Microsoft boss Satya Nadella told investors during an earnings call last night that the company needs to "win back" its fans.

Nadella was referring to its consumer business as Microsoft has become acutely aware that customers are unhappy with the quality and stability of its flagship operating system.

Microsoft published figures for its third financial quarter this week. In between a cloud earnings bonanza and the now-familiar cheerleading for AI and Copilot, there was something a little more sobering. There are more than 1.6 billion monthly active Windows devices, but some of the users are revolting.

Earlier this year, Microsoft's Windows boss, Pavan Davuluri, penned a lengthy post promising the tech giant would do better by Windows and the operating system's installed base. Reliability and stability would improve, Copilot would be less prominent, and Microsoft would be more thoughtful about how it hosed AI around a user's working environment.

The problem, as Nadella himself acknowledged, is one of eroding trust. Disillusioned by the company's direction, some longtime enthusiasts have begun looking elsewhere. Microsoft's financials remain relatively healthy, and investors are still waiting to see when its AI bets will begin to pay off, but Nadella's comment signals something more immediate: an acknowledgment that it must change course. A string of quality failures has dented confidence, and restoring it will require more than reassuring words.

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Earlier this week, codeshack Github, which Microsoft bought in 2018 for $7.5 billion in stock, and which is still the largest source code hosting platform in the world, had to apologize for the availability and reliability problems that have devs so frustrated that early adopter Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto pulled his project off the platform. He said he had decided GitHub is so unstable it is "no longer a place for serious work."

Quality control issues in Windows also continue to be a problem for admins.

Nadella said: "We are … hard at work changing the way we work."

"Our North Star remains the same: delivering customer value with highest quality and top-class innovation."

Microsoft might believe that. However, as Nadella admitted, it needs its former loyalists to believe that too, and return to the fold. ®