From the Editor’s Desk: How Microsoft Ends ⭐

Microsoft released yet another new version of the Copilot app in Windows 11 this past Friday, and it's a major milestone. Not because the new Copilot makes any sense after four years of chaos and enshittification, but because it marks the beginning of the end for Microsoft as we know it.

I've watched Microsoft like a hawk, so to speak, for over 35 years, and the company and its biggest software products have been the focus of my career and adult life. As I've explained, this was pragmatic, not tech enthusiast cheerleading: When I first shifted my focus to Microsoft in the early 1990s, it was still ascendant and dominated personal computing. That might have continued unabated, but Microsoft's dominance crested and then retreated after antitrust regulators started chipping away at its illegal business practices in the late 1990s and early 2000s, opening the door for a new generation of competition.

Today, Microsoft is still one of the world's biggest and most powerful companies, but it's not the biggest or the most powerful of the Big Tech gang of evil-doers. And it is uniquely positioned to be victimized by the AI technology wave that, ironically, it started.

Microsoft will be studied in business schools for generations to come for all kinds of reasons, but it repeatedly proved itself to be as malleable as the software it created. Though it never had a single business or business model, Microsoft embraced software licensing early on thanks to its canny co-founder Bill Gates, who was inarguably as strong a businessman and dealmaker as he was a technical wunderkind. This combination of business smarts and clearly seeing the future is what separated Gates and Microsoft from all their competition.

Though other people and companies played major roles, too, Gates and Microsoft are rightfully credited with creating the personal computing market because they literally invented the software-based business model that made this industry economically viable. Before Gates and Microsoft, it wasn't clear whether anyone could or even should pay for software, just as it wasn't legally clear what intellectual property, copyright, or trademark laws might or might not protect this work. But in the wake of Gates and Microsoft, software sales were what drove personal computing. This is the notion of the killer app, software so desirable that mainstream users would buy a computer just to use that one application.

Microsoft's killer app changed over the years and expanded to include multiple tentpoles. In the enthusiast era of personal computing, Microsoft sold programming languages so that people could create their own software. Thanks to the success of early word processors and VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, Microsoft then shifted to application software, what we now think of as office productivity. It supplied the disk operating system (DOS) that IBM needed for its first PC, but Gates was smart enough to ensure that Microsoft retained...