Microsoft is an Empire in Decline

William Kelly
Nov 1 · 5 min read

America’s age of explosive growth is over. It has been for decades. Economic inequality is now at the highest point in U.S. history, worker wages have not increased since the 70’s, each subsequent generation is set up to be poorer than the one before, and slowly but surely the United States finds its quality of life deteriorating, suffering the first stages of a true 20th-century-style imperial crisis all while being eclipsed by more pragmatic nations. American exceptionalism is not dead––if we can learn anything from the charred remains of the British empire it’s that imperial pretensions tend to die hard––rather the American exception is dead. The most interesting problem of our era is how American corporations, so accustomed to ever-increasing profits, are going to respond to the threat of decline. Will companies quietly fade or will they fight tooth and nail to keep money flowing in as it once did? If the latter, can a corporation with dutifully rising profits be considered ‘in decline’ if their methods are increasingly desperate and unsustainable?

Microsoft has always been ruthless and depraved, but this doesn’t make it stand out from the crowd. What makes Microsoft truly exceptional is how open and truthful it is towards its depravity. Where other corporations equivocate, deflect, or support tame progressive causes to gain public favor, Microsoft’s PR team consists of two business school interns and a Serbian war criminal. Sure, they’ll sue you if you try to leave the company, but that’s just business. In nations with more robust anti-monopoly laws, they regularly and loudly fight lawsuits and dutifully hand over their settlement when they inevitably lose. They made no effort to hide their “enemies list” of journalists who wrote poor reviews of their work, blacklisting them from events and often trying to get them fired. The reason they don’t take even minor precaution towards public controversy, in all seriousness, is that they just can’t be bothered to. Microsoft isn’t just too big to fail, it has been too big to fail for decades, and it is becoming increasingly cognizant of just how far they can go without any impact on their user-base. What are you going to do, switch to Linux? You wouldn’t last a week. Sure you could buy a Mac, but their lineup of $1000–$6000 flagships are going to run you double the cost of a PC with similar hardware. We’re stuck with Microsoft, and they are fully aware.

Microsoft’s current operating system, Windows 10, is the most banally dystopian product of our time. Microsoft has embraced the Software as a Service model a la Adobe Creative Suite, eager to squeeze as much extra revenue from you as possible after the initial $140 purchase. With their cloud storage platform and online partnerships failing spectacularly, Microsoft is left cramming advertisements into every crevice they can be made to fit. Do you use their rebranded internet explorer? No? Well you can look forward to desperate pleas to reconsider every time you open another browser. Do you have a subscription to Sling TV? Oh, you’ve never heard of it? Well at any rate the program is going to come pre-installed, and it’ll send you notifications pushing its $14.99 subscription. Do you have a subscription to Microsoft Office 365? If you, like all humans under 50, answered ‘no’, then you can look forward to regular notifications from your file explorer begging you to put down $6.99 a month. To be clear, these advertisements are not here to sway your consumer conscience towards what Microsoft believes to be a better product; these advertisements are selling you the right to not see them anymore. The constant intrusions are not the result of incompetent programmers or poor marketing, they are deliberate and calculated. Misery is the design, despondence is the business model. Though it’s possible to remove all advertisements, notifications, and bloatware, it requires unlicensed and questionably legal post-market programs to do so. I bought this computer, what do you mean I can’t delete the Windows store? Why are you pinging advertisements for internet explorer every time I open Google Chrome? Why are you downloading candy crush when I’m just going to immediately delete it? Why do I have to hack my own computer to achieve the quality-of-life that my 2004 ThinkPad could give me? How can you make your product qualitatively worse over and over again without losing any money?

XKCD #528 (CC BY-NC 2.5)
XKCD #528 (CC BY-NC 2.5)

As late-capitalism’s flagship polity, it only makes sense that Microsoft is highly active in that most democratic of institutions, campaign finance. Currently these donations are suspended after employees learned that management was ignoring their wishes and donating to prominent Republican politicians such as Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney. Notably, the PAC also donated a smaller but not-insignificant amount to the Democratic opponents of their Republican patrons. I suppose it can never hurt to cover all your bases. And what far-too-on-the-nose cyberpunk corporation would be complete without military applications? In February, they won a $480 million contract to make augmented-reality headsets for the United States military, sparking a near-revolt within the lower ranks of the company. Though an open letter with hundreds of employee backers urged cancellation and expressed discomfort toward developing video-game-coded weapons of war, Microsoft apparently found someone to make it for them, and the first prototypes were released 2 months later. The U.S. military plans to get them to “thousands and thousands of soldiers across the force” by 2022. Oh, Microsoft also just won a $10 billion contract to run the Pentagon’s IT.

Where Apple has a minimalist, clear, pretentious design philosophy, Windows has the indecipherable artistic composition of an estate sale. Where Linux has the freedom and control of the open-source future we hoped for a decade ago, Windows, like a caricature of itself, skips the middle-man and pre-installs the malware for you. This isn’t an issue of “voting with your wallet,” you can’t beat a company that rakes in $126 billion a year with a boycott. Developers could only design their programs for Mac and Linux, but that necessarily means limiting their audience to the petit-bourgeoisie and insufferable nerds. If this rant had to have a call to action, I guess it would be “nationalize Microsoft”, but we all know that isn’t going to happen. We just get to wait, watch, and spend as the empire declines.

student in history and economics

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