MicrosoftEducated guess - they want to simplify all their mail clients to use one code base. New Outlook and Windows Mail are nothing more than a frontend for Outlook for the Web. Nadella's gotta find some way to fund Copilot, so cut corners (and employees) wherever possible! As much as I disliked Ballmer personally, he and Gates were miles ahead of this guy.
I agree. It really is a strange world when Ballmer was the superior choice. He made a lot of mistakes in his tenure. Microsoft still is suffering from losing the mobile phone war so badly. But the one thing Ballmer did right was push every product team to make the best product possible, whether new or legacy. They failed often, sure. But the culture was there. Nadella only cares about cloud and AI -- nothing else. Desktop, server, everything else is just a path to monetizing Azure/AI. In the short run, this seems to be helping their posture on Wall Street. But I do think a dark cloud is looming. With Xbox effectively shutting down, Linux essentially replacing all but Active Directory in the server space, and Apple continuing to make in-roads into the laptop/PC space, Microsoft only has Cloud and AI to lean on now. It didn't have to be this way. They just have to not neglect products. But that's what they've done. This is just the latest example. AI is a huge gamble because there is still, four years on into massive deployment of LLM industry-wide, no actual profit strategy. It's losing money left and right and people are not paying for subscriptions to offset infrastructure cost of running the LLMs. With nothing else but Azure to lean on, this could be bad for Microsoft, especially since they are a distance second in cloud to AWS.
