Well, Blizzard is Microsoft now so I guess they belong together.
Ironically though, Diablo Immortal was a huge commercial success despite the tone deaf announcement. I don't think MS will experience the same though. They're quickly going to be left with the only people using windows are those who are forced by their employer, no one will willingly choose it over other options.
I think what people misunderstand is that this is probably an active goal of theirs.
Similar to how Microsoft has decided there's no money to be made in console hardware and is trying to spin their Xbox brand into a software service brand they can slap on other things, I think they've decided that making a consumer OS has no money in it, and all the minmaxing of squeezing at the moment is them trying to extract the last drips of money while trying to drive people elsewhere.
I could be wrong, I'm not a journalist with sources at the company or something, but looking at it from the outside, this seems like the moves you'd make to drive people off your platform over time so you can kill it while having plausible deniability that you're not trying to do that, you definitely genuinely believe everyone wants you to opt them into everything every time you push an update.
In particular, I don't think having the kinds of enormous tire fires on update releases over this long without radical reinvestment in avoiding that happening in the future is what you do if you're trying to build something you're still dealing with another 10-20 years from now.
It seems like they had the right idea with Windows 10 (our consumer OS is now just a loss-leader we put out for free as a way to market Office/OneDrive/Visual Studio etc) but they've completely about-faced with 11. Which yeah, could be a sign they're wanting to kill the consumer segment i guess.
11, I think, is what happened when they wanted to push breaking changes that customers who pay for LTSC wanted to avoid for the entire lifetime of 10.
My assumption is that 10 was as you describe, and then 11 was motivated by wanting to make disruptive changes to squeeze the last juice from the consumer segment, and the "agentic OS" pivot is just the most recent gorilla in the room to squeeze the ever-drier sponge.
In particular, I would assume Microsoft sees writing on the wall with how so many people in younger demographics are using phones as primary devices and see full sized laptops and desktops as effectively legacy platforms they use at jobs, and is frantically trying to get out of that market before the bottom falls out.
> and is frantically trying to get out of that market before the bottom falls out.
I think you're right. They've been really pushing Windows 365 for businesses lately, and now have direct boot into W365. The new agentic stuff spins up temporary W365 instances to do it's thing.
They even recently made data model and report creation available in PowerBI web, something I never thought I'd see happen has PowerBI desktop was one of a few things still locking people in that ecosystem to Windows. They've publicly said they're committed to the web version now and web will get all the new features.
Microsoft is really pushing hard on "Windows as a service." The future of Windows isn't a locally installed OS. Windows is going to become just another app on every other platform. It's no coincidence that they renamed the remote desktop app to the "Windows app." Macs, chromebooks, phones, tablets, doesn't matter. No matter what you have, you will still be able to access Windows.
They do need to drive as many consumers off of it first though before pulling the rug and going subscription unless they want even more bad press.
Ironically though, Diablo Immortal was a huge commercial success despite the tone deaf announcement. I don't think MS will experience the same though. They're quickly going to be left with the only people using windows are those who are forced by their employer, no one will willingly choose it over other options.