Microsoft is a gargantuan company.
They have 114,000 employees. They make a popular gaming console, the only viable operating system used by more people than anyone by far, and have their toes dipped in every conceivable market segment, from consumer chatbots to social media for business. There’s no question the company competes easily with Apple and Google for the top crown of all technology, assuming you can forgive them for Windows 8.
Yet, they have a major problem in the age of immediate access from anywhere. Bowing out of the smartphone market is not as troubling as a much more serious issue related to usability: Microsoft has a crisis of confusion.
Here’s a good example. Let’s say you want to play the game Gears of War 4 on your PC. Anyone who pre-ordered the game for Xbox One can play starting today, and Play Anywhere means you can download the game on Windows for free. But where do you find it? You can search using the Xbox app, but that doesn’t work. You can try going to Microsoft.com or Xbox.com and checking there, but that doesn’t work, either. In fact, the only way to find the game is through a rat’s nest. You have to go to the Windows store app, login with your Xbox account (not your Windows account), and then click a tiny avatar icon. (By the way, this icon is for Windows, not for Xbox.) There’s an option called My Library in that menu, but it’s not a tab on the main screen. Then, you have to select all apps, because only a few are listed. Finally, you find the game.
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This maze of confusion is just as startling if you try to figure out how to use a new app like Microsoft MyAnalytics, which is designed for personal productivity data. Hashtag irony. It doesn’t help at all that the name used to be Delve Analytics. How do you get the app? Don’t ask me, I have no idea. It’s included for free in something called the Office 365 E5 plan and in the Office 365 enterprise suite. I’m pretty sure Office 365 is an estimate on the number of days you need to allocate to figuring this all out.
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It makes me wonder if anyone at Microsoft ever thinks about making the ecosystem work better. In other words, more like the one for Apple and Google. If I own Gears of War 4, and if the price includes dual platform support on Windows and Xbox, I shouldn’t have to figure out which icons to click. For a massive, iconic company like Microsoft to stay massive and iconic in the coming age of immediate mobile access, they will have to figure out how to make this work smoother. On a desktop, you click around until you find the right option. On a mobile device while you’re waiting for an Uber to show up, you don’t have time. Things either work right away or you move on.
Microsoft, are you listening?
No, John Brandon, I don't think they are. In fact, I think that all of Microsoft's problems in the last year can be explained up by Microsoft not listening: not to users' privacy concerns about Windows 10; nor to users' clearly and often-expressed wishes to not upgrade to Windows 10 in the first place; nor to users' desires to control their PCs' privacy settings and update cycle; nor to users' desire to install updates individually, rather than in a single, monthly, inadequately-tested and bug-ridden lump.
Microsoft is a gargantuan company, and they clearly think that being that large means that they can do whatever the fuck they want, regardless of what their customers want or need. Only time will tell whether or not they're right about that; whether or not they really are too big to actually fail. As someone who's been actively rooting for them to fail for months, now, I'm hoping that Microsoft are wrong about this; I'm hoping that their cavalier attitude towards what their customers are clearly telling them results in more lost market share for their flagship product. Either way, we'll know in a few weeks.
I do need to correct Mr. Brandon on one point: Microsoft may make the most viable desktop (and laptop) OS, but they don't make the OS "used by more people than anyone by far." Since 2015, Google's Android has had the largest installed base of all operating systems (OS) of any kind; it's been the best selling OS on tablets since 2013, and it's dominant by every metric on smartphones. As Brandon himself notes, the mobile market counts, and Microsoft isn't even a player there, let alone the dominant player.
Brandon's entire piece is still well worth reading, though, so go give the man some clicks.