"Poor governance" tends to be an easy catchall term to shift blame on for economic failures, but reality is, like you said, a lot more nuanced. India's socialist government looks justifiably horrible and inefficient when looked at through a rational economist's glasses, but what many don't realize is that its main priority for most of its existence has been stabilizing regions and preventing balkanization, which it has achieved significantly, sadly having to fall back to political nationalism (another catchall term the author of this article himself uses to push some blame) and socialist federal overreach to achieve it. We tend to be quick to notice failures but God knows how many circumstances we have dodged that were too close to disruptive civil war without recognizing it.
I probably don't understand your point, but if the result of having the prevention of balkanisation as the overriding goal is a "horrible and inefficient" government, why is it a good goal? If India had fractured into its component states (and you seem to imply that this has often been a strong threat), would the people have been poorer? It's rare that independent states ever want to rejoin their historical country of origin.
That's a good question but preferably left unanswered, because trying to find the answer could easily lead to some very, very bad outcomes.
Sub-Saharan Africa is an example of what happens when you allow balkanization through arbitrarily-drawn territorial lines (and all territorial lines are always inherently arbitrary enough to not please everyone). Perpetual war, misery, stagnation.
To be fair, I understand why 'preventing balkanization' is a target, but I'm not sure it's a correct one. By de-federalizing a bit, even temporarily, for a few decades, India might have fared a bit better overall. But I understand why they chose not to, it is a very dangerous choice that can end very poorly.
What'd be the point of inflating market caps like this when it's obvious they'll crash the moment the owner tries to liquidate any of it before the promises are kept?
I'm shocked they didn't stash "defender" in there somehow. I used to joke that one name they'd rebrand the start menu as "defender for application launching" and rebrand the power button as "defender for powering on."
Microsoft's brands are historical markers. There's an era when a new Microsoft product is .NET, and an era when it's Azure, and one where it's 365 etc. If you have a new Doodad, if you say "Microsoft Doodad" the other divisions hate you because that's not their thing. Brand it "Hot Brand Name Unrelated Word" and now you're part of the family even though you have no product purpose and your customers will forever be confused.
"Azure Active Directory" wasn't Active Directory, and who'd have guessed a year ago that "365 Co-pilot" would mean the Office applications in 2026. Yes really.
Nothing about Apple's naming schemes seems immediately rage-inducing. Sure, their stuff is bland, and I think it's stupid how people refer to doing things "on iPhone" instead of "on an iPhone", but otherwise Apple's products are mostly descriptive. Garage Band has to do with music, Pages is a word processor, iCloud is a cloud storage thing, etc.
But even the Labrador licking his own balls that someone else mentioned would be better than Microsoft at naming things. I'm surprised they haven't changed Windows to Microsoft Azure Copilot Platform .NET 365 yet.
The power creep on their flagship device names is pretty bullshit though. Pretty soon we'll have the "iPhone 20 ultra pro max++ sublime retina unlimited"
Every generation the base iPhone becomes a lower and lower tier product.
The last lines on the page are a FAQ -- "You can find your favorite apps [...] under the Apps section in the left navigation of the Microsoft 365 Copilot web app."
But no normal person cares. Or do you know somebody that talks about using "Copilot"? Most people even just say "Office" when they mean "MS Office". The brand has entered public use, so that it is not for MS to decide its future.
tl;dr : the website formerly known as office.com that was a portal for accessing a bunch of stuff changed name to "Microsoft 365" in 2022, and then again more recently (adding the copilot bit).
Edit: Although the horror show that is Microsoft product naming in that area left the door wide open for this confusion.
Replacing Office with Microsoft 365 as the brand is still stupid. I was messing with Windows 11 a while back pre Copilot, and in the start menu was a pre installed spam link for “Microsoft 365 (Office)”. The fact they had to put the old brand in parentheses at the end should have been a hint they’re doing something stupid.
Word, Excel, maybe, but the MS strategy is vendor lock-in not any actual productivity. We see all day long how AI burns down silos and enables cross-platform coordination.
I bet MS saw this too and the “CoPilot Everything” pivot was their failed effort to maintain vendor lock-in in the age of LLMs. That failed, devalued their product, since they doubled-down in the meantime on enhanced hostility to cross-platform tools (try lately to read LLM markdown on vanilla M365?) now MS will have that reckoning after conceding a 3-year head start to disrupters and, yes, antagonizing core users with uptempo customer-hostile slop.
You assume Microsoft is interested in offering Windows as a primary consumer product, and not the coercive cross-selling platform that W11 is for Microsoft's higher-margin cloud products. This assumption is wrong.
Except depression rates are rising at similar or worse levels in other places too, including sunnier/tropical regions and the ones with "better" diets.
The main instigator of depression is still societal as the postmodern era is pushing everyone into seclusion and addicting them to constant individualized dopamine hits, increasing the miserable effect on one's chronic mood and exacerbating one's self-consciousness about it.
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