Microsoft Sucks At Everything. But They’re The Real Winners.

Have you noticed that almost all of Microsoft’s consumer products are huge flops? It seems that Microsoft regularly drops the ball, whether it’s Microsoft Edge, Bing, Hotmail, Xbox, Skype, or the Windows phone. In fact, Microsoft leadership themselves are very open about this reality, with leaders like Phil Spencer admitting that they lost the most important console generation that they could have lost. Yet, despite all this failure, Microsoft as a whole has been doing better than ever. In fact, so good that they are regularly the world’s largest company at over $3.5 trillion. It turns out that Windows and the Office Suite were simply so successful that Microsoft has done extremely well cross-selling other solutions to B2B customers like Azure, video conferencing, and team messaging. Microsoft’s solutions are rarely better than competitors, but they’re able to offer bundle pricing and less hassle. This video explains how Microsoft has gotten so big despite losing and seemingly everything.

Earn Cash Back On Stocks: Up To $5,000 Per Year

Free Weekly Newsletter With Insiders:

Socials:

Discord Community:

Timestamps:
0:00 - Microsoft’s Failures
0:43 - Many Misses
7:53 - A Change In Outlook
16:36 - Losing Battles, Winning Wars

Sources:

Disclaimer:
This video is not a solicitation or personal financial advice. All investing involves risk. Please do your own research.

Disclosure: This video is sponsored by Odoo. Some of the links in this description may be affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

[matthewharris]

When you have god level cash, failure is but a minor annoyance

[keltoshh]

One point that is missing in this brilliant video is how Microsoft locks in consulting firms to sell their products. When a corporation requests a digital transformation quote from companies like Accenture or Cognizant; the consulting firms will likely suggest a Microsoft solution first. These deals usually lock in 3 to 5 years of revenue from corporations through licensing and provide reliable income to Microsoft. That is what Satya managed to build as a CEO.

[rayversen]

Microsoft is one of the luckiest company that never suffered for the massive losses they made acquiring companies

[billygrant]

They are well diversified. And they tend to get into big industries. They don't need to win, they don't even need to be great. They just need to have comparable features and be cheap and people use their stuff.

[lordmeowsk]

Google was "Don't be evil" to "We're EVIL!!"

[JoshTurner-osti]

Imagine if Microsoft didn't earn billions a year in no bid government contracts

[DavidMihet]

The Lumia's phone and the interface was brilliant. Their major problem was the lack of applications.

[jayzaf]

You forgot the mention the Microsoft Zune..

[khhnator]

TL;DR version:
Microsoft is still alive because of inertia of business market

[adamsjoh]

I think one of the issues with the consumer view of Microsoft is a focus on the consumer side of the business, and not the fact that they are an enterprise company.

If you're a midsized business, you can probably get everything you need from Microsoft: hardware, software, Office, cloud computer resources, CMS, automation to build basic business automations, more security capabilities than pretty much anyone else. Most of that stuff is tightly integrated, and you can get most of the services for a fixed cost with thousands of companies that can support it all for you if you want.

[JohnDontFollowMe]

Say what you want from Nokia Lumia. It had a awesome battery, it was harder to break than most, was fast and had good speakers. The software may have been clunky, but the hardware was supreme from other phones.

[asambatyon]

Oh, the windows phone. I liked the interface so much more than apple's and google's. Sadly the first versions were so unfinished and unpolished. And when it felt mature enough, nobody took them seriously anymore.

[avada]

My favorite is them dominating instant messaging with MSN/Live. Then somehow letting it fail, then buying up Skype, the ruining that as well.

[isomeme]

7:30 Google executive: "Only *two* competing message apps? Amateurs."

[profdc]

This video taught me that the last person whose interests are considered by tech companies is the consumer.

[peterpaul]

A corporation can lose billions of dollars and still level up while a regular person loses their job and their lives are wrecked. What a system

[JoeHamelin]

Not one word about Active Directory. This is why any company over a few dozen people run on Microsoft.

Neither Linux, Google or Apple offer anything that can totally manage hundreds of thousands of users, and desktops and laptops for an enterprise system. No one.

The other main thing going for Microsoft is that all major enterprise software runs on it. You're not going to run Autocad, Catia, Ansys or other engineering and manufacturing software on an Apple or a Linux box. That use to be the world of Sun and SGI, but now that we have Intel workstations with insane graphic cards, it's all written for Windows.

Before you think of calling me a Microsoft fanboi, I'm typing this on my iMac. But I work for a global aerospace company in IT as a Systems Engineer supporting thousands of servers and almost 100, 000 users. I know what Microsoft excels at: Active Directory and the Office Suite that fully integrates with it. Powershell has also come a long way. I can run *nix commands on Powershell in Windows, and I can also run Powershell on IOS and Linux. With AD integration on PS, you can script GPO updates and AD tasks with ease. This isn't your grandfather's DOS shell anymore.

[marufbepary]

As someone who follows the AI industry closely, studies AI and works with AI, I can tell you that Google is kne of the biggest players in AI. Their recent AI advancements have been impressive with things like Gemini 2.5 Pro, Veo 2, ImaGen 3, etc. Thr age old problem for Google (marketing) still exists though. We also need to remember that Google invented the transformer architecture that is the magic behind LLMs like ChatGPT; the T in GPT literally stands for transformer. I'm by no means a Google fan but we need yk acknowledge that they are a big player in AI and not fodder. Like you said, regular consumers go on feelings and emotions and frankly ChatGPT was the first true LLM that people cared about (since Google slept on their AI research) but if you take out feelings ans look at it objectively then Google is massive in AI (again).

[ChevBling]

Microsoft is mostly for business and not for personal users.

[soroushal]

Microsoft slowly transitioned from a tech company to an investment company. They buy big businesses and integrate them to their massive software infrastructure. If they continue doing business like this, they will not fail for a very long time