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This whole thing is hilarious. In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of

This whole thing is hilarious. In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of their AI things quickly approaching too, it's good to laugh at their stupidity as a consolation prize. In the past Microsoft fucked up some many times but they had the absolute dominance of the market and a huge pool of talent and knowledgeable people capable of making them try again and win. Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers. Now they have the Cloud, I'm not so sure the Windows division can turn this turd around this time. Xbox has tangentially been the canary.

philistine 10mo ago
Xbox was poised to be an earthquake to the video game industry but they squandered with the execution. Hence the layoffs to quell the market. The rest of Microsoft might go the same way. I guess now I know what it felt like looking at IBM in 1989.
- esseph 10mo ago
  This IBM? https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/ibm-will-build-monster-10-000-qubit-quantum-computer-by-2029-after-solving-science-behind-fault-tolerance https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/ibm-will-bu... (Check attached papers)
  - treadmill 10mo ago
    Talk is cheap. Remind me of this, if/when the "will build" has changed to "has built".
    - esseph 10mo ago
      If you are at JPMorgan or aerospace today using quantum computing, there is a very good chance you are using an IBM Heron 156 qubit scalable computer. They have been pushing quantum computers into very large companies for quite awhile now. Google is strictly in research mode, but doing a lot of good, hard work.
  - philistine 10mo ago
    Absolutely this IBM. In 1989, they owned the PC market. It was theirs. Of course the cracks were deep and deepening, but IBM still could have maintained a leadership of that industry to this day. Instead, they squeezed so hard the PC market fell from their iron grip. The fact IBM still exists and is an important company is irrelevant. They lost control of the de facto computing standard. Microsoft could lose control as well.
    - esseph 10mo ago
      Maybe, but the markets also shift. Companies evolve. Old products fade out of importance and new goods and services appear. Their company value has never been higher. I'm not sure I would have liked a world where IBM continued to control so much - we probably would have a much smaller open ecosystem.
      - philistine 10mo ago
        Yes, but it's the same story with Microsoft now. If they lose control over the PC market, it can only make it better.
        esseph 10mo ago
        I mean, the stuff I was hearing about Microsoft over a decade ago was that they were giving up on the OS and moving everything to a cloud based SaaS model. Basically, focusing energy where the money is.
misswaterfairy 10mo ago
> Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers. A couple of quotes from the article above: "WebView2-based Microsoft Teams consistently uses 1-2GB of RAM while doing nothing. Microsoft likely doesn’t know how to make these web apps use fewer resources, so it’s instead moving Teams calling to a separate process to reduce crashes." "But Teams is not the only web app causing trouble when RAM prices are about to soar, as we also have WhatsApp. When WhatsApp debuted on Windows, it was an Electron app. However, Meta later upgraded it to WinUI/XAML (also known as native code on Windows), and WhatsApp eventually became one of the best apps [... using] less than 200MB of RAM and had smoother animations and faster load times." It seems that most developers these days focus on web-exclusive technologies and try to force desktop and system level programs into this paradigm. C, C++, and C# programmers seem to be as rare as hens teeth today? Are colleges and universities not teaching these languages anymore? Is this a symptom of 'cloud-first' strategies where its easier to 'just use JavaScript' for everything, perhaps developer laziness/reluctance to learn another 'lower level' language? I really don't understand the appeal of web-centric languages like JavaScript and TypeScript in the desktop and systems realm when they lack a standard library (which genuinely scares me: supply chain attacks...), likely contributing to the RAM consumption issue as developers just keep piling packages on for one specific function missing in another imported library, and aren't natively compilable to small binaries that aren't dependent on a runtime or bulky embedded interpreter. Yes, C# technically falls afoul of this (in .NET), but C# at least has a standard library that is comprehensive and is supported by an enterprise (Microsoft, for all its faults), not random developers on the internet. https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ Microsoft allowing key components of Windows 11 to be rewritten in web-wrappers is only going to drive people further into Linux, as the RAM affordability crisis continues.
- esseph 10mo ago
  Because JavaScript makes a SaaS that a developer can throw up on hetzer in a weekend and become a billionaire. That's the line that was told for 15 years.
- reval 10mo ago
  I feel like this ‘cloud-first’ strategy will only get worse now that AI assisted development is common. I notice my personal AI assisted C# projects get far more complex than when I use some JS framework. If it’s not the colleges and universities, you can bet the AIs are better trained on JS/TS.
elankart 10mo ago
Can you give some concrete examples of “cheap young” contract workers being hired to work on product features? You seem to know a lot of things so maybe some concrete examples will help.
- tonyhart7 10mo ago
  its nice way to say Indians

philistine 10mo ago

Xbox was poised to be an earthquake to the video game industry but they squandered with the execution. Hence the layoffs to quell the market. The rest of Microsoft might go the same way. I guess now I know what it felt like looking at IBM in 1989.

esseph 10mo ago
This IBM? https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/ibm-will-build-monster-10-000-qubit-quantum-computer-by-2029-after-solving-science-behind-fault-tolerance https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/ibm-will-bu... (Check attached papers)
- treadmill 10mo ago
  Talk is cheap. Remind me of this, if/when the "will build" has changed to "has built".
  - esseph 10mo ago
    If you are at JPMorgan or aerospace today using quantum computing, there is a very good chance you are using an IBM Heron 156 qubit scalable computer. They have been pushing quantum computers into very large companies for quite awhile now. Google is strictly in research mode, but doing a lot of good, hard work.
- philistine 10mo ago
  Absolutely this IBM. In 1989, they owned the PC market. It was theirs. Of course the cracks were deep and deepening, but IBM still could have maintained a leadership of that industry to this day. Instead, they squeezed so hard the PC market fell from their iron grip. The fact IBM still exists and is an important company is irrelevant. They lost control of the de facto computing standard. Microsoft could lose control as well.
  - esseph 10mo ago
    Maybe, but the markets also shift. Companies evolve. Old products fade out of importance and new goods and services appear. Their company value has never been higher. I'm not sure I would have liked a world where IBM continued to control so much - we probably would have a much smaller open ecosystem.
    - philistine 10mo ago
      Yes, but it's the same story with Microsoft now. If they lose control over the PC market, it can only make it better.
      - esseph 10mo ago
        I mean, the stuff I was hearing about Microsoft over a decade ago was that they were giving up on the OS and moving everything to a cloud based SaaS model. Basically, focusing energy where the money is.

misswaterfairy 10mo ago

> Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers. A couple of quotes from the article above: "WebView2-based Microsoft Teams consistently uses 1-2GB of RAM while doing nothing. Microsoft likely doesn’t know how to make these web apps use fewer resources, so it’s instead moving Teams calling to a separate process to reduce crashes." "But Teams is not the only web app causing trouble when RAM prices are about to soar, as we also have WhatsApp. When WhatsApp debuted on Windows, it was an Electron app. However, Meta later upgraded it to WinUI/XAML (also known as native code on Windows), and WhatsApp eventually became one of the best apps [... using] less than 200MB of RAM and had smoother animations and faster load times." It seems that most developers these days focus on web-exclusive technologies and try to force desktop and system level programs into this paradigm. C, C++, and C# programmers seem to be as rare as hens teeth today? Are colleges and universities not teaching these languages anymore? Is this a symptom of 'cloud-first' strategies where its easier to 'just use JavaScript' for everything, perhaps developer laziness/reluctance to learn another 'lower level' language? I really don't understand the appeal of web-centric languages like JavaScript and TypeScript in the desktop and systems realm when they lack a standard library (which genuinely scares me: supply chain attacks...), likely contributing to the RAM consumption issue as developers just keep piling packages on for one specific function missing in another imported library, and aren't natively compilable to small binaries that aren't dependent on a runtime or bulky embedded interpreter. Yes, C# technically falls afoul of this (in .NET), but C# at least has a standard library that is comprehensive and is supported by an enterprise (Microsoft, for all its faults), not random developers on the internet. https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ Microsoft allowing key components of Windows 11 to be rewritten in web-wrappers is only going to drive people further into Linux, as the RAM affordability crisis continues.

esseph 10mo ago
Because JavaScript makes a SaaS that a developer can throw up on hetzer in a weekend and become a billionaire. That's the line that was told for 15 years.
reval 10mo ago
I feel like this ‘cloud-first’ strategy will only get worse now that AI assisted development is common. I notice my personal AI assisted C# projects get far more complex than when I use some JS framework. If it’s not the colleges and universities, you can bet the AIs are better trained on JS/TS.

elankart 10mo ago

Can you give some concrete examples of “cheap young” contract workers being hired to work on product features? You seem to know a lot of things so maybe some concrete examples will help.

tonyhart7 10mo ago
its nice way to say Indians