially focused only on institutional (mostly .edu) customers and not end users. They included services like NetInfo for centralized configuration management.
I guess because NeXT ultimately failed as a business, he didn't repeat that approach upon returning to Apple?
Apple was also quite dominant in K-12 sales in the pre-internet era.
The quote I'm remembering from Jobs I thought was much earlier, but it came post-iPhone:
> "What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go 'yes' or 'no,' and if enough of them say 'yes,' we get to come to work tomorrow. That's how it works. It's really simple. With the enterprise market, it's not so simple. The people that use the products don't decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we're on track or not."
I'm wondering if the success of the iPhone kind of led to that line of thinking since it was primarily a consumer product anyway, it was Apple doubling down on it.
Also makes sense though. "Enterprise" comes with a lot of baggage and support requirements that can really slow your product down and turn into a bloated mess of one-off features for one specific customer's use case. You're no longer making product decisions for what you want the product to be but instead your roadmap is driven by whatever the enterprise customers want.
But the margins are in the cloud stuff (email, iCloud, etc) right?
They just need to make an Apple version of SharePoint and Exchange, and wala.
Now you have a suitable stack for small and medium businesses with simple requirements, like most retail, small lawyers, small accountants, etc
I setup a small business recently and I was able to use a full Apple stack except for Exchange Online Plan 1 (email) and Mosyle (MDM). These are both tech that Apple has (iCloud Mail and Apple Business Manager), it’s just lacking a few critical features.
Windows itself is only a small part of the business ecosystem. The real behemoth is Active Directory and everything that integrates with it. Creating something that powerful, complex and user-configurable is not in Apple's DNA.
If Apple can pull off a workflow where they give you a free online user directory and natively allow people to “login with iCloud for business” on managed devices, they’ve nailed it.
That’s 99% of the way there and fully within their capability.
The idea that Active Directory is merely a user directory is one of the great misconceptions. Windows Server with AD offers incredible amount of things out of the box, from Windows Deployment Services to capture, manage and deploy PC images over PXE, to Certificate Authority to manage and issue and auto-deploy certificates, to print server, file server, web server, hypervisor, virtual desktops, and a huge number of other features and services, all centrally managed and linked with each other, with a well-established track record of providing backward compatibility for decades. Whatever I set up today, I can expect to still be using in 2045.
Yes and that’s why Windows is a behemoth, but honestly how much do users actually need that stuff? Most 365 cloud deployments are incredibly simple, and now Apple has an opportunity to make a solution that leaves all that cruft behind and focuses on roaming/zero trust/cloud native.
Microsoft has been working to move into entertainment and content/content aggregation since at least 1998, and they have always shown the same pattern:
1) attempt to embrace and extend, usually a long-past-its-peak business (they tried to embrace and extend TV channels in 2013 ...)
2) they do this by "integrating" with another product. Anything they have. And making the successful product they have much worse. Zune. Windows. Xbox. Bing. Groove (I actually liked Groove, well the interface). Lumia/Nokia. That last one wasn't even a microsoft product. And now they're working hard at blowing up Windows and Office products.
3) fail, but don't bring the product back to the previous state, and keep trying, keep trying, keep beating the dead horse until they're standing in a hole in the ground in questionable liquids. And while nothing could ever hope to match the speed at which they destroyed Xbox, it's a constantly repeating pattern.
4) Get feedback from the top of Microsoft that Microsoft's valuation is based on this embrace and extend and constant growth and so, no matter how big the disaster, they'll just do it again.
5) goto 1
This, if you look carefully, despite that every Microsoft product that became a success was going into a massively growing, or an outright new market. But none of the markets Microsoft is currently in is growing, except maybe cloud. And I find the fact that they're reluctant with embracing and extending in cloud (e.g. a move like making windows server free) an incredibly bad sign for Microsoft.
Microsoft does not have the proper equipment to embrace and extend anymore, and I don't see much of a target market for them to move into. Microsoft's valuation is based on the idea that they're a monopolist that can "eat" other people's markets, but they haven't eaten someone else's market for a decade now. Admitting this, of course, would take at least half off their stock because at that point you'd have to admit they'd be doing pretty well to have a growth rate of maybe 5%.
> We balance what we see in our product feedback systems with what we hear directly
Step 1. Use dark patterns to funnel users into using a product or service they don’t want
Step 2. Watch usage kpis go up
Step 3. “Everyone says they hate this, but look at our kpis! Must just be a vocal minority” Move on to next thing
You forgot:
Step 4. Get promoted, move to different team
Windows has strong engineering bones, but the business cancer has long spread throughout. Microsoft has been ratcheting up the extractive practices and disrespecting user agency since at least Windows 11's release in 2021. It's a lost cause as far as I'm concerned.
> We care deeply about developers. We know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences.
With respect, that's a load of horse crap. This is NOT why so many of your users are upset. They're angry because you've exhibited a long, deliberate pattern of historical abuse: upgrade-style dark patterns, invasive telemetry, advertisements built into Windows, and outright hostility toward users who want to own their OS rather than the other way around. God damn.
Understood, we'll improve the wording when we nag you about buying OneDrive. /MS
Describing the situation this way is just part of the pattern.
You show them too much respect!
Exactly. I simply don't trust Microsoft enough anymore to choose them as my computers operating system provider. Windows just doesn't feel like something you should do private stuff with due to all that telemetry/data collecting.
If a company says the "care" about something in a public statement (or that something is 'important' or 'our top priority'), its because the opposite is true and the public is unhappy about it. But instead of changing, the easier thing to do is to pretend and gaslight.
Those are not real concerns. People upset about those are not upset for a logical reason, so you will never appease those user by updating the operating system.
People will complain about ads, but when you actually take a look what they are complaining about it is not actually an ad. People just hear a complaint and repeat it without any critical thought.
It's better to instead focus on actual tangible problems and pain points that developers and users are hitting.
The latest Windows has always been the worst for many. They tend to have nostalgic feelings to whatever Windows they used first.
I do share some of the complains but I feel like people get way too much upset about miniscule stuff.
I would rather have Microsoft fix the bugs and weird behavior of the Windows Explorer. I got used to it now after a year but would absolutely prefer a smooth experience for such a core feature.
> when you actually take a look what they are complaining about it is not actually an ad
https://www.windowslatest.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Sta...
Opera Browser [Promoted]
--
https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/file-explo...
Buy OneDrive for $6.99 a month
--
Do you think these aren't ads?
I would consider the first one to be an ad, but you could disable it and it seems to have only rolled out to a small number of users for a short period of time because it's hard to find many instances of this existing. It's certainlynot on my machone. Yet, you'll probably still see people complain about this. The windows team can't remove something they already have.
The second I would not consider an ad, but an upsell.
An upsell is a FUCKING AD and has no business existing, period.
Nothing should appear on a user's screen that doesn't add value for what the user is trying to get done. This is really, really simple. If you are Microsoft, and you are thinking about whether something should appear on the screen, you should be thinking "Does this advance the user's goals?". If you are instead thinking "Does this advance Microsoft's goals?", then you are doing it wrong.
The same applies to automagically configuring everything to use the cloud (good for Microsoft, usually bad for the user). And, as a special case of that, requiring the user to use a cloud-based account to log into their own local computer.
Cloud storage, and office suite software, does add value to what users are trying to get done with their computer.
The definition of ad you are using is not the common usage. For example if someone asked if ChatGPT had ads they would most likely say no, despite it upselling the subscription.
If they were in the OneDrive app in that screenshot, I’d agree with you. But they aren’t.
I doff my hat to you, good sir! Most excellent and subtle sarcasm, of a vintage not seen in these lands in many a long year! Bravo, sir, bravo!
Possibly too little too late. Even my uninterested family and friends are moving over to MacBooks just due to not enjoying windows 11 or not wanting to upgrade hardware to get a minor OS change. Between that and valve looking to move on the casual / console gaming space with the new steam hardware and devs already being split between macs and linux, they’re going to have a hard time coming back if they fumble this for much longer.
> moving over to MacBooks
Ok but
> not wanting to upgrade hardware to get a minor OS change.
Bit of contradiction both in the immediate “need a whole new machine“ and the well known deprecation of 7 year old Macs wrt new OS releases.
I’m sure it’s still better than Windows though (haven’t used Windows for 2 decades except for occasional short lived business mandates)
Everything was good enough in Windows 7.
They won’t fix anything other than add more intrusive tracking. Only an existential crisis will make them turn it temporarily around. Even then they will go back to old patterns soon after any emerging competition dies off.
We are like 35 into using windows. It adds more BS with every release. If I could use windows 7 on modern hardware and games worked like normal I would literally never upgrade. Their updates these days are to just justify new tracking measures and forced logins. It’s Microsoft first, government second and customers a distant third. Everybody internally and externally knows this.
I honestly suspect that most of Microsoft have absolutely no idea what the regular, retail Windows experience is like because neither they nor their customers use it.
If you work at Microsoft you are on an ad free, LTSC variant of Windows that behaves more or less reliably. The IT team handle all the OneDrive stuff for you and make sure that it remains unobtrusive.
Re the second part of my statement, Microsoft only really care about the S500 accounts, the big corporations like, say, Toyota or John Deere. Those guys do not get the ad infested version of Windows. They get something much more elegant and Microsoft outsource any drama by getting favored partners like Accenture and Avanade to deliver it.
You can be a billion dollar corp and not register on Microsoft's radar, being relegated to the "small medium biz" segment. As far as retail users or mom and pop businesses, Microsoft has zero interest in them. These are the people griping on techcrunch and Reddit. They get the ad filled, inscrutably weird versions of Windows.
Nothing is likely to change until Linux gets its act together and delivers a credible threat to Microsoft on the desktop. However it's just as likely that Ubuntu see $$$ and start selling ad space on Ubuntu to "preferred OEM" partners like Dell, whereupon we'll be back to the days of PCs filled with bloatware.
> However it's just as likely that Ubuntu see $$$
This is the bigger problem. There is a financial incentive to make OS suck for everyone but the biggest enterprise clients. If some linux provider started to fill take significant market share from, windows, it would eventually become as bad and for the same reasons. We need a wide field of competition to keep this from happening. The problem is that with all these competing OS variants, none have the resources and user-base to maintain easy compatibility with all the software and hardware being produced. So they all suck a little bit and in different ways. If one did get big enough to manage this, then they will exploit that market dominance through enshittification. It's a never ending battle.
The Microsoft response is very disingenuous because if they knew about the situation and let it get to the current situation, then it means they really didn't care. If they didn't know then, they are clueless.
I think the reality is that they are super confused, don't have a vision, and therefore, no strategy. They are just like a marble bouncing in a pachinko machine.
For example, look at the churn on the UI framework - I think they have gone through three or more frameworks in the last few years.
The constant updates are just huge. I don't think on Linux they use anti-virus software. I'm sure it is nice not losing perf to the AV. I think the windows file system throughput for small files is horrid compared to Linux.
Re the gimped taskbar, I was pleasantly surprised when trying Mac OS that I could set the taskbar to the side of the screen.
at this point it seems evident, they should step away and let the task be done by capable hands.
>We know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences.
I don't believe this verbiage from any company, least of all any of the big boys. This is just placating PR nonsense.
I mean, what are they going to say? "lol no one cares about users - what are they going to do, use Linux haha?!"
> Would love to connect with you about what the team is doing to address these areas if you are open to it
That’s how you know this is bullshit. An exec wants to “reach out” to some rando on the Internet.
I believe that "rando" here is Gergely Orosz, famous creator of https://www.pragmaticengineer.com and ex-team lead at Uber.
Previously:
Microsoft executive closes replies after Windows 11 "Agentic OS" backlash
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45931725
Limp wristed and far too little too late
Just waiting for macOS to get their act together in the Business space so that Windows can become a gaming only OS.
I know people always say that macOS purposely don’t target business, and things like this, but at this point.. why not? Honestly? They have the best hardware in the world right now. Catering just to personal use (and these lines are getting blurrier each day with WFH) is just inconvenient.
I don't think Windows keeps gaming if it loses corporate. Valve's very successfully created a PC-like linux based console, has been gently pushing linux PCs, and it has a huge amount of power over the gaming industry. Dedicated gaming computers probably mostly follow Valve to linux. Non-dedicated gaming computers are whatever people have - i.e. in your hypothetical macs.
As someone who doesn’t touch Windows anymore without hazard pay, part of the problem is a lot of the ancillary business apps are Microsoft as well. For example Outlook, which technically exists on Macs, but is missing half the features.
Don’t worry. New Outlook on Windows is rapidly reaching feature parity with the Mac version, and as soon as they remove Classic Outlook from support, all versions will be equal(ly missing half the features).
There are many MDM solutions for macOS that business use.
Apple isn’t interested in the corporate desktop. Margins aren’t there.
Outside of margins, Apple also famously said (under Jobs) they had no interest in the enterprise because the users don’t choose the products there. They want to sell direct to their customers, and the way the OS works and behaves shows that. There’s MDMs, yeah, but you just don’t get the level of control you can with Windows at scale and it’s very much on purpose.
With enterprise, the users aren’t the ones choosing or even configuring their computers.
Which is a bit strange because at NeXT, Jobs initially focused only on institutional (mostly .edu) customers and not end users. They included services like NetInfo for centralized configuration management.
I guess because NeXT ultimately failed as a business, he didn't repeat that approach upon returning to Apple?
Apple was also quite dominant in K-12 sales in the pre-internet era.
The quote I'm remembering from Jobs I thought was much earlier, but it came post-iPhone:
> "What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go 'yes' or 'no,' and if enough of them say 'yes,' we get to come to work tomorrow. That's how it works. It's really simple. With the enterprise market, it's not so simple. The people that use the products don't decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we're on track or not."
I'm wondering if the success of the iPhone kind of led to that line of thinking since it was primarily a consumer product anyway, it was Apple doubling down on it.
Also makes sense though. "Enterprise" comes with a lot of baggage and support requirements that can really slow your product down and turn into a bloated mess of one-off features for one specific customer's use case. You're no longer making product decisions for what you want the product to be but instead your roadmap is driven by whatever the enterprise customers want.
But the margins are in the cloud stuff (email, iCloud, etc) right?
They just need to make an Apple version of SharePoint and Exchange, and wala.
Now you have a suitable stack for small and medium businesses with simple requirements, like most retail, small lawyers, small accountants, etc
I setup a small business recently and I was able to use a full Apple stack except for Exchange Online Plan 1 (email) and Mosyle (MDM). These are both tech that Apple has (iCloud Mail and Apple Business Manager), it’s just lacking a few critical features.
What's wala?
Probably voilà https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/voil%C3%A0
Yes, sorry, viola.
Which is a type of violin
"Boiler!", a certain hairy patriarch from my past used to say, when doing something such as dumping ten pounds of salt beef on a kitchen table.
Windows itself is only a small part of the business ecosystem. The real behemoth is Active Directory and everything that integrates with it. Creating something that powerful, complex and user-configurable is not in Apple's DNA.
If Apple can pull off a workflow where they give you a free online user directory and natively allow people to “login with iCloud for business” on managed devices, they’ve nailed it.
That’s 99% of the way there and fully within their capability.
The idea that Active Directory is merely a user directory is one of the great misconceptions. Windows Server with AD offers incredible amount of things out of the box, from Windows Deployment Services to capture, manage and deploy PC images over PXE, to Certificate Authority to manage and issue and auto-deploy certificates, to print server, file server, web server, hypervisor, virtual desktops, and a huge number of other features and services, all centrally managed and linked with each other, with a well-established track record of providing backward compatibility for decades. Whatever I set up today, I can expect to still be using in 2045.
Yes and that’s why Windows is a behemoth, but honestly how much do users actually need that stuff? Most 365 cloud deployments are incredibly simple, and now Apple has an opportunity to make a solution that leaves all that cruft behind and focuses on roaming/zero trust/cloud native.
Whatever you set up today, your users can fear they'll still be using in 2045.
Microsoft has been working to move into entertainment and content/content aggregation since at least 1998, and they have always shown the same pattern:
1) attempt to embrace and extend, usually a long-past-its-peak business (they tried to embrace and extend TV channels in 2013 ...)
2) they do this by "integrating" with another product. Anything they have. And making the successful product they have much worse. Zune. Windows. Xbox. Bing. Groove (I actually liked Groove, well the interface). Lumia/Nokia. That last one wasn't even a microsoft product. And now they're working hard at blowing up Windows and Office products.
3) fail, but don't bring the product back to the previous state, and keep trying, keep trying, keep beating the dead horse until they're standing in a hole in the ground in questionable liquids. And while nothing could ever hope to match the speed at which they destroyed Xbox, it's a constantly repeating pattern.
4) Get feedback from the top of Microsoft that Microsoft's valuation is based on this embrace and extend and constant growth and so, no matter how big the disaster, they'll just do it again.
5) goto 1
This, if you look carefully, despite that every Microsoft product that became a success was going into a massively growing, or an outright new market. But none of the markets Microsoft is currently in is growing, except maybe cloud. And I find the fact that they're reluctant with embracing and extending in cloud (e.g. a move like making windows server free) an incredibly bad sign for Microsoft.
Microsoft does not have the proper equipment to embrace and extend anymore, and I don't see much of a target market for them to move into. Microsoft's valuation is based on the idea that they're a monopolist that can "eat" other people's markets, but they haven't eaten someone else's market for a decade now. Admitting this, of course, would take at least half off their stock because at that point you'd have to admit they'd be doing pretty well to have a growth rate of maybe 5%.
>5) goto 1
This. Here is your main Microsoft engineering failure, using a Basic goto statement in their implementation of a marketing algorithm. Shame!