Look I love the show but it does feel like a missed opportunity in a lot of ways. In order to get more moments in the story itself took a backseat. Lots of cool moments if you love tech history but as a stand alone drama it was kind of a let down.
> It seems odd he would announce her so early? When did he get announced as the hier to his father?
In his book Dictator's Handbook [1], de Mesquita explains that transitions from one leader to another is risky because the folks that help keep the leaders in power (e.g., military, and specific persons there-in) may not know if they'll be kept around by the new leader. The new leader may wish to bring in their own people who would be more 'grateful' to them for raising their position.
By indicating things early, everyone can build a 'rapport' with her, and everyone becomes comfortable that the status quo (which everyone at the top is benefiting from) will continue.
You can send your children abroad if you have never released pictures publicly. His daughter has been in the media so much that it is now impossible for her to be sent abroad discreetely.
Not sure who is downvoting you. You're experessing a valid opinion even if I disagree with it.
I read this book series as a kid and was enthralled by the sci fi aspects of it. When I reread it as an adult the political undertones completely ruined the series for me.
I'd recommend avoiding it for now. It still feels unfinsished and poorly thought out. I have many criticisms of their decisions with regards to game design, but even if you like the direction they went in, the UI is rough, and the actual experience of playing isn't fun.
They're releasing a big update in the spring where they reworked the core gameplay mechanic because so many people disliked it. If nothing else I'd wait until that comes out.
I'm not sure how big your repos are but I've been effective working with repos that have thousands of files and tens of thousands of lines of code.
If you're just prototyping it will hit wall when things get unwieldy but that's normally a sign that you need to refactor a bit.
Super strict compiler settings, static analysis, comprehensive tests, and documentation help a lot. As does basic technical design. After a big feature is shipped I do a refactor cycle with the LLM where we do a comprehensive code review and patch things up. This does require human oversight because the LLMs are still lacking judgement on what makes for good code design.
The places where I've seen them be useless is working across repositories or interfacing with things like infrastructure.
It's also very model-dependent. Opus is a good daily driver but Codex is much better are writing tests for some reason. I'll often also switch to it for hard problems that Claude can't solve. Gemini is nice for 'I need a prototype in the next 10 minutes', especially for making quick and dirty bespoke front-ends where you don't care about the design just the functionality.
One of the things I hated most about living in NYC was grocery shopping.
Having to walk meant you could only practically buy in small quantities, and visiting different places for different things was super annoying and inefficient.
Moving out and being able to take my car to the georcery store once a week and get everything I needed was one of the best quality of life upgrades from leaving.
I did the exact opposite and and it was most impactful quality of life upgrade I've ever done. I eat fresher and healthier food, I walk more, and I'm not tempted to snack on my stockpile of accumulated food.
Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now.
Really needs to be studied.
It's like they started making structural decisions a decade ago that are now overwhelming their ability to deliver basic functionality.
I realize there were always problems like this, I live through Windows ME, but it does feel qualitatively different now with advertising being forced into the product, performance of no consideration at all, etc.
Under Satya Nadella's early leadership, Microsoft eliminated the test role on their engineering teams in 2014, transferring QA responsibilities to developers and detecting issues through telemetry. That's slightly over 10 years ago. Windows 10 was their last version of Windows built with a full test infrastructure in place.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to put 2 and 2 together.
- They're beholden to Wall Street and stock price is the only relevant metric.
- They've been laying off staff even up to senior/principal engineering levels.
- Shifting towards vibe coding instead of engineering.
Gonna get a lot worse still and things will continue to deteriorate until Wall Street picks up on the issues and thinks it'll start hurting their next quarter results. (And it's not going to happen since Windows is nothing but a quarterly result side note at this point)
> (And it's not going to happen since Windows is nothing but a quarterly result side note at this point)
Azure will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Their stock price has depended on it since Cloud and AI got restructured into a single department (it was Nadella's baby before he became CEO), and Azure was already pretty bad before vibe coding entered the picture.
Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now.
Has it really, though? Or has it just shifted its corporate priorities away from its traditional stalwarts of Windows and Office, but in doing so caused disruption to users that had bet on the eternal stability of Microsoft’s product line? I don’t like the current direction of Windows any more than the next guy, and personally I’ve made other choices in recent years, but as a general principle, I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect a business to continue offering the same product or service indefinitely if market forces are pushing it elsewhere.
IMHO, a deeper problem here is that we collectively allowed a near-monopoly culture to develop around desktop operating systems and basic business software. Instead of having a healthy degree of competition between providers and using standardisation to ensure interoperability and portability of our data, we’ve ended up in a “too big to fail” situation where many users have all their eggs in one basket and that basket has a rapidly growing hole in the bottom and looks like it’s going to fail anyway.
There are also reasonable arguments to be made about length of support for products already sold, forced obsolescence and ratcheting “upgrades”, where possibly the actions of some providers in the market are exploitative in ways we should not allow, and therefore regulating to prevent the undesirable behaviours might be in the public interest.
Ultimately, I think a combination of restricting customer-hostile practices while also encouraging a healthy degree of competition and interoperability in important markets would be best for the users and fair to the developers. Sadly, right now, we have neither of those things, and that’s how we get Windows 11, the mobile device duopoly, numerous examples of products or services being locked down against their users’ interests, online services that people increasingly rely on for fundamental aspects of their normal lives and yet that have little real obligation to those people in return, and assorted other ills of the 21st century tech landscape.
> I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect a business to continue offering the same product or service indefinitely if market forces are pushing it elsewhere
Market forces aren't pushing it elsewhere. The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office. If those would not exist nobody in their right mind would choose Azure over AWS or GCP.
By letting their guard down on those fronts and letting Windows and Office degrade more and more, they are exposing themselves to the risk that someone ends up building a competitive company filling those niches and people risk the switching cost in order to get away from ever increasing Office 365 subscription costs.
Agreed. Companies pick Azure because they have already invested in Windows and Office. I have never worked in one company that uses Azure but not Office. They usually buy azure because of the discount.
> nobody in their right mind would choose Azure over AWS or GCP.
There's a really interesting dynamic here in that Azure has a solid spoiler role for large organisations that don't want to be commercially dependent on only AWS, and they can probably get really solid discounts if they're aready on board elsewhere. It's something that doesn't play out with Microsoft's other products nearly so much: you get shouted down if you want to have desktop diversity, but having a multicloud strategy is (in my experience) looked on as essential.
The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office.
Again, is it really, though? I have no special insider knowledge so perhaps this is just a misunderstanding of the public information, but just going by the organisation structure, leadership comments and recent financials, it looks like Windows makes up a relatively small part of Microsoft’s revenues these days, while the traditional desktop Office applications seem to be almost lost in the noise. The emphasis seems to be firmly on cloud services, though admittedly with all the rebranding from Microsoft lately, I find it hard to understand even what basic products and services they offer any more.
My point is that Windows/Office are a essential part in their sales funnel.
Google also makes most of their money in "ads" but if they were to axe Search and Youtube (which in an reduced view are only sales funnels for ads), they wouldn't have much of a business left.
I expect you’re right about the sales funnel angle, though neither Windows nor Office seems to be the same kind of product that those brands have traditionally described any more, presumably for that same reason.
Windows appears to be positioned more as a platform to reach all the online services now, rather than its traditional role as a desktop OS. Can you even activate it without being online and having a Microsoft account any more? I’m out of the loop, so genuinely don’t know the answer to this one.
Office — or whatever it’s being called after the recent changes — also appears to have morphed into something quite different. I tried searching just now to see if you could still buy a permanent licence and install the classic applications like Word and Excel locally, and some sources implied you could, but I didn’t actually find any way to buy it in five minutes of looking around office.microsoft.com. As far as I saw, that site is now 100% about the online SaaS version and trying to get users to save their documents in the cloud. For businesses, the strategy seems to include promoting other online services like SharePoint and Teams as well.
So I think I stand by my original argument, though I don’t think it necessarily disagrees with yours. Windows and The Software Product/Service Formerly Known As Office might still be a significant part of Microsoft’s sales funnel, but they aren’t the products that Windows and Office used to be any more. The products they used to be have been repurposed to support an online-first corporate strategy, along with almost everything else in the Nadella era. Would Microsoft care if 100% of their customers stopped using Windows tomorrow and jumped to Apple or Linux systems, as long as they still used the other services that generate most of Microsoft’s revenues these days? I’m not entirely sure they would.
Not much? Google would still have cloud services (which unlike Azure adoption depending on Windows/Office, only basically depend on the Internet), Gemini and Google Drive paid subscriptions, their flagship Pixel line...
They kinda did the same with IE. Got into a virtual monopoly and then let what was already a mediocre browser crumble into a pile of manure. So yeah then Google came along and ate their lunch. They should know better at this point.
There's not really not much more room for Microsoft's consumer software to grow, but the next quarterly report must show black numbers, so the only way to stay profitable is to produce software in a way that is cheaper than the previous month.
Incidentally, neither a rigorous quality control process, nor a team of experienced engineers is particularly cheap.
Growth mindset can be such a cancer. Many mature businesses don't need to grow and are perfectly fine as they are. You could continue running them forever, making steady cash. Or you could enshittify them, make slightly more money for 3 years, and get overtaken by competitors, all the while pissing everyone off and wasting billions of dollars.
Intel was resting on their laurels throughout most of the 2010s, while AMD floundered and couldn't catch up. By the time AMD got their shit together with Ryzen, Intel had all but been defeated by their own complacency.
All products seem to decline the moment the revenue model switches to monthly recurring. This is always contrary to the promise that they won't and that money will be invested in product improvements.
If you think it's bad now wait until they consolidate the rental PC market (Bezos and Nadella are all over that)
Because they are no longer competing with their own previous version. This means they only compete with the other crap, or don't care because they are a monopoly.
It seems like that decline will continue until it affects their stock prices. There's effectively a bunch of perverse incentives at the decision making level in all major companies right now that disconnects them from customer/end users. Until that fundamental issue is fixed the enshittification will continue.
According to their latest annual report, Windows earns them less than half as much as Office and less than a quarter of what they make by selling server products.
They haven't made their money from selling Windows for a very long time, these types of mistakes are gonna have precisely 0 impact on their stock price.
That is true in the short term but most of the rest of their business rests on the fact that windows is the default OS.
If windows ever gets so bad that people actually do defect to macos/linux en masse that absolutely will affect their stock price, but so far it hasn't happened
It's definitely on a very long fuse, but if they lose control of the windows codebase to the point where bugs are regularly getting shipped to production that cause issues for corporate IT departments, and an increasing number of employees use MacOS or Linux at home and need training at work to learn how to use windows, it could change.
Short term no but long term these rotations do happen, otherwise we'd all still be using IBM
Oh trust me, it's not like their server offerings are any better at being bug-free. I can't go into the specifics, but here's how Microsoft truly makes their money:
I'm currently stuck in some sort of an infinite loop where a bug in Microsoft's server offerings causes us to waste some money each month, my management is pushing me towards re-creating the same ticket with Microsoft's support in hopes of getting rid of those extra costs, and Microsoft's support partners waste my time by telling me to check the same 5 things I've already checked before they close the ticket due to "inactivity" once (heaven-forbid) some other task on my plate deserves my attention and I fail to re-check those same 5 things fast enough.
So they treat their corporate customers the same way they treat devs or consumers on their forums?
Lmao. Shifting responsibility is real.
"Actually it is YOUR problem that we broke something*
It's like Dell telling you that CPU voltage/RAID controller alert and server reboot is your fault that will get fixed if you just install EXACTLY the same firmware version you have, or this another firmware update to completely different component. Yes, it's market "optional", but you must have it installed before they actually consider it a hardware problem next time it happens.
I don't disagree with you and in fact I hope there were quicker ramifications. Any company that forgets their customers and assumes such arrogant self serving stance should get a proverbial slap in face rather sooner than later. Unfortunately our mechanism for serving that said slap in the face are rather limited and as a single consumer (or even as a single enterprise) serving that slap only serves to slap ourselves in the face in the process by inconveniencing ourselves given the lack of viable/drop in alternatives. This is why we need regulation to get the corporate greed in check.
You're also right that incentives are misaligned - Satya might well be fully aware that he's running the company into the ground but he doesn't care.
He'll be gone in a few years with all his bonuses and RSUs intact and there'll be absolutely no consequences for him if his actions cause MS to fall apart in 2035
I think that transition, from OS/Desktop company to a Cloud Services Provider, is where the rot comes from.
The financial incentives are to upsell incompetent IT departments onto forever subscriptions. The poor products lead to fat over-engineering in the cloud and huge running bills that are very hard to undo. Sloppy LLM integrations, and sloppy LLM advice about IT needs, would seem to feed into that same strategy.
By the time the decline affects the stock prices — it won't, since dollars will devalue faster than Microsoft shares — it will be too late as all institutional memory of how to make good products will have been lost.
Depends what you mean by Microsoft. Azure is its biggest division. OpenAI stake is its most important. I think xbox/gaming has more revenue than Windows now. Even LinkedIn is a huge part of the company.
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