Online Sourcerer

Three months ago, I had to switch schools. The school that I transferred to is deeply integrated with the products of Microsoft, meaning that our books were on OneNote, mails on Outlook and everything else on Teams. Fancy names right? This three month experience led me to discover how unoptimized, unorganized and over-engineered Microsoft products are. Having worked on similar software, these traits caught my eye, so I dug deeper.

To understand how Microsoft ended up here, it helps to know where they started. Microsoft was first established in 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen as Micro-Soft. The first ever product of Micro-Soft was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800. Functional, purposeful; the opposite of how things are run today.

Let’s start with Teams. Introduced in 2016 as Microsoft’s competitor to Slack, it’s never matched Slack’s performance. As a daily user, the most glaring issue I’ve encountered is RAM usage. I’ve seen the web version hit 1GB while completely idle. This isn’t a resource problem. Microsoft has near-infinite resources, so why can’t they get their software together?

The Microsoft that built the BASIC interpreter for Altair 8800 isn’t around anymore. It got replaced with layers of executives who chase metrics instead of users. It doesn’t help that Microsoft’s executive layer is a revolving door. Just look at the names: Sinofsky, Myerson, Panay. All led major divisions. All left. Each time, priorities shifted and projects stalled. Every new executive arrives with a different vision, launches initiatives to leave their mark, and abandons whatever their predecessor started. Nothing gets finished. Nothing gets fixed. Remember Windows Phone? Cortana? Their current products are no different; still running, barely improving.

Microsoft doesn’t have a resource or workforce problem. They have a focus problem. Is this going to change? Probably not. As long as schools like mine keep buying Microsoft 365 subscriptions, they’ll keep seeing users as dots on a graph.