6 ms·

In all the MS Recall drama, I've yet to hear or read one single person utter something to the effect of "Wow - great!!! - I've been waiting for something like t

In all the MS Recall drama, I've yet to hear or read one single person utter something to the effect of "Wow - great!!! - I've been waiting for something like this for years! This will solve at least one of the major issues I face regularly!". In fact, it seems to me the only people that really want this feature are the ones trying to push it down everyones collective throat. Why is MS pushing something so hard when nobody asked for it?

WorkerBee28474 2y ago
I use the search inside Windows all the time. To me, this seems like a 2% improved version of that. Probably useful, mostly mundane, something I would use but not get excited about. I assume they would push it for the same reason they would push any other mildly-useful feature improvement.
LordKeren 2y ago
Rewind.ai is the Mac version of this and many is the same talking points apply. However, it’s a third party tool, and as such isn’t enabled by default. I think most, if not all, of the overwhelmingly negative feedback is tied to this being enabled by default, and shipped by default
rchaud 2y ago
I've heard Microsoft wants to do away with on-device Windows entirely for consumer devices, and go with a "dumb client" form factor that is always connected to a remote Windows server. I'm not sure who at the org is pushing for this as it would essentially hand the PC games market to SteamOS. I suppose they saw how well it's worked for enterprise customers that essentially already use a Windows VM through Citrix or some other provider, and think this would solve the virus/malware problem once and for all.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > as it would essentially hand the PC games market to SteamOS ... or they will just stop developing windows games and do only xbox/playstation games ...
- cesarb 2y ago
  > I'm not sure who at the org is pushing for this as it would essentially hand the PC games market to SteamOS. PC games can already be played on a remote server, using services like Stadia, so it would not necessarily hand the PC games market to local Linux-based devices running SteamOS (like the Steam Deck).
  - Slyfox33 2y ago
    Stadia? That got shut down years ago.
- dabbz 2y ago
  It's because there's a huge cloud first push internally. Leadership is trying to find any way they can find to leverage Azure and recurring revenue.
- callalex 2y ago
  Rent-seeking is not new human behavior, it’s just been enough generations that the lesson must be collectively learned again.
wing-_-nuts 2y ago
When this was announced I actually saw a post by someone who used a similar tool for time tracking in OS X and they claimed it was really helpful. To be frank, I would not mind having this feature on linux provided it was entirely local, and encrypted.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Daedren 2y ago
As long as stockholders think it'll be good, that's what matters. Perceived value is easier to create than real value.
chrisjj 2y ago
> Why is MS pushing something so hard when nobody asked for it? Here's the thing. When no-one asks for it, hard push is the only way to sell it. :)
Terretta 2y ago
On the contrary, executives at the office have been coming to me about various such tools for months now. It really picked up last fall. Microsoft was last to the party.
pdntspa 2y ago
Honestly this whole thing reeks of some sort of data grab dressed up as an "innovative" new feature. They probably wanted a bunch of new training material for their AI projects, and this is what they came up with.
barbazoo 2y ago
> when nobody asked for it It's easy to say if you aren't one to benefit from this, but that doesn't mean no one will or that no one asked for it.
mikehearn 2y ago
I can be that guy. I use Rewind for Mac, which is almost identical to Recall in functionality. I love it, and I've used it frequently to find things that otherwise would have been lost forever. Most recently I used it to refresh my memory on a particularly convoluted way to authenticate with a third-party oauth system (it involved using an online oauth debugger and curl commands). I had gone through the process once successfully weeks ago, but by the time I had to do it again I'd forgotten every detail. Rather than have to go through the process of figuring it out again, I went back to my successful attempt, watched it, and basically retraced my steps. Rewind probably saved me an hour or two. My take on Recall is that, like with almost everything, it's a trade-off of security for convenience. I find it valuable enough that I'm willing to make the trade-off, but others might not.
pjmlp 2y ago
Just go to Windows Central, and you will get a couple of editors shouting exactly that.
delecti 2y ago
Security nightmare aside, it seems like it would be handy all the time. Surely everyone has had trouble finding a website or document or email again, days or weeks later?
- ragnese 2y ago
  Documents and emails are probably easier to find via old-school text searching, though.
  - delecti 2y ago
    What if you don't know where it was though? What if you saw a bit of text, but don't remember if it was in outlook, confluence (if so, which), mattermost (if so, which server), or teams (maybe a screen share?). Those are all systems I use at work, and while I've never been quite that lost about where to start, it's also not wildly exaggerated.
- roywiggins 2y ago
  Most or indeed all of that doesn't need screen-scraping though.
vondur 2y ago
It could be handy if the data was stored locally and was managed by the users.
- wvenable 2y ago
  It is.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ragnese 2y ago
> In all the MS Recall drama, I've yet to hear or read one single person utter something to the effect of "Wow - great!!! - I've been waiting for something like this for years! This will solve at least one of the major issues I face regularly!". There were definitely some comments in a previous HN post about it that attempted defend it and to paint everyone else as overreacting. Several of them even said that they thought it would be useful for something they might hypothetically like to remember or search for... I don't really remember, because the whole thing is crazy to me and I think it's crazy for any tech-savvy person to be running Windows in 2024. > Why is MS pushing something so hard when nobody asked for it? I assume this is a rhetorical question, but just in case it isn't: this is not a feature/product for Windows USERS. This is a feature to help train/test MS's AI stuff- YOU are the product, not the customer.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
haswell 2y ago
If I knew that the data could be absolutely kept safe and private to me, I’d love a feature like this. Keeping track of my work over time would be so much easier. The natural next step is to have a local model trained on everything I’ve ever done, and for all of my computing tasks to be contextual to that history. I could see this transforming how we use computers. But I wouldn’t go anywhere near Recall. I suspect Microsoft is pushing this so hard because they want to do what I just described, and they want to start collecting the data necessary to enable it ASAP. I can easily see a future capability that people might love that they wouldn’t have even known to ask for. But the way they’re rolling out Recall is certainly not a good foundation.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
rvense 2y ago
For tech savvy people, it's a bewildering feature. Why would I want some weird unpredictable AI thing when I've already got filesystem search, browser bookmarks, the neatly categorized PDF collection, and my Zettelkästen/2GB Org.mode doc/Joplin notes? But for non-technical people, of course, computers are already unpredictable. They routinely (appear to) misplace files and overwrite them with previous versions, and if the URL falls out of autocomplete the site might as well not exist. For people who google to find the Facebook login page, this would simply be how computers should work. You tell it to give you the thing and it gives you the thing. How that happens is immaterial.
- chuckadams 2y ago
  I’m plenty savvy and I’d like that AI thing. I’d just like it to be more discerning about what it records, and managed in a way that’s not a pinkie-swear promise to protect my privacy. MS has a track record both long and recent that shows they’re not the appropriate stewards of this data. I don’t even see MS as mustache-twirling villains in general, just incompetent at an organizational level to stand up to whatever scheme any individual mustache-twirling marketing middle manager comes up with.
  - usrbinbash 2y ago
    I can, and am, using a locally running LLM with RAG on my personal wiki already. The difference between that and Recall: I decide what goes into the wiki.
  - callalex 2y ago
    I know it’s generally unhelpful to discuss voting on this site, but I must point out the irony that this particular comment chain started with “I haven’t heard anybody saying they want this” and then the one comment saying “I want this” was rejected so hard it was threatening to disappear if I didn’t save it.
- doug_durham 2y ago
  Why are you conflating being tech savvy with being organized? Only a subset of people in tech that I know have the type of organization you describe. I personally rely on local search for everything.
chucke1992 2y ago
Has the new Copilot devices even launched? Because I don't think that aside journos anybody else has even tried to play with the Recall yet.
rurp 2y ago
This applies to most AI features that have been released recently. It feels like almost every business that wants to think of itself as a tech company has been desperate to throw out as many new features as possible that they can slap an AI label onto. Most of those features are garbage and make the product worse, either because they don't address an actual problem or because they are implemented poorly. But of course improving the product is at best a secondary concern, chasing the hype is far more important, both for the company itself and the individuals building this stuff.
usrbinbash 2y ago
> Why is MS pushing something so hard when nobody asked for it? Because they bet big on AI, and hardware suppliers bet big on AI-enabled hardware, and so they are trying to find use cases for it.
al_borland 2y ago
I've heard some people say this, but those people either don't understand what's going on, or they have to start off by staying, "security issues aside," which is basically saying that they'd like it in a magical world where they could have the feature without anything the system is doing to enable the feature.
gnuser 2y ago
All the replies ignoring the elephant in the room: three letter pressure. To me such large moves could indicate an event is in the near/medium future.
- wait_a_minute 2y ago
  An event?
twobitshifter 2y ago
Imagine you could use Recall to train a model to do all the interactions that knowledge workers do on their computers using the exact same software, do you think there would be value in that?
- callalex 2y ago
  I can also imagine that Recall could grow and cook my food for me, but it can’t do that either so I don’t really understand your point.
  - twobitshifter 2y ago
    point is that microsoft may have a secondary objective further down the road that recall can be a stepping stone towards
layer8 2y ago
To be fair, people recording their full terminal and browsing history forever is a topic that has come up regularly in HN submissions. It’s certainly something people find a worthwhile idea.
wait_a_minute 2y ago
I do want it but I want it to be optional and preferably something built from source. That being said, it won’t be that hard for someone to build their own Recall with an onboard sandboxed LLM. That way users will benefit from the power and know exactly how it works so that they have no questions about the security behind it. It’s a more powerful and useful search.

WorkerBee28474 2y ago

I use the search inside Windows all the time. To me, this seems like a 2% improved version of that. Probably useful, mostly mundane, something I would use but not get excited about. I assume they would push it for the same reason they would push any other mildly-useful feature improvement.

LordKeren 2y ago

Rewind.ai is the Mac version of this and many is the same talking points apply. However, it’s a third party tool, and as such isn’t enabled by default. I think most, if not all, of the overwhelmingly negative feedback is tied to this being enabled by default, and shipped by default

rchaud 2y ago

I've heard Microsoft wants to do away with on-device Windows entirely for consumer devices, and go with a "dumb client" form factor that is always connected to a remote Windows server. I'm not sure who at the org is pushing for this as it would essentially hand the PC games market to SteamOS. I suppose they saw how well it's worked for enterprise customers that essentially already use a Windows VM through Citrix or some other provider, and think this would solve the virus/malware problem once and for all.

nottorp 2y ago
> as it would essentially hand the PC games market to SteamOS ... or they will just stop developing windows games and do only xbox/playstation games ...
cesarb 2y ago
> I'm not sure who at the org is pushing for this as it would essentially hand the PC games market to SteamOS. PC games can already be played on a remote server, using services like Stadia, so it would not necessarily hand the PC games market to local Linux-based devices running SteamOS (like the Steam Deck).
- Slyfox33 2y ago
  Stadia? That got shut down years ago.
dabbz 2y ago
It's because there's a huge cloud first push internally. Leadership is trying to find any way they can find to leverage Azure and recurring revenue.
callalex 2y ago
Rent-seeking is not new human behavior, it’s just been enough generations that the lesson must be collectively learned again.

wing-_-nuts 2y ago

When this was announced I actually saw a post by someone who used a similar tool for time tracking in OS X and they claimed it was really helpful. To be frank, I would not mind having this feature on linux provided it was entirely local, and encrypted.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Daedren 2y ago

As long as stockholders think it'll be good, that's what matters. Perceived value is easier to create than real value.

chrisjj 2y ago

> Why is MS pushing something so hard when nobody asked for it? Here's the thing. When no-one asks for it, hard push is the only way to sell it. :)

Terretta 2y ago

On the contrary, executives at the office have been coming to me about various such tools for months now. It really picked up last fall. Microsoft was last to the party.

pdntspa 2y ago

Honestly this whole thing reeks of some sort of data grab dressed up as an "innovative" new feature. They probably wanted a bunch of new training material for their AI projects, and this is what they came up with.

barbazoo 2y ago

> when nobody asked for it It's easy to say if you aren't one to benefit from this, but that doesn't mean no one will or that no one asked for it.

mikehearn 2y ago

I can be that guy. I use Rewind for Mac, which is almost identical to Recall in functionality. I love it, and I've used it frequently to find things that otherwise would have been lost forever. Most recently I used it to refresh my memory on a particularly convoluted way to authenticate with a third-party oauth system (it involved using an online oauth debugger and curl commands). I had gone through the process once successfully weeks ago, but by the time I had to do it again I'd forgotten every detail. Rather than have to go through the process of figuring it out again, I went back to my successful attempt, watched it, and basically retraced my steps. Rewind probably saved me an hour or two. My take on Recall is that, like with almost everything, it's a trade-off of security for convenience. I find it valuable enough that I'm willing to make the trade-off, but others might not.

pjmlp 2y ago

Just go to Windows Central, and you will get a couple of editors shouting exactly that.

delecti 2y ago

Security nightmare aside, it seems like it would be handy all the time. Surely everyone has had trouble finding a website or document or email again, days or weeks later?

ragnese 2y ago
Documents and emails are probably easier to find via old-school text searching, though.
- delecti 2y ago
  What if you don't know where it was though? What if you saw a bit of text, but don't remember if it was in outlook, confluence (if so, which), mattermost (if so, which server), or teams (maybe a screen share?). Those are all systems I use at work, and while I've never been quite that lost about where to start, it's also not wildly exaggerated.
roywiggins 2y ago
Most or indeed all of that doesn't need screen-scraping though.

vondur 2y ago

It could be handy if the data was stored locally and was managed by the users.

wvenable 2y ago
It is.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ragnese 2y ago

> In all the MS Recall drama, I've yet to hear or read one single person utter something to the effect of "Wow - great!!! - I've been waiting for something like this for years! This will solve at least one of the major issues I face regularly!". There were definitely some comments in a previous HN post about it that attempted defend it and to paint everyone else as overreacting. Several of them even said that they thought it would be useful for something they might hypothetically like to remember or search for... I don't really remember, because the whole thing is crazy to me and I think it's crazy for any tech-savvy person to be running Windows in 2024. > Why is MS pushing something so hard when nobody asked for it? I assume this is a rhetorical question, but just in case it isn't: this is not a feature/product for Windows USERS. This is a feature to help train/test MS's AI stuff- YOU are the product, not the customer.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

haswell 2y ago

If I knew that the data could be absolutely kept safe and private to me, I’d love a feature like this. Keeping track of my work over time would be so much easier. The natural next step is to have a local model trained on everything I’ve ever done, and for all of my computing tasks to be contextual to that history. I could see this transforming how we use computers. But I wouldn’t go anywhere near Recall. I suspect Microsoft is pushing this so hard because they want to do what I just described, and they want to start collecting the data necessary to enable it ASAP. I can easily see a future capability that people might love that they wouldn’t have even known to ask for. But the way they’re rolling out Recall is certainly not a good foundation.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

rvense 2y ago

For tech savvy people, it's a bewildering feature. Why would I want some weird unpredictable AI thing when I've already got filesystem search, browser bookmarks, the neatly categorized PDF collection, and my Zettelkästen/2GB Org.mode doc/Joplin notes? But for non-technical people, of course, computers are already unpredictable. They routinely (appear to) misplace files and overwrite them with previous versions, and if the URL falls out of autocomplete the site might as well not exist. For people who google to find the Facebook login page, this would simply be how computers should work. You tell it to give you the thing and it gives you the thing. How that happens is immaterial.

chuckadams 2y ago
I’m plenty savvy and I’d like that AI thing. I’d just like it to be more discerning about what it records, and managed in a way that’s not a pinkie-swear promise to protect my privacy. MS has a track record both long and recent that shows they’re not the appropriate stewards of this data. I don’t even see MS as mustache-twirling villains in general, just incompetent at an organizational level to stand up to whatever scheme any individual mustache-twirling marketing middle manager comes up with.
- usrbinbash 2y ago
  I can, and am, using a locally running LLM with RAG on my personal wiki already. The difference between that and Recall: I decide what goes into the wiki.
- callalex 2y ago
  I know it’s generally unhelpful to discuss voting on this site, but I must point out the irony that this particular comment chain started with “I haven’t heard anybody saying they want this” and then the one comment saying “I want this” was rejected so hard it was threatening to disappear if I didn’t save it.
doug_durham 2y ago
Why are you conflating being tech savvy with being organized? Only a subset of people in tech that I know have the type of organization you describe. I personally rely on local search for everything.

chucke1992 2y ago

Has the new Copilot devices even launched? Because I don't think that aside journos anybody else has even tried to play with the Recall yet.

rurp 2y ago

This applies to most AI features that have been released recently. It feels like almost every business that wants to think of itself as a tech company has been desperate to throw out as many new features as possible that they can slap an AI label onto. Most of those features are garbage and make the product worse, either because they don't address an actual problem or because they are implemented poorly. But of course improving the product is at best a secondary concern, chasing the hype is far more important, both for the company itself and the individuals building this stuff.

usrbinbash 2y ago

> Why is MS pushing something so hard when nobody asked for it? Because they bet big on AI, and hardware suppliers bet big on AI-enabled hardware, and so they are trying to find use cases for it.

al_borland 2y ago

I've heard some people say this, but those people either don't understand what's going on, or they have to start off by staying, "security issues aside," which is basically saying that they'd like it in a magical world where they could have the feature without anything the system is doing to enable the feature.

gnuser 2y ago

All the replies ignoring the elephant in the room: three letter pressure. To me such large moves could indicate an event is in the near/medium future.

wait_a_minute 2y ago
An event?

twobitshifter 2y ago

Imagine you could use Recall to train a model to do all the interactions that knowledge workers do on their computers using the exact same software, do you think there would be value in that?

callalex 2y ago
I can also imagine that Recall could grow and cook my food for me, but it can’t do that either so I don’t really understand your point.
- twobitshifter 2y ago
  point is that microsoft may have a secondary objective further down the road that recall can be a stepping stone towards

layer8 2y ago

To be fair, people recording their full terminal and browsing history forever is a topic that has come up regularly in HN submissions. It’s certainly something people find a worthwhile idea.

wait_a_minute 2y ago

I do want it but I want it to be optional and preferably something built from source. That being said, it won’t be that hard for someone to build their own Recall with an onboard sandboxed LLM. That way users will benefit from the power and know exactly how it works so that they have no questions about the security behind it. It’s a more powerful and useful search.