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Microsoft Businesses

Microsoft Reportedly Lays Off Team Focused on Winning Back Consumers (theverge.com) 80

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Microsoft is reportedly laying off its team focused on winning back consumers. From a report: In 2018 the software giant originally detailed its efforts to win back the non-enterprise customers it let down, forming a Modern Life Experiences team to focus on professional consumers (prosumers). Business Insider now reports that Microsoft is laying off that team, and telling the roughly 200 affected employees to find another position at the company or take severance pay. While Microsoft isn't officially commenting on the end of its Modern Life initiative, a Microsoft senior designer revealed there was "hard news" for the Modern Life Experiences team this week in a LinkedIn post. The news comes weeks after Microsoft cut less than 1 percent of its 180,000-person workforce, with job cuts in consulting, and customer and partner solutions. Microsoft has also been cutting open job roles as it slows hiring amid a weakening economy.
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Microsoft Reportedly Lays Off Team Focused on Winning Back Consumers More

Microsoft Reportedly Lays Off Team Focused on Winning Back Consumers

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  • Why win back? (Score:3)

    by Evtim ( 1022085 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @11:52AM (#62777466)

    I think they can ride the corporate world for eternity. Why bother?

    • For consumers, MS cannot let Apple's MacOS or Google's ChromeOS become the preferred OS at home or school because users might want them at work. At my work in recent years, the number of developers using Macs outnumber the PC ones especially if development is not on hardware but web, cloud, or app.

      • Apple's MacOS or Google's Chrome don't have hardware that Linux or windows does.

      • The mass market consumer is mostly on phones and tablets now. You don't need a full computer to get email now, or to use facebook or twitter, or to do stuff on the web. For the stripped-down PC style of thing, Google is way ahead of them with the chromebooks, and even the cheapest Surface doesn't fit (really, MS shouldn't be in the hardware business).

      • For consumers, MS cannot let Apple's MacOS or Google's ChromeOS become the preferred OS at home or school because users might want them at work.

        Why? What are you doing at work where the OS actually matters? If it runs the programs you need to run then whether it's macOS, Windows or Linux really is irrelevant. For the IT department that spend their time working in the OS I can see the issue but not for people using their computers to run programs to do their work.

        • Not all applications are platform agnostic. However as I noted web, cloud, and some app development does not require Windows. Hence some developers can use Macs; some could use Chromebooks but I have not seen any used at work.

          • Not all applications are platform agnostic.

            That's my point, the only reason people care about the OS is because of the applications it can run...which of course is the whole point of the operating system.

    • There are 2 big things that often cause companies to fail
      1. They are stagnate and don't change their business model to meet the change in demand.
      2. They branch off into too many paths, where they cannot maintain the company.

      The thing is like real life, it isn't a binary thing where there are two options to follow, but a delicate balance between competing priorities and needs.

      Microsoft made it into the Business market, via its Personal Computer Products. Mainframes and Minicomputers were the domain of corpo

  • Overheard... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @11:54AM (#62777476)
    Micros~: We want you back.
    Customer: OK. Let's install Windows 11 then.
    Micros~: Not possible on your 4GHz 8-core CPU.

  • The O/S isn't the revenue (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Virtucon ( 127420 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @11:59AM (#62777490)

    It's the apps, not the O/S. They've already commoditized the office suite as a service and per their last quarterly report [microsoft.com] it's about 1/3 of revenue. Even that's up over 12% YOY.

    They're selling services, tablets, gaming consoles, and games so trying to win back customers seems like a waste of money.

  • simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @11:59AM (#62777494) Homepage

    its simple, Microsoft. Just start RESPECTING your customers again. Its that simple. You want to win us back over?

    Let's start with the Windows 11 task bar. How much bad press has that one single item gotten? It isn't rocket science. You disrespected your users. Your users have complained exceedingly loudly about how much you fucked up. And your answer is to double-down on the fuck-ups.

    Remember Windows 8? How much of a fuck-up that was? And how much users complained? Yeah, you're doing it again with Windows 11. GOOD JOB!

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • That and you have to find a new shortcut to open task manager. That's about it for me. I'm happier about the wide search bar going away by default than I'm annoyed by the default centering so it's still a win.

      • Ungrouping the taskbar icons (https://aka.ms/AAd2l82) "Update the Windows 11 taskbar to support never combining app icons and showing labels" at 21,700+ votes

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by darkain ( 749283 )

        They removed the option to have text labels, so yes, there is indeed a massive usability difference. I get that not everybody cares about the text labels (MacOS for instance is icons only), but for some workflows, they're vital.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GoTeam ( 5042081 )
      They want Windows 12 to look good by comparison... wait, didn't they say there wouldn't be any new versions after Windows 10???
      • Nope. Microsoft never said that. Someone else said it about Windows 10, and Microsoft never corrected them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rossdee ( 243626 )

        I am sure they wil change the version numbering scheme before they get to Windows 13

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aitikin ( 909209 )

      its simple, Microsoft. Just start RESPECTING your customers again. Its that simple. You want to win us back over?

      Let's start with the Windows 11 task bar. How much bad press has that one single item gotten? It isn't rocket science. You disrespected your users. Your users have complained exceedingly loudly about how much you fucked up. And your answer is to double-down on the fuck-ups.

      Remember Windows 8? How much of a fuck-up that was? And how much users complained? Yeah, you're doing it again with Windows 11. GOOD JOB!

      Hey, bitch all you want about Windows 11's task bar, it's so much more useable than Windows 9's!

      • I'd rather have the 98 task bar back. At least you can make changes to the shit and don't have the app store being shoved down your throat every second.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by aitikin ( 909209 )

          Me too, but I wasn't referencing Win 98. I was referencing Windows 9. I haven't used Windows since the XP days, and I know for a fact that the Win 11 task bar is better than the Win 9 task bar...

    • Re:simple solution (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @12:30PM (#62777570) Journal

      MS seems pressured to make changes to the OS UI to keep up with trends. But there's two problems with them.

      First, they suck at targeting trends. They tried to tablet-ize Windows with Windows 8 and it ended up sucking BOTH for mice and tablets.

      Second, they are usually behind the curve. When they finally come out, the rest of the industry has moved on or found a better way to do the original trend while MS is still mirroring the first generation of the trend.

      If you suck at keeping up, then instead perfect what works. Otherwise you will do nothing well, having shitty new stuff and shitty old stuff. Know your strengths and limits.

      • Or they are ahead of the curve but are too anal to compromise their design vision and doom it.

        There was nothing inherently wrong with live tiles and combining the start menu and the desktop ala Metro. They just should have had sparse packages at the start and allowed alternate ways to make tiles than UWP, also people want to be able to put folders and files on the desktop, also people want to be able to have a non full screen start menu. How about just giving the people everything they wanted?

        Microsoft need

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Tablizer ( 95088 )

          That sounds a bit complicated. They could have one big and clear button on the start-up screen ("desktop") to switch between mouse mode and finger mode. It would be easy for newbies to find and change.

    • Re:simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @12:30PM (#62777572)
      Here's an example of the problem. It's something that is extremely trivial, but it illustrates the stupidity that now seems to have a firm grip on Microsoft.

      In Windows 7 I had it configured to change my desktop wallpaper every 12 hours using a folder with about 40 different images. Every day at exactly 7am and 7pm my desktop wallpaper would change. After a while it became embedded in my brain. I would notice that the wallpaper changed and I would automatically think "OK, its 7am time to stop screwing around and leave for work" or "Its 7pm time to stop screwing around and go eat dinner".

      Then along comes Windows 10 and the option of every 12 hours doesn't exist any more. The closest options are "every 6 hours" and "every day"

      So I select "every day" which I foolishly thought meant the same thing as "every 24 hours". Nope. Microsoft can't do anything that simple and straight forward. Choosing "every day" results in the desktop wallpaper changing at random intervals anywhere from 2 hours to 20 hours. The days of changing at exactly the same time every day are gone.

      Out of curiosity, I tried "every 6 hours" and the result was the same. No matter what you choose, you get random.

      Someone at Microsoft got paid to make these changes. There's probably a 20 person Wallpaper Team who worked on it. And they probably put it on their quarterly performance review as "modernized wallpaper handling".

      • I find the worst thing is the amount of "Something went wrong" messages in there now, they tell you NOTHING. You can't bing for that (lol j/k nobody uses bing) so it's just a complete dead end.

        I did a fresh Windows 10 install the other week and had a link to a PDF I needed, I hadn't installed Chrome yet so the link opened in Edge, it fumbled about for a while and then just gave me a dialog box telling me "Something went wrong". Was the connection terminated? Was there a security validation issue? Was the fi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kmoser ( 1469707 )
        You can't do this with Task Scheduler? I didn't think that had changed.

    • When Microsoft stops:

      1. spying on me.
      2. advertising at me
      3. using dark patterns to make it hard to even restrain both of the above

      I will consider using their OS again. Though the only reason would be wider games support, and that's not a great reason because Linux already supports nearly everything I want to play.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I find it kinda amusing, funny, inevitable? MS and lot of large firms use data for most decisions.

        For instance, People who turn off all the 'telemetry/spyware/advertising' don't show up in the data, so their preferences are not counted, and behold, 'most people don't seem to care'.

        I think this is similar to the way apple has chosen to go. I'm sure they decided that soldering in storage and ram was a cost effective and performance enhancing option and from their data, most people didn't upgrade ram or

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      ..again? What did I miss? When did MS respect its users?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ldephil ( 868060 )
        I would argue a big demonstration of Microsoft's respect for its customers is the impressive compatibility for legacy applications. It's really impressive how so many Win32 applications continue to run on modern Windows. Apple just breaks things wholesale, and trying to run moderately aged applications on Linux tends to lead, in my experience, to lots of library version pain. That's not to brush aside the other issues, but not breaking your users' stuff, with that effort continuing over decades, shows quit

    • You want to win us back over?

      I think the point of TFA is they don't.

      And your answer is to double-down on the fuck-ups.

      Well no not really. They made massive excuses for their fuckups. The overwhelming majority of complaints are from the taskbar's missing features, but they are still in the pipeline. God knows why MS decided it would be a good idea to re-write it from scratch and then release it half backed. But hey Windows 11 is a "live service" with features changed constantly. It's the new normal.

      God MS is incompetent.

      • I suspect that MS is a lot like many big enterprises. They really do suck, but some of the teams have drunk the Agile kool-aid and insist on only doing tiny incremental changes, forever. They're stuck with a giant ball of badly done legacy code, just like so many enterprises, and a set of workers all ready to do the new thing with the new paradigm and the new language and they refuse to touch that old stuff. So, like the other enterprises, they're left with an aging team of legacy maintainers and legacy m

        • done incrementally with two week sprints

          Yep, welcome to Agile. It's called a Minimum Viable Product for a reason. It's a positive spin on: "Unfinished crap our customer's won't like."

    • its simple, Microsoft. Just start RESPECTING your customers again. Its that simple. You want to win us back over?

      If you're still giving them chances after all this time then it seems unlikely you're going to leave...unless you already did but where you went to is monumentally crap and you really want to be a Windows user again.

  • lobbies the right congress people to keep them off the anti-trust radar - which they have been very successful at.

  • MS did indeed piss on smaller biz (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @12:19PM (#62777544) Journal

    MS's development tools have indeed increasingly become enterprisier over time. They assume big dev teams with layer specialists. It's too much to deal with for smaller shops or departmental developers. "Core" is just too convoluted and config-fiddly for multi-hatters. One can spend days figuring out what should be common functionality.

    They do have "low code" Power Developer (or whatever name they use this month), but it's too low code. Plus, it's goofy. They need to offer something in the middle between layer-happy big-team stacks and clicky-click no-code. Web Forms is often bad-mouthed by big formal shops, but it was a decent internal CRUD git-er-done tool that could be further improved if MS didn't deprecate it. There's too much throw-it-out-and-start-over rather than keep improving something. Whenever they start over, they uninvent needed features with time-tested implementations. Fuck keeping up with the Jonesdashians, just improve what works. Internal CRUD doesn't need the Look of the Month.

  • Problem number one... (Score:4)

    by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @12:34PM (#62777590) Homepage

    ... they called it "Modern Life Experiences".

    Yikes.

    • Modern life experiences are a lot like ancient life experiences. Get born, get slapped, cry, deal with puberty, deal with a job, deal with a spouse, deal with kids, deal with taxes, deal with someone else's death, deal with being old, deal with your own death, trying to keep your head down and out of the way the whole time.

  • That title speaks volumes, all by itself. I suppose we're also going to see a reduction in Microsoft's advertising budget, as a result. After all, Microsoft doesn't really need to court consumer interest in their operating system and productivity software, if consumers simply don't have a (meaningful) choice in the matter.

    This scenario sounds like it should be included in some future article outlining the warning signs of a monopolistic company preparing to abuse their dominant position. (Ahem... again.)

  • These teams were probably responsible for "increasing engagement with Microsoft brands and services", and responsible for those carefully designed yet infinitely annoying banners and OOTB wizards that keep popping up in my face and asking me if I want to try X or want to try it anyways, or as a third option, try it anyways.

  • Windows people (Score:3)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @03:43PM (#62778118) Homepage

    To me this is expected. The people who would run and buy windows for home systems are also highly likely to use there Cell Phones instead of a PC. No surprise here.

    One thing I find interesting is more hardware vendors are offering Laptops with Linux. I wonder if they saw the writing on the wall. But I have a long memory, years ago people were begging for Linux preinstalled, but these vendors said FU. Me, if I were to buy a new Laptop with Linux, it would be from one of the small vendors that have offered Linux for a long time.

  • Microsoft is like General Motors, or possibly all the automakers in that from 1946 until about 1979 the automobile did not change. All styling, slick colors...the veneer of an automobile, but not its actual working parts. Windows seems like that since Windows XP, and the irony is other GUI windowing technologies had it before Windows. Windows seems to be 9x + NT with MacOS style features and some from Linux.

    Microsoft is trying to win back customers with a shiny facade and glitz, so what can the team pitch t

    • Windows has consistently made kernel improvements version-on-version. Even Vista offers better performance than prior Windows, once it's service packed and updated and if you have an absolute shedload of RAM. Windows 7 isn't much more performant than Vista, but it does use a lot less memory; but everyone knows it's basically the service pack Vista needed anyway. Windows 8 definitely performs better than 7. I presume later versions are still faster on more modern hardware, but I've barely run 10 and I haven'

      • Microsoft like GM and the other American automakers improved what works, but continued to make the same thing, so optimized relative to the previous releases.

        Yes munged the interface, I remember the hullabaloo over the new interface called "Metro" but then a software company already had that name, and it seemed the interface was another kind of tiling.

        I only run Windows inside a virtual machine, and that's usually to use Visual Studio which is half-way decent as an IDE. Visual Code seems to be decent as we

        • I run Windows both in VM and on the metal, because I play games and there are still games that don't run well on Linux. The VM is great for stuff where I just need it for driver support, though, like when I need to configure some hardware with a windows-only tool. For example CHIRP doesn't run properly on modern Linux, except maybe the snap... but snap is shit so I removed it. So in order to program my radios I need to connect them to a Windows VM so I can run CHIRP there. It almost works right in WINE, exc

          • I run in a VM for most OS images, some because the tools/apps on Linux or Windows are better. Not much of a game player, but sometimes one tool is better than another.

            I remember in college a professor was running a neural network on her husbands Windows 95 (yes that long ago...) machine and it crashed, well first locked up and then crashed. I ran the same code on my Yggdrasil Linux box in DOSEmu, same thing happened but only the process died and the Linux box didn't even hiccup. And this was by current stan

  • Seriously, has anybody ever seen any branding, any advertising, any anything from Microsoft around the term "Modern Life"? Sounds like that little effort was destined to be an L from the jump.

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