vendredi 24 janvier 2020

The strange success of Microsoft in the cloud


In July 2015, Microsoft released Windows 10. But, a novelty compared to previous versions, it made the update from Windows 7 and 8 available free of charge to everyone for one year.

And if officially, the free update lasted only one year, it remained possible until the beginning of 2018. It was enough to declare being a user of assistive technologies (for the disabled) for the update to be validated. And even until 2019, there are regularly people indicating that it is still possible to upgrade to Windows 10 free of charge. In other words, throughout this period, very few people have had to buy a Windows 10 license.

So that means that Microsoft has lost a huge amount of money for 3 years (and more) by doing so, since Windows has been an important source of income until then. So MS should have suffered financial losses.

But, unbelievably, that wasn't the case at all. On the contrary, its income increased. Where did this miracle come from? Well, mainly from the cloud. Microsoft started to offer cloud services and was so successful in this market that it more than compensated its losses with Windows 10.

It is very surprising that Microsoft has become an important player in the cloud, given that it was not present on this market until a few years ago and that this one was already very competitive, with major players already present, such as IBM, DELL, then Amazon, Alibaba, Google, etc...

And as we have seen here, the entire world economy is in the hands of the elite. The elite controls all large companies and the vast majority of medium-sized companies. There is no real competition between them. We are in fact a managed economy.

So Microsoft's success in the cloud was also planned and arranged by the elite and is not the result of a winning strategy by Microsoft. And if the elite did this, it's to explain why Microsoft didn't collapse because Windows 10 was free.

It seems clear that the strategy of the elite is to make more and more normal to spy people via the operating system. To get people to accept this, the operating system had to be free. So the elite proposed a deal to the general public: the OS becomes free, but you pay for it indirectly by letting Microsoft access your data. It is indeed quite difficult to impose mass espionage when you make people pay for the OS. Besides, with W10, MS also imposes forced updates, which will allow the OS to evolve in the direction MS wants (and behind MS, the elite) without people being able to prevent it.

But, there is a logical problem with this strategy. Since Microsoft's revenues were largely based on the sale of Windows until then, they should have collapsed. It should have been an untenable strategy in the long run. Especially since Windows 10 is supposed to be the last of the Windows. There won't be a new version after that. There will only be free updates of Windows 10. So anyone who has upgraded to W10 will never have to pay for a Windows again. And even those who paid for the OS once, will never have to do it again afterwards.

Furthermore, since the Office suite has become mature starting with the 2007 version, most people and even companies do not need to buy new versions (or at least, not as often as before). As a result, this branch of the business should have seen its revenues drop sharply as well.

So, Microsoft should have reported very important losses for a few years. It should have been quite catastrophic. And that should have called into question Windows 10's free software strategy. And without free Windows 10, the goal of spying users openly would have become very difficult to achieve.

So, for the elite plan to work, MS had to "find" a new source of income. That new source was the cloud. By becoming a giant in this field, it was then relatively normal to keep Windows 10 free. Being only a more or less secondary branch of the company (or at least no longer a primary one), it didn't seem strange anymore that MS would make it free, and more importantly, keep it free.

That's why, while MS kept making mistake after mistake in almost every domain for years, it suddenly started to have a seemingly ultra-brilliant strategy in the cloud, a domain where it's difficult to differentiate oneself. The reality is that the elite have imposed MS in the markets and made sure that their offerings were superior to others and that even when they were not, it was MS that was chosen. Or it is also possible that all this is largely virtual and that MS's market share is much lower than what is officially said.

The fact that MS failed in the telephony field was most probably planned for from the outset as well. The company spying PC users had to be another one than the one spying smartphone users. Otherwise, it would have been much less accepted by the people. It was better if there were two different companies for that: Google for smartphones, and MS for PCs.