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Whatever happened to Microsoft? Did they become like this because they have trouble attracting decision-making talent post, like, 2010 or so? Or were they alwa
by bee_rider 2y ago
Whatever happened to Microsoft? Did they become like this because they have trouble attracting decision-making talent post, like, 2010 or so?
Or were they always like this, and the bar was just incredibly low when they were taking over the world?
- chongli 2y agoEnshittification! Microsoft used to earn a lot of revenue from selling perpetual software licenses (like any software company in the 1990s). Now they've pivoted over to services, SaaS, and ad-driven freemium software (Windows itself). They're not seeing any growth in Windows installs (and haven't in years), so in order to continue growing they've got to enshittify the existing install base!
- gjsman-1000 2y agoCan we please not use the word that makes us sound like whining adolescents? (No apologies Cory Doctorow)
- rererereferred 2y agoCan we call things as they are? We are all adults here.
- larodi 2y ago[flagged]
- Spivak 2y agoBecause people recognize dog whistles when they see them. Calling Adderall amphetamines is literally correct, the generic is "amphetamine salts." Nobody denies it and so there's no reason to point it out in a discussion except as a means to tie someone's medication to the existing negative associations people have with amphetamines/speed/meth.
- lagniappe 2y agoMeth also is a prescribed medication in the form of Desoxyn
- larodi 2y agoReply is absolutely relevant to the sub thread discussing freedom of expression by grownups. It also successfully makes a point. No dog whistle here, no conspiracy theory, no offense, no rude speech, no nothing that you can read as a bait. Sorry the intent was different.
- linguae 2y agoAs a semi-functioning adult, I am sympathetic to the argument that the term “enshittification,” while accurate, is also too vulgar of a term in some settings. It’s one thing to use it on Hacker News, but I personally wouldn’t use this term at church or when talking to K-12 students. Not everything can be PG-13 all the time; sometimes we need G-rated language. There needs to be a more professional-sounding, G-rated term that describes the degradation of quality of software services.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoIf I was Apple or Microsoft, convincing people to use the term “enshittification” is actually the best possible outcome. Nobody can use it in a TV ad. Nobody can use it in political messaging. Nobody can use it in G-rated settings. Nobody can use it in a party platform. Nobody can use it on the debate stage. Nobody can use it in marketing on why they are better. Nobody can use it in a courtroom without being accused of bias. Nobody can use it who is generally soft-spoken or has strong cultural inhibitions. The term itself silences speech. Anyone who calls this out is labeled a prude, which is perfect from a corporate planning point of view. The only possible better outcome would be to use the term “assholeification” or something stronger. Call it “companies fucking with consumers” - that’s even better from a PR perspective.
- zmgsabst 2y agoWhy not use “degradation of software services” when you want to be staid — and let everyone else use the term they want? Inventing jargon with the intention of being boring is just hiding the issue with euphemisms.
- CooCooCaCha 2y agoYou’re just trying to shift the narrative to using a less impactful term.
- omoikane 2y agoRegardless of whether the word is vulgar, I often see it thrown around as a meme that has became overused. Even if the original phrase used different words, they will become less and less meaningful once they start appearing in every other comment thread.
- CooCooCaCha 2y agoThings that are “adult” or “mature” tend to reinforce the status quo and reduce the probability of change. Think about why you dislike the word “enshittification”, it’s likely because the word is both very direct and is based on a swear word. These both give the word impact and switching to a word that doesn’t have these properties would likely have less impact and be less likely to catch people’s attention. Digging even deeper there is also a class dynamic as swear words are considered lower class. I don’t want to write an essay so I won’t go in-depth but “adult” and “mature” could also be considered code for “imitating the upper class” as the upper class loves to protect its identity and uses these dynamics in their favor. Consider for example how, historically, dressing in a suit is both considered upper class and mature, but what function does a suit really have? The primary function is signaling to other people. The point I’m making is that the upper class generally doesn’t want change, they want to keep their status and power. So many of the things we consider “adult” or “mature” tend to really be imitating the upper class and indirectly maintaining their power and the status quo.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoThis is actual whining dude.
- bee_rider 2y agoWhether swearing sounds childish is a cultural convention, particularly in the case of such a mild swear as “shit.” My experience is that it is not something that carries this baggage you describe for the typical person. Of course we’re both commenting from inside our bubbles.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoI think you completely missed my point. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820447
- CooCooCaCha 2y agoThese are cultural conventions and they also help enforce the status quo by pushing us to use less impactful language.
- bee_rider 2y agoI guess I did miss your point, I thought by “we” you meant us currently in this conversation here, instead of some other hypothetical situation. In that case, sure, it would be good to have a sanitized named to describe the thing. Enshittification seems to have found resonance with the folks who engage with tech often, so I think it is a good term for us as. But maybe something like “abusive platform cash-in” would be a better name in other contexts.
- wk_end 2y agoNeither here nor there, but in my cultural context (Anglo-Canadian, middle millennial) “shit” is usually considered one of the most vulgar swear words (second only to “fuck”) outside of the slurs.
- dijksterhuis 2y agoas a brit living in scotland, there are much worse swearwords. we use them on a daily basis here. vulgarity and or beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vezycash 2y agoIt's change for the sake of change. Features unrelated to the cloud, like Notepad, Calculator, Control Panel, context menus, and now File Explorer, are constantly being tweaked and nerfed.
- soraminazuki 2y agoI could never have imagined this coming back in the '00s. Like it or not, Windows was miles ahead of Linux in terms of usability. Their business practices were terrible as ever for sure, but it was not an OS that constantly tried to screw over the user at every chance it could get. Fast forward 20 years later, Windows is a UX nightmare cramming in a barrage of user-hostile changes every month. It's the least usable desktop operating system out there. What the heck happened?
- bee_rider 2y agoYes, this is sort of my perspective to. Well, I switched around 2010, maybe a bit earlier, so I wasn’t on Linux during the real heyday of Windows villainy. But there were lingering sentiments. It is and odd sort of sentimentality to look at them and say “wow, how did they go from competently evil to just embarrassing.” Time makes IBMs of us all I guess.
- hulitu 2y ago> What the heck happened? They talk directly to CEOs who have no idea about SW. The CEOs buy their crap and the employee must use it.
- hulitu 2y ago> freemium software (Windows itself). Last time i looked, you had to pay money for a Windows licence.
- n_plus_1_acc 2y agoIt doesn't have any effect, except that you can't change the desktop wallpaper.
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoMy theory is that they're now a Cloud Services company with a bunch of legacy junk attached that they really don't know what to do with, kind of like a person who changed careers but can't let their old wardrobe go. Azure and everything in its orbit are the stars of the company now; Windows is more and more of a distraction and an expense that needs to find ways to fund itself since consumers aren't willing to pay for a desktop OS, much less for constant updates. The solution is to make the users the product that's for sale.
- snozolli 2y agoWindows is more and more of a distraction and an expense Is it? Or is it simply not the New Hotness with the biggest growth? If this source is to be believed, Windows accounted for almost $25 billion in 2022, up from $20 billion in 2018. To me, it sounds like the same problem that Microsoft has had for years: if it's not showing explosive growth, then it gets ignored.
- BeefWellington 2y agoAdjusting for inflation, those numbers suggest very minimal growth. But also, if you look at their 2023 report[1] it is contracting substantially: Windows revenue decreased $3.2 billion or 13% driven by a decrease in Windows OEM. Windows OEM revenue decreased 25% as elevated channel inventory levels continued to drive additional weakness beyond declining PC demand. Windows Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 5% driven by demand for Microsoft 365. Some of that may be cyclical because hardware purchases went way up during the pandemic period and are coming back down to earth, but that doesn't matter anymore to stock value when investors are chasing quarterly or annual performance. [1]: https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar23/index.html https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar23/index.html
- snozolli 2y agoAdjusting for inflation, those numbers suggest very minimal growth. Adjusting for inflation, that's still a two billion dollar increase. I wish I had problems like that. As for the rest, you're demonstrating my point. GGP talked about Windows being a "distraction and an expense" when it's still generating tens of billions in revenue. That's not a distraction and expense, that's a cornerstone.
- gmueckl 2y agoThey were always like this. They deliberately broke early Windows compatibility with non-MS DOS implementations for no good technical reason. They bundled Internet Explorer as an unremovable component of Windows during their browser war with Netscape and made it hard to change defaults. They artificially added nonsense dependencies on IE throughout the OS like "ActiveDesktop", which rendered an HYML page as your desktop background. They created the atrocious Windows 8 desktop shell changes (now entirely rolled back) in a desperate effort to gain tablet market share. They added extensive phone-home telemetry with an uninspectable data stream that seemed to log every keystrokes at some point. They try to force the use of Microsoft Accounts to log into Windows. The current replay effort is only remarkable among all the other user-hostile changes in that it is a the biggest invasion of user privacy yet. In every other way, this is standard MS behavior.
- canucker2016 2y agoThe "early Windows compatibility" problem with DR-DOS happened in a Win3.1 beta. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS#DR_DOS_6.0_/_Competition_from_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS#DR_DOS_6.0_/_Competitio... I don't think Microsoft designed/tested Windows to run on anything other than MSDOS/PCDOS.
- GeekyBear 2y ago> Whatever happened to Microsoft? Personally, I think this has the same root cause as Microsoft trying to force everyone to log on to the local machine with an online Microsoft account, and telemetry that even the administrator can not completely turn off. They want to gather personal interest data from your your computer use to fill out your online advertising profile. They are looking to fully embrace the surveillance capitalism business model that has previously been so successful at Google and Meta.
- Salgat 2y agoI think it's simpler. They were tired of their name and OS being dragged through the mud by your average user who has no idea what they're doing. So they started forcing updates, providing their own anti-virus, started adding lots of metrics to track what your average user was actually doing, and tied your documents to an account with cloud storage so that when the user inevitably broke something, it was recoverable in an easy manner. I think people forget that earlier versions of Windows were virus-laden wastelands that had to be fixed all the time because of all the mistakes users were making (most famously all the viruses they'd download and run on their machines that hadn't been updated in 5 years).
- philistine 2y agoI’ll argue iPhone won the smartphone because Windows was such a minefield that a foolproof device like that meant everybody could compute safely. People who are arguing for freedom to mess up their own computer and those of the tech-illiterate (the kernel access maximalists, the people conflating code signing with corporate oversight) are arguing for giving general computing to closed systems because a majority of users need protection from themselves.
- hulitu 2y ago> that a foolproof device like that meant everybody could compute safely. Can you do real work on an iPhone ?
- andai 2y ago>What if you could remember everything? Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell draw on their experience from their MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research to explain the benefits to come from an earth-shaking and inevitable increase in electronic memories. In 1998 they began using Bell, a luminary in the computer world, as a test case, attempting to digitally record as much of his life as possible. Photos, letters, and memorabilia were scanned. Everything he did on his computer was captured. He wore an automatic camera, an arm-strap that logged his bio-metrics, and began recording telephone calls. Blurb for Total Recall (2009), with foreword by Bill Gates. https://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Memory-Revolution-Everything/dp/0525951342 https://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Memory-Revolution-Everyt...
- phaedrus 2y agoInstead of an Overton window imagine an Overton amoeba. Microsoft, as a monopolist, has for two decades been pushing out pseudopods in all directions against the boundaries of acceptable behavior for an operating system. ("All" directions, but overall in the direction of more corporate surveillance and less control and visibility for users, as well as profligate resource use.) So it's not that the bar was higher or lower in the past, just that the amorphous shape of the effontery is pushing out a new lobe.
- npteljes 2y agoBar was very low, and they didn't win by making a better product, they won with business techniques, let's put it that way. Bundle Windows with new machines, have schools teach Windows and Office, let people pirate Windows and crack down only on business users, bribe officials to use and mandate Microsoft software and formats, the list goes on an on an on. Bill is a ruthless businessman and the others were not shy as well. Don't get me wrong, Microsoft products are plenty capable, but they didn't became the de facto PC and office standard by merit, they did so by force.
- apatheticonion 2y agoI think Windows makes up 10% of Microsoft's revenue - which isn't a small dollar amount but is minor compared to their other divisions. I suspect Microsoft is looking for ways to extract value from Windows rather than thinking about the OS as the critical computing infrastructure that it is. Who knows where this road will end up. Maybe EU regulators will ensure there is a clean build of Windows available for those savvy enough to install it? Maybe international governments will deem Windows a liability/threat and investment in Linux will increase? Microsoft have the enterprise space locked down with Windows, many of the enterprise architects I've spoken to know little-to-nothing about Linux and have high praise for Active Directory. A transition away from Windows feels impractical - which further justifies the risk
- bigfatkitten 2y agoMost of the enterprise architects I've met know very little about computers, let alone Linux.
- hnlmorg 2y agoThey’ve always been like this. People who lived through 90s Microsoft will remember this kind of thing well. But I will say, this isn’t just a Microsoft phenomenon. Apple, Google, pretty much any company will pull sleazy tactics if it improves their bottom line. It’s just more painful with Microsoft because their products suck. So you don’t even get a consolidation of buying into a great but flawed product. You just get crap piled on top of more crap. The fact that Microsoft are even remotely successful is a testament to how you need a good businessman (Gates) and a lot of luck (IBM vs Kildall) rather than the best tech on the market.
- Gud 2y agoThey were always like this. Actually, they were even worse under Bill Gates, who was smarter and more ruthless than his successors.