Not to defend them, just that we don’t really know what they intend, what they’re really trying to do.

They want profit. Maximum profit, preferably by the end of this quarter. Failing that, they want monopoly power. The fact that M$ is going all in on AI (it already spent over 150 fucking billion dollars on it as capital expenditure) with nothing to show but "trust me bro" revenue and empty promises should be all you need to know about how far up their own asses the higher ups are.

When they went on a studio acquisition spree, it was with the intent of gaining market share. This was back when cloud gaming was "the next big thing", but that it has mostly disappeared from headlines should make it obvious that it was not "the next big thing". Sure, only Google Stadia was shut down, but you don't hear much about GeForce NOW, Amazon Luna or even Xbox Cloud. "Cloud gaming" was nowhere near as big as they hoped and is unlikely to be, even with the absurd prices of electronics thanks to the AI craze.

We are talking about the M$ which is actively sabotaging their own mainline programs for greater profit extraction. Win11 is a mess of unwanted ads, worse than Win10 ever was. They bundled copilot everywhere - teams, office, even fucking notepad - in order to artificially boost adoption numbers.

All of the decisions that put focus on profit extraction come from higher up. None of them come from Joe Software Engineer, who has to do what the boss says or pack his shit and look for a job elsewhere.