6 ms·

This month I picked up a Surface Go, which I've been eyeing for a while as a decent drawing tablet. There I learned the fantastic joys of "S Mode", which helpfu

This month I picked up a Surface Go, which I've been eyeing for a while as a decent drawing tablet. There I learned the fantastic joys of "S Mode", which helpfully restricts the otherwise general purpose computer from running apps that aren't delivered through the Microsoft Store, forces the browser to Edge+Bing and requires you to sign in with a Microsoft Account before you can disable the nonsense. I jumped through some hoops to get that done without actually leaving the account on the system, but the whole experience left an awfully sour taste. Microsoft... what happened?

kalleboo 5y ago
> Microsoft... what happened? Intense jealousy of Apple
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  That explains a lot of the poor decisions Microsoft has made over the years. In particular the changes to the Windows UI. The trouble is they don't have enough taste to pull it off.
- zeusk 5y ago
  *Google.
skohan 5y ago
I had a similar experience when trying out the Minecraft RT beta some time ago. I had gotten a GPU with ray tracing capabilities, and I wanted to try it out, so I went to download the beta. To actually use it, you have to have a Microsoft account, and an "XBox Insider" account or something like that. When you have both of those, and opt-in to the beta, the MS store is supposed to know you want to get the beta version instead of the normal one, and download it for you. Of course that didn't work, so I had to delete the app and re-install multiple times, and even restart the whole system to get it to take. On the restart, I got a new popup about opting in to sending my usage data to MS. Finally I got it working, and it was a half finished mess. The home screen is full of micro-transactions (and this is a game which is supposed to be for children) and I had to go to a separate guide, not provided by Microsoft, to figure out how to get the special RT maps so I could actually see this feature working. And even then you could not just load up a new game and see raytracing, I had to do some manual work in the file-system to create a texture pack which could be used with an arbitrary map. The whole thing just reeked of a room full of product managers trying to optimize a KPI around account creation without having taken a moment to go through the process and see what they had created.

kalleboo 5y ago

> Microsoft... what happened? Intense jealousy of Apple

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
That explains a lot of the poor decisions Microsoft has made over the years. In particular the changes to the Windows UI. The trouble is they don't have enough taste to pull it off.
zeusk 5y ago
*Google.

skohan 5y ago

I had a similar experience when trying out the Minecraft RT beta some time ago. I had gotten a GPU with ray tracing capabilities, and I wanted to try it out, so I went to download the beta. To actually use it, you have to have a Microsoft account, and an "XBox Insider" account or something like that. When you have both of those, and opt-in to the beta, the MS store is supposed to know you want to get the beta version instead of the normal one, and download it for you. Of course that didn't work, so I had to delete the app and re-install multiple times, and even restart the whole system to get it to take. On the restart, I got a new popup about opting in to sending my usage data to MS. Finally I got it working, and it was a half finished mess. The home screen is full of micro-transactions (and this is a game which is supposed to be for children) and I had to go to a separate guide, not provided by Microsoft, to figure out how to get the special RT maps so I could actually see this feature working. And even then you could not just load up a new game and see raytracing, I had to do some manual work in the file-system to create a texture pack which could be used with an arbitrary map. The whole thing just reeked of a room full of product managers trying to optimize a KPI around account creation without having taken a moment to go through the process and see what they had created.