5 ms·

iPhone's last stand? More like Microsoft's last stand. Nobody wants their garbage hardware and software outside of enterprise shmucks more interested in filling

iPhone's last stand? More like Microsoft's last stand. Nobody wants their garbage hardware and software outside of enterprise shmucks more interested in filling their pockets with fat contract money than delivering value. > The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services? > consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services. What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids? > What they do want to do is watch short-form video Yeah, it seems so.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
cultofmetatron 4mo ago
> What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids? brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.
- yladiz 4mo ago
  Access to knowledge doesn’t mean you automatically acquire that knowledge.
  - koolba 4mo ago
    Sadly access to knowledge strongly correlates with access to mindless entertainment that competes with the absorption of said knowledge. If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them. But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.
    - yladiz 4mo ago
      This doesn’t make any sense. We have more access to entertainment, be it comics, porn, or films, than any period in history, yet we continue to make more substantial scientific progress than any point in history.
      - angiolillo 4mo ago
        Scientific progress is typically the result of outliers at the upper end of the normal distribution which doesn't inherently contradict a decrease in average knowledge. (i.e. a larger standard deviation could overcome a lower average) Consider nutrition. Technological advancements mean that people have access to both higher-quality food and lower-quality food than their ancestors. In practice that seems to have resulted in some people eating healthier than their ancestors could have, and others worse.
      - adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago
        We have one of the most incredible vaccine technologies in mRNA and yet vaccination rates are going down. We have the best medicines we’ve ever had, and yet life expectancy is down in many countries. We have more wealth as a globe and yet we are fighting more wars than in generations. We have more automation than ever and yet people are working harder for less. We have more capability for democratization of knowledge and capital and yet inequality is higher than ever. The list goes on. Technology/science are not ends in themselves, and the positive ends they allow are going in reverse.
        komali2 4mo ago
        The things you describe may be problems in your country, but they're not universal. Something or set of things must specifically be going wrong wherever you live. It would probably be interesting to identify what.
- baal80spam 4mo ago
  This hurts.
- wiseowise 4mo ago
  > brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. And even more people believe there's an old man on a cloud judging everyone, so what?
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Forgeties79 4mo ago
    I’m not religious but there’s a significant difference here. Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion in both cases, but we can’t prove without a doubt that god doesn’t exist even if we don’t feel there’s enough evidence to suggest he is. There is, however, concrete evidence the earth isn’t flat, so no matter who the burden is on it’s demonstrably false. Put another way: You can concretely observe without a doubt that not only is the earth not flat, but also that it can’t be flat. We can’t confidently say god can’t exist.
    - technothrasher 4mo ago
      I don't think you've thought through what you're trying to assert. A god could make you believe anything they wanted to about the earth. So if you cannot disprove a god, then you cannot disprove the theory that the earth is flat.
      - detourdog 4mo ago
        I’m not sure you thought this through. Why would G-d want to or care to make one have thoughts.
        DiggyJohnson 4mo ago
        why are you censoring the word 'God'?
- coldtea 4mo ago
  >and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. I'd take those over the people who want to shove AI down our throats any day of the week!
- skywhopper 4mo ago
  I think you have the causation backwards: we have people thinking the world is flat because they can access the sum total of human knowledge, both true and false. There’s so much available, with similar production values, that going down brainwashing rabbit holes like flat earth, anti-vax, and more is a lot easier than it has ever been before.
  - iamnothere 4mo ago
    Let’s be real, some people are going to believe absurd things even if you strap them in a chair Clockwork Orange style and force them to consume your favorite propaganda 24/7. There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, because mass culture’s failure modes are even scarier than small subcultures. Attempting to stamp out competing worldviews leads a certain kind of (relatively common) person to dig even harder for forbidden knowledge. If you’re not careful this will lead people directly to the arms of your geopolitical enemies, as it’s not possible to fully stamp out their narratives—they have a big budget!
    - flohofwoe 4mo ago
      Say about the Eastern side of the iron curtain what you will, but we didn't have flat earthers or a chemtrail conspiracy - teaching rational thinking is the very least requirement for an education system, but even this seems to fail in the 'free world'. Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly, but nobody believed in communism either, everybody knew it was just a carrot dangling in front of the people - and at least Marx tried to put some rational thought into the idea by extrapolating from history - but how does one get from at least 2300 years of knowing that the Earth is round back to believing the Earth is flat?
      - komali2 4mo ago
        > Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly But the communists are smarter than the free world, at least the Americans, which I take it to represent the peak of capitalism and western liberal traditions. The PRC literacy rate is 96.67%, the USA is 79%. In 1937 the Soviet literacy rate was 75%, the USA appears to have been 97% literate then? [1] so somehow the Americans have become nearly as illiterate as a recently industrialized nation of peasants. Ah, apparently late 70s literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 99.7%. [2]. > but nobody believed in communism either I really recommend reading some Mao/Stalin era publications, not just from folks like Lenin but general notes from standing committees or national congresses. Even today the national congress of the PRC will get into all sorts of debates about communism. I don't believe their current system is socialist, but they sure do, and there's no doubt that there were a lot of true believers around Mao. I strongly doubt the cultural revolution or red guard could have happened without a lot of peasants genuinely believing in the cause. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy [2] https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016-0127/html https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016... Edit: Cuba's literacy rate is 98% lol https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?locations=CU https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?location...
- thunky 4mo ago
  > brother, Why am seeing "brother" a lot recently?
  - sanex 4mo ago
    Tiktok addicted kids, brother.
  - wett 4mo ago
    It’s kind of a meme https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ
    - derwiki 4mo ago
      I heard it with the voice of Macho Man Randy Savage
      - matwood 4mo ago
        That's the only way I hear it. I wonder if that gives away our age? When I was a teenager WWF came to my town. The day before the event a bunch of the wrestlers randomly showed up to my local gym to get a workout in. None of the guys, and especially Macho Man ever broke character the entire workout. They were super nice and after a bit of handshakes with us there we all just went back to our workouts.
      - parpfish 4mo ago
        Annyong hermano
      - MisterTea 4mo ago
        Let me tell you something, brother - whatcha gonna do when a thousand Hulkamaniacs come tell you Macho Man was known for his Oh Yeah!
    - Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
      Kind of, but younger generation will prefix every sentence with "bro" so you can kind of see a generational difference. But also, Warhammer 40K is popular.
- mcculley 4mo ago
  > capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge No. Lots of knowledge is still behind paywalls or not yet digitized. Some models have been trained on books that we cannot search or download.
  - alnwlsn 4mo ago
    Plenty has already been lost due to being buried in search, removed for lack of interest, or simplified so far as to be too generalized.
- graemep 4mo ago
  > yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. Very few. They are louder online. I have never met one in real life. Yes, the internet does spread misinformation, but I think its pessimistic to think it outweighs the benefits. A lot of the problems are economic and social at the core too.
  - librasteve 4mo ago
    but, the earth is flatter than it looks … since, according to GR, spacetime is convex around it gravity well
- jollyllama 4mo ago
  Nice snark, but they're not all convinced of that via short form video. You can reach the same conclusion from 4-hour podcasts. Your point is kind of irrelevant.
- sph 4mo ago
  My pet peeve is that every flat earther there are 1000 people complaining about them and keeping the meme alive at every chance possible. At those rates you might as well be complaining about people who believe they are Jesus Christ reincarnated, or that they are trolling for the fun of it.
  - cicko 4mo ago
    Mate, I was buying a kebab and the guy was convincing me that the Earth is flat, there's no Moon. And it's proven by... something with shadows. At least I got a real kebab in the end.
Traubenfuchs 4mo ago
> Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services? Microsoft is still simply one of the very best at enterprise dealmaking.
imglorp 4mo ago
I think Microsoft does have a point here: hosted services and thin clients are going to make money. (1) Their main focus is selling services, selling you, selling your data, and showing you ads. Children are being raised to think that asking chat to add two numbers is normal; they will enter the workplace in this state. Everything for MS is a service: this is going to work for them. And (2) because those hosted services will also replace some jobs, as the enterprise schmucks want.
- engineer_22 4mo ago
  How is that different than using a calculator
  - ceejayoz 4mo ago
    It's less likely to be accurate, it's slower, and far less efficient as a bonus.
  - imglorp 4mo ago
    Kids are absolutely using chat for calculator tasks. There was a meme going around last week where a child saw a phone calculator app and remarked "wow there's an AI just for math". Generalizing, they're using chat for everything else, like search. Actually reading a source is not on their radar. This is frightening. A whole generation that will not, and can not, think. At all. "Do it for me."
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      If you want to get rich quick there's a huge lesson here: sell to children early. If you can get 5-year-olds hooked on your product and growing up thinking it's the only way to do things, they will give you a huge amount of money later in life. Such as paying ChatGPT to be a calculator.
- debugnik 4mo ago
  I still can't get over people calling ChatGPT "chat" instead of it referring to a stream chat.
jstummbillig 4mo ago
The anger is real, but it's misguided (as anger mostly is). The benchmark is reality. Everyone is more "TikTok addicted kids" than not and the analysis is quite apt.
wongarsu 4mo ago
If enterprises were really focused on saving employee's time, Jira wouldn't sell. At least not the bog slow SaaS version Saving time (==saving money) is something you can sell to companies. But above all, they are willing to spend on saving their managers time. The higher up the hierarchy, the better. If that involves wasting a lot more time for the underlings, then so be it. The underlings aren't the ones making the purchasing decisions after all
- parpfish 4mo ago
  i dont think jira (or linear or any other ticketing platform) is about saving anybody time. they know on some level that they are all a burden. but they will gladly take the productivity hit from that time sink because it gives them teh ability to track employees. they'd rather know that everybody is working at 80% productivity than release that burden and just trust them. it's either this or filling out frustrating timesheets.
  - hylaride 4mo ago
    The previous place I worked had the Head of Product become VP of Engineering after the CTO left (don't ask, it's a long story). They literally implemented the most orthodox scrum you can imagine, with the one exception that they could sit on the sprint planning meetings and override the teams pulling tickets off the backlog into sprints (technical debt of course started to pile up). The kicker is that after a few months of this, productivity slowed to a crawl. The retrospectives showed that the planning wasn't working because the planned work rarely got done - because we were always fighting fires. Work also slowed due to all the overhead that was added to implement scrum (I also had to participate, despite being in an DevOps role - that at the best of times is inherently interrupt driven and I'm servicing the work of developers). Despite the fact that the powers that be knew things were not working as well as they used to, no amount of feedback could loosen the reigns - probably because it inherently meant losing some control. We had to try everything else to get back to where we were, when empowered developers could make decisions. Things got worse of course as within 6 months we lost half our most experienced talent that wasn't going to put up with it (this was the peak 2022 tech hiring levels). Eventually there was some mild "improvement" as we were allowed a "15% time" to work on what we thought was best, which still had to be justified and it was still the lowest priority during any given sprint. I still shake my head at the whole situation.
jmuguy 4mo ago
Thompson is speaking broadly about markets, not trying to put anyone down. The point he's getting at is that Apple and MS are just playing (or trying to play) to their strengths. Did you see anything in the new Siri AI demos that looked all that much like someone getting work done? I didn't. And that's fine, for Apple and the iPhone. Microsoft for better or for worse is what a large part of the American business world is using to get work done, and so Microsoft is trying to position their AI strategy towards that. For what its worth I wish Apple would care more about those of us that want to use AI to actually do work and not these weird contrived examples asking if focaccia can be made gluten free. And I personally couldn't care less what Microsoft does as I'm lucky enough to never have to use their products outside of Github.
csallen 4mo ago
> What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids? It's not a "callous view," it's reality. Social media, entertainment/streaming/media, gaming, and porn make up the vast majority of minutes spent on the internet, and it's not even close.
dang 4mo ago
Can you please not post to HN in the denunciatory/indignant style? I know it's popular on the internet but we're trying for curious conversation here, and those things can't co-exist. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
gradientsrneat 4mo ago
That last quote is when I stopped reading the article. The opening with the premonition of personal computing moving to the cloud, followed by the heavy use of the word "consumer", made it clear that the author has a cynical view of humanity, but at that point it went too far. I honestly think the use of the word "consumer" is intentionally dehumanizing, a way for corporate figureheads to ignore the humanity of the people they interact with directly or indirectly. This in turn makes them numb to the markets and institutions they are degrading.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

cultofmetatron 4mo ago

> What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids? brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

yladiz 4mo ago
Access to knowledge doesn’t mean you automatically acquire that knowledge.
- koolba 4mo ago
  Sadly access to knowledge strongly correlates with access to mindless entertainment that competes with the absorption of said knowledge. If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them. But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.
  - yladiz 4mo ago
    This doesn’t make any sense. We have more access to entertainment, be it comics, porn, or films, than any period in history, yet we continue to make more substantial scientific progress than any point in history.
    - angiolillo 4mo ago
      Scientific progress is typically the result of outliers at the upper end of the normal distribution which doesn't inherently contradict a decrease in average knowledge. (i.e. a larger standard deviation could overcome a lower average) Consider nutrition. Technological advancements mean that people have access to both higher-quality food and lower-quality food than their ancestors. In practice that seems to have resulted in some people eating healthier than their ancestors could have, and others worse.
    - adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago
      We have one of the most incredible vaccine technologies in mRNA and yet vaccination rates are going down. We have the best medicines we’ve ever had, and yet life expectancy is down in many countries. We have more wealth as a globe and yet we are fighting more wars than in generations. We have more automation than ever and yet people are working harder for less. We have more capability for democratization of knowledge and capital and yet inequality is higher than ever. The list goes on. Technology/science are not ends in themselves, and the positive ends they allow are going in reverse.
      - komali2 4mo ago
        The things you describe may be problems in your country, but they're not universal. Something or set of things must specifically be going wrong wherever you live. It would probably be interesting to identify what.
baal80spam 4mo ago
This hurts.
wiseowise 4mo ago
> brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. And even more people believe there's an old man on a cloud judging everyone, so what?
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- Forgeties79 4mo ago
  I’m not religious but there’s a significant difference here. Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion in both cases, but we can’t prove without a doubt that god doesn’t exist even if we don’t feel there’s enough evidence to suggest he is. There is, however, concrete evidence the earth isn’t flat, so no matter who the burden is on it’s demonstrably false. Put another way: You can concretely observe without a doubt that not only is the earth not flat, but also that it can’t be flat. We can’t confidently say god can’t exist.
  - technothrasher 4mo ago
    I don't think you've thought through what you're trying to assert. A god could make you believe anything they wanted to about the earth. So if you cannot disprove a god, then you cannot disprove the theory that the earth is flat.
    - detourdog 4mo ago
      I’m not sure you thought this through. Why would G-d want to or care to make one have thoughts.
      - DiggyJohnson 4mo ago
        why are you censoring the word 'God'?
coldtea 4mo ago
>and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. I'd take those over the people who want to shove AI down our throats any day of the week!
skywhopper 4mo ago
I think you have the causation backwards: we have people thinking the world is flat because they can access the sum total of human knowledge, both true and false. There’s so much available, with similar production values, that going down brainwashing rabbit holes like flat earth, anti-vax, and more is a lot easier than it has ever been before.
- iamnothere 4mo ago
  Let’s be real, some people are going to believe absurd things even if you strap them in a chair Clockwork Orange style and force them to consume your favorite propaganda 24/7. There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, because mass culture’s failure modes are even scarier than small subcultures. Attempting to stamp out competing worldviews leads a certain kind of (relatively common) person to dig even harder for forbidden knowledge. If you’re not careful this will lead people directly to the arms of your geopolitical enemies, as it’s not possible to fully stamp out their narratives—they have a big budget!
  - flohofwoe 4mo ago
    Say about the Eastern side of the iron curtain what you will, but we didn't have flat earthers or a chemtrail conspiracy - teaching rational thinking is the very least requirement for an education system, but even this seems to fail in the 'free world'. Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly, but nobody believed in communism either, everybody knew it was just a carrot dangling in front of the people - and at least Marx tried to put some rational thought into the idea by extrapolating from history - but how does one get from at least 2300 years of knowing that the Earth is round back to believing the Earth is flat?
    - komali2 4mo ago
      > Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly But the communists are smarter than the free world, at least the Americans, which I take it to represent the peak of capitalism and western liberal traditions. The PRC literacy rate is 96.67%, the USA is 79%. In 1937 the Soviet literacy rate was 75%, the USA appears to have been 97% literate then? [1] so somehow the Americans have become nearly as illiterate as a recently industrialized nation of peasants. Ah, apparently late 70s literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 99.7%. [2]. > but nobody believed in communism either I really recommend reading some Mao/Stalin era publications, not just from folks like Lenin but general notes from standing committees or national congresses. Even today the national congress of the PRC will get into all sorts of debates about communism. I don't believe their current system is socialist, but they sure do, and there's no doubt that there were a lot of true believers around Mao. I strongly doubt the cultural revolution or red guard could have happened without a lot of peasants genuinely believing in the cause. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy [2] https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016-0127/html https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016... Edit: Cuba's literacy rate is 98% lol https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?locations=CU https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?location...
thunky 4mo ago
> brother, Why am seeing "brother" a lot recently?
- sanex 4mo ago
  Tiktok addicted kids, brother.
- wett 4mo ago
  It’s kind of a meme https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ
  - derwiki 4mo ago
    I heard it with the voice of Macho Man Randy Savage
    - matwood 4mo ago
      That's the only way I hear it. I wonder if that gives away our age? When I was a teenager WWF came to my town. The day before the event a bunch of the wrestlers randomly showed up to my local gym to get a workout in. None of the guys, and especially Macho Man ever broke character the entire workout. They were super nice and after a bit of handshakes with us there we all just went back to our workouts.
    - parpfish 4mo ago
      Annyong hermano
    - MisterTea 4mo ago
      Let me tell you something, brother - whatcha gonna do when a thousand Hulkamaniacs come tell you Macho Man was known for his Oh Yeah!
  - Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
    Kind of, but younger generation will prefix every sentence with "bro" so you can kind of see a generational difference. But also, Warhammer 40K is popular.
mcculley 4mo ago
> capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge No. Lots of knowledge is still behind paywalls or not yet digitized. Some models have been trained on books that we cannot search or download.
- alnwlsn 4mo ago
  Plenty has already been lost due to being buried in search, removed for lack of interest, or simplified so far as to be too generalized.
graemep 4mo ago
> yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. Very few. They are louder online. I have never met one in real life. Yes, the internet does spread misinformation, but I think its pessimistic to think it outweighs the benefits. A lot of the problems are economic and social at the core too.
- librasteve 4mo ago
  but, the earth is flatter than it looks … since, according to GR, spacetime is convex around it gravity well
jollyllama 4mo ago
Nice snark, but they're not all convinced of that via short form video. You can reach the same conclusion from 4-hour podcasts. Your point is kind of irrelevant.
sph 4mo ago
My pet peeve is that every flat earther there are 1000 people complaining about them and keeping the meme alive at every chance possible. At those rates you might as well be complaining about people who believe they are Jesus Christ reincarnated, or that they are trolling for the fun of it.
- cicko 4mo ago
  Mate, I was buying a kebab and the guy was convincing me that the Earth is flat, there's no Moon. And it's proven by... something with shadows. At least I got a real kebab in the end.

Traubenfuchs 4mo ago

> Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services? Microsoft is still simply one of the very best at enterprise dealmaking.

imglorp 4mo ago

I think Microsoft does have a point here: hosted services and thin clients are going to make money. (1) Their main focus is selling services, selling you, selling your data, and showing you ads. Children are being raised to think that asking chat to add two numbers is normal; they will enter the workplace in this state. Everything for MS is a service: this is going to work for them. And (2) because those hosted services will also replace some jobs, as the enterprise schmucks want.

engineer_22 4mo ago
How is that different than using a calculator
- ceejayoz 4mo ago
  It's less likely to be accurate, it's slower, and far less efficient as a bonus.
- imglorp 4mo ago
  Kids are absolutely using chat for calculator tasks. There was a meme going around last week where a child saw a phone calculator app and remarked "wow there's an AI just for math". Generalizing, they're using chat for everything else, like search. Actually reading a source is not on their radar. This is frightening. A whole generation that will not, and can not, think. At all. "Do it for me."
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    If you want to get rich quick there's a huge lesson here: sell to children early. If you can get 5-year-olds hooked on your product and growing up thinking it's the only way to do things, they will give you a huge amount of money later in life. Such as paying ChatGPT to be a calculator.
debugnik 4mo ago
I still can't get over people calling ChatGPT "chat" instead of it referring to a stream chat.

jstummbillig 4mo ago

The anger is real, but it's misguided (as anger mostly is). The benchmark is reality. Everyone is more "TikTok addicted kids" than not and the analysis is quite apt.

wongarsu 4mo ago

If enterprises were really focused on saving employee's time, Jira wouldn't sell. At least not the bog slow SaaS version Saving time (==saving money) is something you can sell to companies. But above all, they are willing to spend on saving their managers time. The higher up the hierarchy, the better. If that involves wasting a lot more time for the underlings, then so be it. The underlings aren't the ones making the purchasing decisions after all

parpfish 4mo ago
i dont think jira (or linear or any other ticketing platform) is about saving anybody time. they know on some level that they are all a burden. but they will gladly take the productivity hit from that time sink because it gives them teh ability to track employees. they'd rather know that everybody is working at 80% productivity than release that burden and just trust them. it's either this or filling out frustrating timesheets.
- hylaride 4mo ago
  The previous place I worked had the Head of Product become VP of Engineering after the CTO left (don't ask, it's a long story). They literally implemented the most orthodox scrum you can imagine, with the one exception that they could sit on the sprint planning meetings and override the teams pulling tickets off the backlog into sprints (technical debt of course started to pile up). The kicker is that after a few months of this, productivity slowed to a crawl. The retrospectives showed that the planning wasn't working because the planned work rarely got done - because we were always fighting fires. Work also slowed due to all the overhead that was added to implement scrum (I also had to participate, despite being in an DevOps role - that at the best of times is inherently interrupt driven and I'm servicing the work of developers). Despite the fact that the powers that be knew things were not working as well as they used to, no amount of feedback could loosen the reigns - probably because it inherently meant losing some control. We had to try everything else to get back to where we were, when empowered developers could make decisions. Things got worse of course as within 6 months we lost half our most experienced talent that wasn't going to put up with it (this was the peak 2022 tech hiring levels). Eventually there was some mild "improvement" as we were allowed a "15% time" to work on what we thought was best, which still had to be justified and it was still the lowest priority during any given sprint. I still shake my head at the whole situation.

jmuguy 4mo ago

Thompson is speaking broadly about markets, not trying to put anyone down. The point he's getting at is that Apple and MS are just playing (or trying to play) to their strengths. Did you see anything in the new Siri AI demos that looked all that much like someone getting work done? I didn't. And that's fine, for Apple and the iPhone. Microsoft for better or for worse is what a large part of the American business world is using to get work done, and so Microsoft is trying to position their AI strategy towards that. For what its worth I wish Apple would care more about those of us that want to use AI to actually do work and not these weird contrived examples asking if focaccia can be made gluten free. And I personally couldn't care less what Microsoft does as I'm lucky enough to never have to use their products outside of Github.

csallen 4mo ago

> What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids? It's not a "callous view," it's reality. Social media, entertainment/streaming/media, gaming, and porn make up the vast majority of minutes spent on the internet, and it's not even close.

dang 4mo ago

Can you please not post to HN in the denunciatory/indignant style? I know it's popular on the internet but we're trying for curious conversation here, and those things can't co-exist. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

gradientsrneat 4mo ago

That last quote is when I stopped reading the article. The opening with the premonition of personal computing moving to the cloud, followed by the heavy use of the word "consumer", made it clear that the author has a cynical view of humanity, but at that point it went too far. I honestly think the use of the word "consumer" is intentionally dehumanizing, a way for corporate figureheads to ignore the humanity of the people they interact with directly or indirectly. This in turn makes them numb to the markets and institutions they are degrading.