Microsoft's anti-consumer strategy... of self-destruction

I've spent plenty of time writing on this blog about Microsoft's anti-consumer bullshit; in fact, some may say that I've spent far too much time writing on the subject. But all of my writing on this topic has started from a single, straightforward, baseline assumption: that Microsoft want our money. 

If you assume that Microsoft want as much money as they can extract, and to extract money from as many of us as possible, then a lot of what they're doing seems at once obviously motivated, and bafflingly counter-productive. But what if that's not the goal? What if MS don't care about individual consumers at all?

That's the argument being put forward by Kareem Anderson at ONMSFT:

CEO Satya Nadella and by extension, software giant Microsoft doesn’t want you or me as customers.

Why might you ask?

Perhaps, because we’re fickle, fair-weather, shiny gadget chasing consumers whose financial investments are mostly spent perpetuating the status quo rather than helping to make the leaps necessary to shape a technology future envisioned in countless science fiction books and films.

Instead, Microsoft’s ideal customer is a 250,000 seat Office 365 licensee, or an aerospace facility using Azure as its backend cloud solution. Microsoft can no longer be bothered with our petty wants or needs as a Microsoft Health, Band, Windows Phone or Groove Music consumer.

Microsoft believes a future isn’t in the shackles of 5-inch plus rectangle piece of glass, the latest streaming media platform, or even the most powerful gaming console of the time. Instead, Microsoft is betting that the future is in an always-connected mesh network of interconnected devices, nodes, sensors and software that combine to anticipate, automate and regulate the lives of most people. And, quite frankly, it seems Microsoft is tired of walking consumers hand-in-hand through this process.

This is a perspective on Microsoft's anti-consumer approach to... well, everything, that honestly hadn't occurred to me, but it does make a horrible sort of sense. Customers are work. It seems a lot easier, at least on paper, to build the info-structure that other businesses will use to deal with all those demanding, unreasonable individuals, and then ignore all those little people to do business exclusively with other big businesses.

There's just one problem with that: the simple fact that personal computing is personal... and that interacting with those people directly is the only way to know anything about them. It's really hard to build a framework that will let you deliver services to individual consumers that you don't understand at all.