Quote:
Originally Posted by hardcastle
I'm just trying to make a point about Microsoft's company culture being unable to sustain long-term consumer products. If you want to argue with me, argue with that.
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Well I know you don't like IE, but like it or not it has been sustained.
And so has XBOX. XBOX was forced to change, as the gaming console industry is on the decline and being seriously challenged by casual gaming platforms like iOS and services like Steam. It HAD to be more of a general entertainment and service-driven device to survive the next 5-10 years, and even now the traditional game console part may not. But that's not Microsoft's fault. You can't maintain a market that isn't there. Even so, it's still a gaming console today and continues the brands associated with it.
Zune was not sustained because the writing was on the wall in that market. Notice how the current iPods aren't up to date with the iPhone? The dedicated music player market has collasped. If you want a Microsoft music player you can spend about $70 on a Lumia 520 and not activate the phone part. It's redundant to offer a standalone player today with such cheap phones available. Two years support for a discontinued consumer device is quite good and nothing to complain about.
They also continue to support and develop Bing even though it has struggled to gain traction. It's gotten to be quite good, along with many of its companion products.
Office is still a consumer product on some level.
And of course there's the most successful consumer product in the history of computing, Windows. Yes, there have been new versions, but do you really expect support to never end on old versions? They have been pretty good about extending support to old versions. Twelve years of supporting Windows XP. Heck, they even still have the MS-DOS command prompt in Windows 8.1/RT.
Anybody can complain about any computer product I suppose as they ALL require upgrades of some sort and nothing is supported forever. I don't understand why people single out Microsoft as being so horrible as historically they have typically been better in offering support than most of their competition and this is very easy to show.