I feel like Gemini made a giant leap forward in its coding capabilities and then in the past week or so it's become shit again - constantly dropping most of the code from my program when I ask it to add a feature - it's gone from incredible to basically useless.
How do you figure? This show is actually going to be rather boring. The setup has long been completed and Europe will not even squeal all that much.
What, with the Ukraine trap and the narrative hole of Russia marching on Paris, Europe is going to do what against America for taking Greenland? Europe walked itself into a trap and it has no clue it’s even happening.
There is a tiny chance something else is being done, but it’s such a small chance it’s not even worth mentioning. Reality is that this thing we still call America is starving hungry and it smells European blood in the water, and is furiously rubbing its hands over Greenland’s resources and Arctic access. And no, Europeans, the Democrats will also devour you now that they’ve also smelled the money in the Potomac. The Empire must eat.
No, Europe is already drugged, muzzled, and strapped to the table… it will be over soon, Europe.
You might be at Victoria Station, but there's a slim but tangible chance you are in fact in Paddington.
We won't know until someone looks at you. Until then you are on every station possible in the underground sorted of smeared out into a probability wave.
I doubt the various shitty parts of Windows (not the forced AI/whatever) is due to malice, unless you mean employees maliciously trying to destroy the company.
I would say the malice is from management, investors, and product leads. Developers just do what they are told. Microsoft is choosing enshitification versus quality. CEO needs to pump that stock and having enterprise locked into without alternatives helps them.
I grew up with Microsoft and now you have to pay me to use their products. I would never choose their OS for product hosting. Even their embedded / IoT is trying to force a Microsoft account and push against local user.
I get the impression that a lot of the old guard are long gone from the Windows team or have no influence. Raymond Chen is still around but not sure how much he actually works on Windows day to day.
Microsoft was founded in 1975. 1981 was the first DOS release. 1985 was the first release of Windows. 40 years working on windows is a long time, I would be surprised if anyone for the original team is left at this point. Even someone joining out of college in 2000 is now 25 years in, is 57, and could feasibly be retiring....
True. I meant to say that it feels like the people who know what's going on have long departed and it's junior web developers left to pick up the pieces.
Off by 10+1. Someone who graduated college in 2000 = 25 + 22 (4 years of college from 18) = 47, not 57, and not anywhere close to the retirement age. It might be pedantry, but the original comment should have said 1990, not 2000.
which brings the points about demographic, experience and wisdom.. the artefact we see and manipulate is the results of a certain group of people... when it changes, don't expect anything
With the way the economy is going (some call it K-shaped) it's more profitable to squeeze as hard as you can and extract as much as possible out of whales versus trying to have mass market appeal. Azure, Office and Copilot will sustain them.
Nvidia is doing something similar where they're just extracting as much as possible out of AI companies and not caring one bit about consumers.
The term cloud feudalism is not new, but now I'm thinking it feels like humanity is being dragged to the feudal ages because more and more everything happens online now. You want to work? Be a peasant for Uber Eats, they have all the power and you have none, they set the rules as they please and all you can do is grin and bear it, or try move from one feudal domain to another (i.e. work for a different delivery app).
>With the way the economy is going (some call it K-shaped) it's more profitable to squeeze as hard as you can and extract as much as possible out of whales versus trying to have mass market appeal
How does whatever microsoft is doing to windows line up with that?
Hmm, it does line up with that from my perspective too.
It's just a different way to say "you're the product, not the customer" if you look at the statement from a neutral perspective - the whale being the actual customer, who changes all the time depending on what Microsoft MBAs think might have the highest potential value they can extract.
>the whale being the actual customer, who changes all the time depending on what Microsoft MBAs think might have the highest potential value they can extract.
Who's the "whale" in this context? Windows users who subscribe to copilot? Enterprise? Advertisers?
Enterprises are the whales. Microsoft sells user management, Office, Copilot, Outlook, etc... all bundled together for more per seat per year than a consumer will spend or generate in the whole lifecycle of their device. Nevermind Azure.
So consumers are mostly ignored, except as a testbed to shove AI and ads.
And based on historical trends, they are doing the clever thing. If there are enterprises today still running IBM mainframes, MS is probably right to expect that today's enterprise contracts will be paying off at least 40 years down the line -- especially when you factor in the motte of regulatory traps and labyrinthine compliance checks.
This is true with a lot of companies. If you made people actually use their own product (do they?!) maybe they'd think twice before doing boneheaded things
Then again, I get the biological desire to put food on the table for one's family and therein lies the problem
If you made people actually use their own product (do they?!)
Yes, they do. Unfortunately even MS employees are powerless to do anything about the crap that gets shoved into Windows by other employees working at the company, and the ones who complain about it are quietly shown the door or have already left of their own will, leaving only those who are completely apathetic or...
Then again, I get the biological desire to put food on the table for one's family and therein lies the problem
Exactly. That and the desire to remain in the country --- part of the reason why companies like H-1Bs so much is because they are going to be far more docile and less willing to resist doing things they feel are wrong.
I remember I was at a Python conference some years ago and every Microsoft dev I saw had a MacBook. So no, I don’t think they use their own product internally.
As an aside, I used to know a number of MS heads who ran Windows on Mac Intel machines because they preferred the hardware (~2014 MBP) and/or because they ostensibly worked at Mac shops and were handed one upon entry.
Long ago at this point when my job required windows, the best experience for me was running it in a VM on a MBP. Actually worked quite well since it was easy stop/start windows and segmented work off on its own.
When did any manager get promoted for keeping software stable?
Just look at google and their chat softwares... you either make something new, or someone else does and you're left behind... be it ads in their start menu, spyware "AI", or paid solitaire.
That pays for itself in 20 years and most of those customers won't have better choices in the next 50. The core of that infrastructure will probably oitlive most people on the team. Sounds like a good long term stable business.
That's actually an example of the very long-term strategies that are common in that industry. There are still active phone lines which were installed over a century ago.
I'm not so sure about that. If Microsoft actually removed all the cruft, then they would need around 5% of the employees currently working on it. They'd all be unemployed.
They basically did that though for basic usage. Not activating windows only stops you from changing the background and removes the watermark for activation.
Windows is now less than 10% of their revenue, last I saw. I think Windows is more valuable to keep people in the Microsoft ecosystem, than as a source of direct revenue.
Honestly Windows 7 was the best OS they ever built. It just went downwards from there, and they abandoned it essentially.
I don't understand what's going on at Microsoft, but they leave huge stacks of money on the table. LTSC versions weren't "popular", they were the least worst option for a lot of industries. And now they kinda completely ignored all customer feedback.
Microsoft managed to make every other release of Windows good.
95 good, NT 4 bad, 98 good, 98 SE bad, 2000 good, Me bad, XP good, Vista bad, 7 good...
The plan with Windows 10 was to light their desktop market share on fire in the hopes they could see iPads in the distance and try to chase them. Windows 11 was codenamed "give your toxic ex a second chance."
It’s not about giving you a clean experience, it’s about setting you up as a constant cash cow hooked into and paying for all their services.
I hate adobes current business model and for that matter fusion360 as well. It’s all internet required bullshit but it’s making them tons of money and there are no viable alternatives.
It could be a nice OS, if Microsoft didn’t go out of their way to make it awful.
I run Active Directory at home, for various reasons. I’ve got Group Policy in a good enough shape now that I’m not terribly troubled by Microsoft’s enshittification but it took substantial effort to get there, and it requires some work to maintain.
Only true if those inconsistencies actually matter to your workflow. Not going to deny that they exist, obviously, but their impact is largely overplayed (and gratuitously downplayed on Windows, in my experience).
Spoken like a true Windows UX aficionado. Who doesn't love multiple system settings apps, a mix of minimal new context menus and overcrowded legacy context menus just one more click away.
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