4 ms·

There's a much more mundane read: They invested a bunch of effort into a product the market loudly rejected. They're now withdrawing the product while they fi

There's a much more mundane read: They invested a bunch of effort into a product the market loudly rejected. They're now withdrawing the product while they figure out what they can salvage from the effort. Key stakeholders may have a few ideas about how to proceed (ranging from "try again later" through "repurpose it" to "forget it"), but enterprises of Microsoft size make decisions very slowly so of course it's vague about what's next. Collectively, they almost certainly don't know!

consumer451 2y ago
In addition to direct market reaction, they must be a bit red in the face considering that Apple just laid out a complex and well thought out implementation of "AI", which focused on privacy. As someone who grew up near Redmond, who still has an emotional soft-spot for Microsoft for some reason, I feel truly embarrassed for their implementation.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  From all three major OS vendors on the consumer market, Microsoft is still the one that pushes more C and C++ into production on their OS, in detriment of .NET, despite all the security discussions. All the efforts from other teams to have .NET reach Swift, Java, Kotlin levels of adoption on Windows, have always hit a wall against WinDev culture. Also the 90's spirit from features over security hasn't yet gone away from WinDev, so it isn't really surprising this turned out this way.
  - consumer451 2y ago
    My personal feelings aside, Microsoft is Too Big to Suck like this, regarding security and privacy. At this point, their culture is a national security liability. We have seen some recent efforts, but how does one right such a large ship? https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/brad_smith_microsoft_hearing/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/brad_smith_microsoft_... https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/3/24119787/microsoft-cloud-email-hack-china-us-cyber-report https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/3/24119787/microsoft-cloud-e...
    - creshal 2y ago
      Your post could've been written in 2004, when Microsoft was pinky swearing it was gonna refocus on security-first development, starting with XP SP2
      - consumer451 2y ago
        To be a bit fair, Windows security has gone from a laughing stock in 2004, to having Windows Defender in the 2020s. I ain't no city slickin' infosec guy, but Defender appears to be state of the art end point protection today. They can figure this stuff out sometimes, right? How did they get from Windows/AVG/ESET to Windows Defender, and how can they make that happen on Azure?
        pjmlp 2y ago
        Azure is much more secure than regular Windows.
        keyringlight 2y ago
        To me this seems like a different aspect of security. The push with the winxp service packs onwards was to make it secure by default against the network (trying to be vague because I'll probably be wrong on the details), I'm fairly sure it was xp where you could be infected before setup was complete if the network was plugged in, or that acquiring third party AV was something you must do for anything that touches the internet or media from a source you can't 100% trust. Now with defender this is far in the background for most users that they don't need to think about it at all. The difference with recall is about blast radius of any unauthorized/unintended access, which still happens even if it's less common or via something like clicking a bad link in an email. That's in addition to mistrust of MS or large corporations sucking up data, and how secure they are (what would a Ashley Madison type breach look like with recall data?)
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        They did improve their story, with SAL exactly introduced for XP SP2, and having for many years having one of the few C++ standard libraries with bounds checking enabled by default in debug builds. However that was it, WinDev fought against Longhorn, Office folks redid the .NET ideas in COM for Vista, and so on.
  - Gormo 2y ago
    It's too bad that the rest of the "90's spirit" -- consistent, well-organized UIs, users controlling their own computers, and software that runs locally without dependence on cloud servers -- seems to be receding at Microsoft, leaving everyone with the worst of both worlds.
- slashdave 2y ago
  My suspicion is that Microsoft learned of Apple's effort, thus this rushed, skunkworks implementation, pushed to be released before Apple. The effort backfired spectacularly.
  - consumer451 2y ago
    I worry that it's worse. They have been working on this for years, but I think that they may have assumed that their desktop market dominance was so sound, that they just didn't care to put the effort into privacy. What are you going to do, Linux Desktop? This seems like the general attitude that delivers lackluster solutions across many products, like Teams, SharePoint, etc.
dialup_sounds 2y ago
Intelligent search for your personal data is still a feature with broad appeal, and they're bound to come back with that. The critical blunder was in indexing that personal data by watching over your shoulder, which is both creepy and low-effort. They've got to put the work in to find a better way.
chucke1992 2y ago
But market did not reject it - the OS and corresponding copilot devices literally hasn't launched yet.

consumer451 2y ago

In addition to direct market reaction, they must be a bit red in the face considering that Apple just laid out a complex and well thought out implementation of "AI", which focused on privacy. As someone who grew up near Redmond, who still has an emotional soft-spot for Microsoft for some reason, I feel truly embarrassed for their implementation.

pjmlp 2y ago
From all three major OS vendors on the consumer market, Microsoft is still the one that pushes more C and C++ into production on their OS, in detriment of .NET, despite all the security discussions. All the efforts from other teams to have .NET reach Swift, Java, Kotlin levels of adoption on Windows, have always hit a wall against WinDev culture. Also the 90's spirit from features over security hasn't yet gone away from WinDev, so it isn't really surprising this turned out this way.
- consumer451 2y ago
  My personal feelings aside, Microsoft is Too Big to Suck like this, regarding security and privacy. At this point, their culture is a national security liability. We have seen some recent efforts, but how does one right such a large ship? https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/brad_smith_microsoft_hearing/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/brad_smith_microsoft_... https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/3/24119787/microsoft-cloud-email-hack-china-us-cyber-report https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/3/24119787/microsoft-cloud-e...
  - creshal 2y ago
    Your post could've been written in 2004, when Microsoft was pinky swearing it was gonna refocus on security-first development, starting with XP SP2
    - consumer451 2y ago
      To be a bit fair, Windows security has gone from a laughing stock in 2004, to having Windows Defender in the 2020s. I ain't no city slickin' infosec guy, but Defender appears to be state of the art end point protection today. They can figure this stuff out sometimes, right? How did they get from Windows/AVG/ESET to Windows Defender, and how can they make that happen on Azure?
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        Azure is much more secure than regular Windows.
      - keyringlight 2y ago
        To me this seems like a different aspect of security. The push with the winxp service packs onwards was to make it secure by default against the network (trying to be vague because I'll probably be wrong on the details), I'm fairly sure it was xp where you could be infected before setup was complete if the network was plugged in, or that acquiring third party AV was something you must do for anything that touches the internet or media from a source you can't 100% trust. Now with defender this is far in the background for most users that they don't need to think about it at all. The difference with recall is about blast radius of any unauthorized/unintended access, which still happens even if it's less common or via something like clicking a bad link in an email. That's in addition to mistrust of MS or large corporations sucking up data, and how secure they are (what would a Ashley Madison type breach look like with recall data?)
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      They did improve their story, with SAL exactly introduced for XP SP2, and having for many years having one of the few C++ standard libraries with bounds checking enabled by default in debug builds. However that was it, WinDev fought against Longhorn, Office folks redid the .NET ideas in COM for Vista, and so on.
- Gormo 2y ago
  It's too bad that the rest of the "90's spirit" -- consistent, well-organized UIs, users controlling their own computers, and software that runs locally without dependence on cloud servers -- seems to be receding at Microsoft, leaving everyone with the worst of both worlds.
slashdave 2y ago
My suspicion is that Microsoft learned of Apple's effort, thus this rushed, skunkworks implementation, pushed to be released before Apple. The effort backfired spectacularly.
- consumer451 2y ago
  I worry that it's worse. They have been working on this for years, but I think that they may have assumed that their desktop market dominance was so sound, that they just didn't care to put the effort into privacy. What are you going to do, Linux Desktop? This seems like the general attitude that delivers lackluster solutions across many products, like Teams, SharePoint, etc.

dialup_sounds 2y ago

Intelligent search for your personal data is still a feature with broad appeal, and they're bound to come back with that. The critical blunder was in indexing that personal data by watching over your shoulder, which is both creepy and low-effort. They've got to put the work in to find a better way.

chucke1992 2y ago

But market did not reject it - the OS and corresponding copilot devices literally hasn't launched yet.