Is Microsoft Going Out of Business?

Given recent pricing decisions, one has to ask if Microsoft is going out of business. Wall Street has been worried about the massive financial abyss that is AI and Cloud Computing. Despite what you might see in the chart, smart money has been getting out while fools rush in.

Some of you may remember the GameStop Bubble. That’s where the supposed “professional investors” had massively shorted GME and ordinary people who were locked in and bored with the pandemic used some money they accumulated to really put the hurt on those people. Trouble was, they got out and the sheep following the herd were lead to slaughter.

Microsoft has been a bastion of low quality software coupled with bad design for decades. Ironically Microsoft proved most humans are imbeciles and Apple decided to capitalize on that by releasing the Imbecile Phone.

The Stench of a Corpse

One has to have lived long enough to watch enough things die to catch the tell tale scent of a corpse. There are many things that lead me to believe Microsoft may be going out of business.

• Re-opening of 3 Mile Island. If you weren’t alive in the 70s, find The China Syndrome on your streaming services or in your local library. Their code is so inefficient it requires data centers so massive they cannot be connected to the existing power grid.
• Forcing customers into subscription services. I’ve been in IT 40 years. You buy a piece of software and use it for as long as you want. Forcing subscriptions on customers is a red flag of a cash flow problem. Customers are jumping to Linux with OnlyOffice or SoftMaker Office. Both have desktop packages that can be installed and used for free. There are some commercial options if you would like to pay for it. I personally paid the $99 or whatever it was for a 5 system license of SoftMaker some years ago. It was a more than fair price. I’m currently writing another novel with it.
• Per-CPU core licensing.
• Non-transferable licenses.

Non-transferable Lesson of Wang

Microsoft has made perpetual licenses non-transferable. When your old computer dies you cannot install your Microsoft products on your new machine. You have to buy new Micorosft products and oh yes, we mandate you buy a subscription that is basically useless if you aren’t connected to the Internet where we can pump ads at you constantly.

Yeah, Wang tried something like this. Wang went a bit further. If you sold your Wang or traded it in, whoever bought it had to buy a new $20K software license for it. Kind of sad really. Wang was the word processor of its day. When Wang pulled this, its customer base jumped ship.

Per-CPU Licensing Lessons of DEC and Cognos

I heard from an embedded systems customer yesterday that wanted me to start a new business migrating customers off Windows Server to Linux. Kid you not. They had 2 (two) 40-core servers and Microsoft just informed them Windows Server would be licensed per-cpu core. I told him to dig out an old single-core computer to run whatever had to be Microsoft on and to migrate to either Rocky Linux or Linux Mint. I had literally just set up a regular Mint desktop as both a file server (using Samba) and a CalDav (calendar and address book) serer using something else. NextCloud was just too unstable. An upgrade trashed everything.

This email more than anything has me asking “is Microsoft going out of business?” The huge cash investment to build data centers for buggy inefficient software is generating no returns. DeepSeek just handed the supposed tech titans of AI their ass. They OpenSourced that thing to just to prove if you don’t use Agile and don’t write shit code you can do more with a cheap computer than they can with a data center.

Cognos

Some of you will say “but Cognos is still around.” No, not really. IBM consumed the company. Cognos had the best 4GL on the market during the late 80s and early 90s. Relational databases like Oracle and RDB were finally get priced where they could be purchased by companies with Midrange computers. Trouble was every major computer system was using indexed files and flat/relative files. Re-writing all core systems was not an option. Cognos Powerhouse was one of the few 4GL tools to successfully straddle indexed files and multiple databases with simple scripting.

The downside was too many BASIC programmers demanded they be able to keep using a different variable name for the same field in each different file. They were not going to key that into a common data dictionary. Yes, many of them quickly became unemployed as companies tried to migrate systems to relational databases where that simply wasn’t allowed.

As the typing resistance force dimmed sales, Cognos started selling licenses priced based on the number of users your computer could support. This was an early version of per-CPU core licensing. That really tanked sales. Cognos got eaten by IBM. Powerhouse got spun off. 4GLs are now marketed as “low code” environments.

DEC

I loved the DEC platforms and worked on them for nearly two decades. They made some serious blunders with the treasure they had, not the least of which was dumping money into the VAX 9000. A 32-bit billion dollar boondoggle that didn’t ship until 1990 with a price tag in the million dollar per machine range. In 1992 they came out with DEC Alpha which was 64-bit, faster, and way cheaper. You could put an Alpha in what kids today would call a desktop computer case. Didn’t need special cooling.

Ken Olsen, may he rest in peace, exited the company. Eventually they got G. Q. Bob who sold off all the crown jewels to finance his personal golden parachute. Axing employees right and left. Then they came up with “user capacity licensing.” I don’t remember the details, but it was much like the Cognos licensing and had the same effect. DEC got eaten by HP on its way under.

Summary

Per-CPU core and other “capacity” licensing is generally a last ditch effort by a failing company to generate cash flow. “The Cloud” is not green technology.

The cloud already emits more global GHG emissions than the commercial airline industry, surpassing emissions of over 22.2 million flights annually. 

Green Software foundation

Microsoft never really improved their software, not really. From the dual floppy days of DOS until now, they still churn out buggy massively bloated code that has countless security holes. Rather than use actual Software Engineering they created Microsoft Security Response Center. For decades they told the world “just throw hardware at it.” Intel, yet another company that is going under, published Moore’s Law telling MBAs around the world “just throw hardware at it” was the correct answer.

With these drastic licensing changes coupled with the push to subscription software, I have to ask “is Microsoft going out of business?” Once you stop paying the subscription you can’t use it anymore. Maybe you get the data you stored with them back, maybe you don’t. Do you want to toss those dice? Got to be driving people away. The world is accustomed to installing it on their own computer and using it until it dies. Visit a hospital ER and see how many computers are still running XP.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper to hire actual software professionals and write better code for your AI than to build all these data centers? The Large Language Model was a joke, time for you to admit that. Yes, you may be able to salvage the part that dynamically creates tables for a relational database as a database design product, but the rest of it is a joke. DeepSeek is just the first of many to come. Just like Intel, Bloatware Inc. appears to be headed out of business.

Update: 2025-02-24

Further evidence of Microsoft’s downward spiral can be found in this article. Suddenly and quietly cancelling data center leases is the mark of a company in financial death throws despite how they cook the books. I expect they will be forced to cancel their dividend soon.

Update: 2025-03-10

And the smart money bails! Mag 7 sell-off gathering steam.