developer economics

Microsoft’s attempt to build a safe, centralized app ecosystem for Windows began as an inspired idea and then spent more than a decade bouncing between half-measures, bad product bets, and shifting incentives — but over the last two years Microsoft has quietly rebuilt the plumbing and the...

Microsoft’s app-store experiment started with a clear promise — a single, safe place to find and automatically update Windows software — but for more than a decade the reality was a sequence of missteps, confusing platform shifts, and fragmented developer incentives that left most PC users...

Microsoft’s push to make Xbox the gaming platform that follows players across consoles, PCs, and handhelds is now measurable—and exposed by a practical problem: some of the biggest publishers still aren’t playing ball with Xbox Play Anywhere, and that gap risks turning Microsoft’s cross-device...

Microsoft’s renewed push to make Windows a deeply agentic, multimodal platform—paired with ambitious Copilot investments—has quietly rewritten the conditions that once made a Microsoft-branded phone an improbable gamble; taken together, those shifts make the idea of a “new Windows phone” not...