Microsoft's year of shame

The last ember of optimism in my subconscious wants me to believe that by putting the four words above in sequence, shouted in 30pt font, the truth of it has already rung out in your mind. You don't need the impassioned argument about how Microsoft is the shameful poster child for just how contemptible an American megacorp can be in the year 2025. You don't need me to muster every bit of evidence I can find, because even if you don't remember each step in the bleak parade you can recall the shape of the march.

Or maybe that's just the end-of-year fugue trying to convince me it's already past time I surrendered to the sugar coma and don't have to do any more work. Who can say? Either way, when you chalk up this many Ls in a single year, I don't think the passing shame of a single week's news cycle can do the whole picture justice. For as much criticism as Microsoft has gotten this year for closing game studios like Arkane, for pivoting Windows away from the kind of software that has a fun hot dog stand color scheme to a bloated whale carcass that even non-techies are considering ditching in favor of Linux, it deserves more.

Microsoft's leadership will no doubt point to the stock price as proof 2025 was a great year for the company. Call me crazy, but I feel like profiting while laying off talent, making your products materially worse, and firing your own employees for protesting your morally bankrupt deals with a bloodthirsty military is a bad look, actually! But get that bag I guess.

Xbox closes studios, cancels games and lays off thousands as Phil Spencer says the "platform, hardware, and game roadmap have never looked stronger"

Has it become passé yet, pointing out that the things executives say in their work messaging fall somewhere between "detached from reality" and "outright deranged?" I think you can see Spencer grappling with this in the memo he sent internally, when he wrote: "I recognize that these changes come at a time when we have more players, games, and gaming hours than ever before. … The success we're seeing currently is based on tough decisions we've made previously."

I guess that's what I'd try to tell myself as I closed The Initiative and canceled Perfect Dark, binned Rare's Everwild and a shooter being made by John Romero, and axed an MMO that I apparently thought was awesome! Just some real tough decisions, super tough, but necessary. No way around them.

What else was I going to do: Not spend half a decade consolidating half the gaming industry under my roof, so that any shift in my tech company's expectations of profitability would spell maximum disaster? Quit, rather than serve as the trigger man for everyone suffering the consequences of my own planning? Nah. That's just the job, making the tough calls.

Ending Windows 10 support with no upgrade path for hundreds of millions of PCs

Microsoft's steep performance and security requirements for Windows 11 seemed so ill-advised four years ago that I thought the company would surely back down from them, but it didn't. In fact, if you choose to install the OS on a below-spec PC, Microsoft will let you know you aren't entitled to updates. Nothing's changed in the years since, and Windows 10 reached its planned end of life this past October.

According to ZDNet's estimates, roughly a third of PCs in the world are still running Windows 10: Something like 400 million. That's an embarrassing number all by itself, considering how poorly it reflects on Windows 11 adoption. Most of those systems can't be upgraded if their owners wanted to. Even if many of those Win 10 systems are enterprise PCs at companies that have paid for continued security patches for the next few years, there are still millions more that belong to everyday people with perfectly fine computers who will now be increasingly vulnerable to viruses and exploits.

I'm sure this is engendering tons of goodwill towards Windows 11 among the average computer user, but Microsoft has thought up a solution for that particular downward spiral.

Fucking jamming fucking AI in everything, fuck

It was a fiasco last year when Microsoft realized its marquee AI feature called Recall was a privacy nightmare, and you might be surprised to discover it's still problematic because you're probably not using it. Did you even know it was released? Do you know anyone who likes it, or uses Copilot, which can't even do the things Microsoft shows it doing in ads?

I don't even want to get into how fucking bleak it is that the CEO of one of the most lucrative companies on earth would rather talk to his phone about the transcript of a podcast than listen to the human beings who made the thing speak. I don't wanna get into the way Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI are basically hitching the whole economy to AI such that a flop either means a recession or a too-big-to-fail government bailout.

It's just the maddening insult—the gaslighting!—of people with tremendous amounts of control over how we interface with technology holding up something that totally sucks and going "Look how awesome this is!"

In other words: Microsoft's head of AI doesn't understand why people don't like AI, and I don't understand why he doesn't understand because it's pretty obvious

Diversity priorities? Eh, who needs those

Microsoft is hardly the only tech company to gleefully retreat from progressive policy decisions as soon as the Trump administration came back into power, but I cannot roll my eyes hard enough at the company saying it has "evolved beyond" the annual diversity and inclusion reports it's been publishing since 2019, to forms that are "more dynamic and accessible," as reported by The Verge.

I'm sure it's no coincidence that the company has also dropped diversity from its HR language and performance reviews. Corporate values do have a pesky habit of getting in the way of profits, don't they?

The Xbox Series X can no longer even feign being competitive

• Tariffs drive the Xbox Series X price up to $650, $100 more than the PS5 that has already outsold it by more than 3-to-1
• Xbox consoles sell so poorly Costco stops bothering to stock them
• Major releases continue skipping Xbox at launch
• It's so over John Halo is coming to PlayStation now

Game Pass proves unsustainable despite Microsoft plowing $75 billion into Activision

Former Arkane developer Raphael Colantonio called Game Pass "an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade" while former Bethesda and Microsoft executives Pete Hines and Shannon Loftis said it creates "an ecosystem that is not properly valuing and rewarding" game developers and creates "weird inner tensions" for first party development.

But getting Call of Duty on Game Pass would push Microsoft to that goal of 100 million subscribers, right? No? It's not working out that way at all? The company is still 60-ish million subscribers away from its goal of 100 million? Hmm. Seems like this may not have been a good plan.

"This is an Xbox" ad campaign's attempted rebrand just highlights the brand's irrelevance

Xbox was clearly setting itself up for the launch of its gaming handheld when it started this campaign in late 2024, and everyone gets the pitch: "Xbox" these days is not so much about the console as it is Game Pass and cloud streaming and buying Microsoft games on PC and so on and so forth.

But alongside the console's failure and the shuttering of studios and the declining interest in Game Pass, the ad doesn't so much convince that "anything is an Xbox" as it does "Xbox no longer matters."

Windows gaming handhelds perform worse than Linux ones

Despite making hardware and software and having literal decades and endless money to make Windows the best possible OS for PC gaming, Microsoft has been embarrassed on both the UI and performance fronts by open source development and Valve, which has somewhere around 500 employees to Microsoft's 220,000.

Two years into Microsoft's ownership of Activision Blizzard, Call of Duty sells so badly they can't even come up with any positive metrics for it

"We'll never do this again" is community management at its most desperate.

Supplying tech to the Israeli military throughout its commitment of atrocity after atrocity in Palestine

The shame that makes all the rest of Microsoft's shames trite in comparison. In January, The Guardian reported that "Microsoft deepened its relationship with Israel’s defence establishment after 7 October 2023, supplying the military with greater computing and storage services and striking at least $10m in deals to provide thousands of hours of technical support."

The company's support for the Israeli military went beyond Word documents and PowerPoints. According to The Guardian, "While the IDF has used some Microsoft services for administrative purposes, such as email and file management systems, documents and interviews suggest Azure has been used to support combat and intelligence activities."

Microsoft all but ignored the topic until two incredibly brave employees interrupted the company's 50th anniversary event to protest. They were fired.

In response, Microsoft "conducted an internal review" and gave itself the all-clear: being paid tens of millions of dollars by the Israeli military was fine, it said, because it "found no evidence … that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza."

This was such a pathetic turn that it roused a denouncement from Windows 95 startup sound composer Brian Eno, more protests, and even a shareholder proposal to perform more than a token internal review.

Finally, in September, Microsoft blocked the Israeli military from "specific cloud storage and AI services and technologies" to ensure its "services are not used for mass surveillance of civilians."

Despite this change, Microsoft—specifically, Xbox—remains a target of the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement and No Games For Genocide, groups "working to end the material and commercial ties between the games industry and enabling genocide, war crimes, and the military industrial complex." While ditching Windows is impractical for millions, BDS has targeted Xbox as a "luxury good" for consumers to boycott "without having to give up items or services they need to live."

My expectations for Microsoft in 2026 are low. I expect it to lay off more game developers and cancel more games as it tries to pump AI bubble profits out of entertainment. I expect Windows to continue down the path of agentic AI, even as the experience proves poor for the humans on the other side of the screen. I expect it to keep making its icons worse, for some damn reason.

But if it does fully cut ties with the Israeli military, that will at least represent a small step towards reckoning with how much worse you can make the world for the sake of a $3.5 trillion market cap.