It's a device with a fixed, known-good set of hardware for developers to target, which is all that any of the major consoles is. Your question applies just as much to the Steam Deck and upcoming Steam Machine.
The fine article plainly says that these are for corporate use and that the service it is meant to connect to isn't even available to regular consumers. And this is hardly a new concept: even a casual search shows that Windows thin clients have existed since the '90s and that the previous models are still currently being sold by various OEMs.
Yes, exactly, this is the same old "how do we prevent lowly employees from going on facebook and solitaire" technology many other companies have tried 1000 times before.
Always runs stuck on 3 problems:
1) this attitude makes these machines a reverse status symbol. I mean if you work at a company and work on one of these it essentially means you're low status. It's just shy of a slave collar. So everyone fights to the death not to have one of these.
(this was imho also a problem of Google Stadia. It worked ... but an xbox was better. It worked, but a PC was better. It worked ... but a PS5 was better. Not because they were actually better, but because they were fundamentally superior status symbols. Stadia meant you were cheap/poor)
2) for any even remotely creative work you need access to so much of the internet, and a web browser. Which then defeats the purpose because of course facebook (or rather the 10.000 ad-supported sites) have an extreme incentive to make themselves available. So solitaire (whatever the modern version) is available.
3) management has their little favorite solution and configuration. IT has their little favorite adaptations. Security has ... and so on. So fixing even the tiniest of incompatibilities is a 5 year project that requires 5 departments getting involved, that nobody wants to do.
Microsoft has always resisted doing this, with citrix picking up the slack, but looks like they'll give it another shot.
One would expect people on Hacker News to know that a single business division doesn't have direct access to the funds of other business divisions of the same corporation.
I'm pretty sure I recall "release candidate" being used in other divisions so it might be Windows division specific terminology. Microsoft is a big place.
Xbox has been languishing badly and Microsoft games in general have not been doing very well over the past decade despite gaming becoming completely mainstream so one might suspect that he is being retired rather than retiring. Yes, he was better than Mattrick but that was a very, very low bar to clear.
I will give Spencer a bit of credit though for bringing back Microsoft Flight Simulator.
I want to agree but I don't see the greener grass at all. Please bear in mind that this is totally anecdotal.
I own all three major consoles. My PS5 has been switched on about six times since I purchased it at the time the PSVR2 was released. Is it because I'm not into the funky and weird JRPG titles or am I just sold to the Xbox ecosystem? I play Xbox almost every single day. My PS5 is just using up space and for two titles which didn't fully grip me (Horizon and The Last of Us).
All Xbox games are available on PS5. You can play Forza Horizon just fine on PS5 but Ghost of Yotei is never coming to Xbox. Microsoft had to do this because Xbox sales are dismal (below Xbox One) and they're being outsold 3:1.
When did the last new Gears and Halo games come out again? 5+ years ago? That's what Xbox has, historic exclusives. Gears 1 Reloaded came to PS5, Halo: Campaign Evolved is coming to PS5. All the big recent Xbox games have either come to PS5 or are coming. Indiana Jones, Avowed, Flight Simulator 2024, Forza Horizon 5, etc. Then you have to remember most everything else but Halo 5 and a few Gears games were already on PC too.
The only reason to keep an Xbox these days is for your existing library.
Funky and weird JRPG titles and games with cartoony graphics and ridiculous titles are (a) a small percentage of the PlayStation library given that >99% of games are cross-platform, (b) not nearly global enough in their appeal or sales figures to make any disinterested persons the outliers, and (c) in my experience, many of them also release on Xbox, Switch, and/or PC.
I own no consoles and am neutral on JRPGs and cartoony graphics, so I have no skin in this game. But you seem oddly focused on writing off a functionally identical piece of hardware based on the existence of one particular genre that doesn't interest you.
Sounds like the GP still has the mentality of the PS2/late PS1 era, where JRPG with cartoony graphics were indeed the big trend and pushing force of gaming.
But that very abruptly ended with the PS3, between development costs ballooning and shutting down many longstanding studios, trends shifting to chase open world or the blossoming online FPS genre, a shift of Japanese developers towards "global appeal", and the extremely slow start of the PS3 as a viable console to sell for.
Any JRPG studios surviving past that purge are the stragglers, not the trendsetters. And every company has their battle scars from that time. Final fantasy development exploded in budget, the "Tales of" series coasted along (fans would call it the "call of duty of JRPGs"), Atlus had to be bought out by Sega to survive (and fortunately, thrive), Monolith broke off of Bandai Namco and went to Nintendo, and so many more stories. Falcom seems to be the only one who simply cruised on by, which speaks to how lean and consistent their development cycle was.
I haven’t looked at the specifics but it’s seemed to me that for years anything that came out on Xbox also came out on PC on the same date, and the PC has titles that aren’t on either Xbox or PS5. There are a lot of games that come out on PS5 and then either never come to PC or there’s a year+ delay. Thats why I have a PC and a PS5 and haven’t considered buying an Xbox for a long time.
Individual developers or even developer management doesn't get much of a say in product direction at large corporations. The product management folks are who decide what features go in and when.
If I had to guess, the mandate to cram AI in everywhere came down from Nadella and the executive level with each level of management having KPIs for AI in their product all the way down. Much like the "everything has to be .NET even though nobody has any idea what .NET means" when it was first introduced and every MS product suddenly sprouted .NET at the end of their names. When executive management gives stupid non-negotiable orders, they get stupid results.
I’m all for AI integrated into applications where it makes sense; “remove background” buttons in image editors, for example, where the application uses AI to perform a useful function, without the user needing to care what happened under the hood.
Microsoft’s product managers however have no imagination, and so they insist on just mindlessly shoving obnoxious Copilot buttons everywhere.
Now imagine that you are someone who doesn't even think AI is useful, and imagine just how much more infuriating it is to have it crammed in. Drives me up a wall.
If you Google around, you'll find that about 1/3 of server operating systems broken down by revenue (not install count) is Windows Server. That's billions of dollars.
The difference is that Microsoft didn't receive any direct revenue off of IE and Google had a lot of levers to use (they weren't under antitrust scrutiny at the time) to continue to eat away at IE's market share. It was smart for MS to give up on maintaining their own browser and downright brilliant for them to use their competitor's own browser against them.
On the other hand, Windows Home and Windows Pro are only part of the bigger picture. Microsoft gets billions in revenue from Windows Enterprise seats and billions more from Windows Server, probably more enterprise revenue than Red Hat and Canonical combined does for their Linux offerings. They have zero reason to give up on Windows while the money keeps rolling in.
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