The thing with government stuff is that no one is held accountable. Even people “fired” from doing a lousy job in a place will just be transfered to another department or another government agency. No one really gets fired fired. And when you know nothing happens to your job… there is no incentive to be good at it.
About a decade ago I switched to Ubuntu LTS because of Debian’s “policy?” of having pretty old packages in “stable” and a long release cycles.
Nowadays, even with Ubuntu’s two year or so release cycle I have to use 3rd party packages to have up to date software (PHP being one) and not some version from three years ago.
We no longer live in a world (with few exceptions) where running a 3-5 year old distribution (still supported) makes sense.
I like to think that Microsoft is trying to run GitHub in Windows in their Azure cloud. And on the fact that every time GitHub is down I think of "someone updated the Windows Servers GH runs on and had to reboot everything".
While I'm 99% sure it is not true, it makes me sleep better at night. And giggle a little when it goes down.
They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy.
I have this feeling that their bet was that all the Microsoft shops will jump on Copilot without looking at alternatives, so they did not really have to make it as good as their competition.
"good" is not important for software anymore, at least in the regular consumer market. Companies have discovered that people will just continue to accept subpar, unfinished and sometimes even partially-functioning software.
if internet comments are any kind of indication (which they very well may not be) I've seen lots of people complaining about win11 but remaining because they can't give up playing their favorite online hero shooter. That's acceptance to me
Agree that acceptance is irrelevant. No one has a choice, because all the “competitors” in any given niche (phone, cloud platform, PC operating system) are executing the same play. Enshittify, extract profit from ~suckers~ customers, ignore any churn because with the limited choices available there will be new suckers to replace them.
We accept this the same way we accept the air quality wherever we are.
Yes, Linux is there, but consider the barriers to the average person of truly adopting a strict Free Software life. Consider how many things in life now simply demand for you to have an Android or iOS phone. Things as simple as parking.
Well, now no one has to convince anyone to shell out for upgrades because everything is a subscription. What worked perfectly well can now get replaced out from under you overnight
Making good products was never Microsoft's MO. Even during the peak of the Nadella era, the good bits were side shows. Microsoft Office and Windows have always been things that succeed primarily via network effects/lock-in.
Microsoft continues to make billions in profit despite its spending on AI, because it has a diversified business that generates revenue. I don't get why they would be "scared"? It's basically a calibrated risk at that level.
> They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy.
I really liked Copilot - it gave you a lot of tokens across a bunch of models and their agentic features were perfectly serviceable, alongside it being really affordable! And then they moved over to usage based billing and it no longer has that advantage over the alternatives: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilo...
I still think they have a really good AI tab autocomplete implementation and it's nice to be able to use that in VSC without swapping to another editor altogether... but that's not enough to really make me pay for their subscription. I could probably move to Zed altogether if I had a problem with VSC itself, though at least the base editor doesn't feel like it has been enshittified and I quite like it, all things considered.
Good products are not profitable enough. Not that good products are profitable at all, but if it doesn't make disgusting amounts of money this quarter it's not worth considering at all.
We've reached the phase of "infinite shareholder growth" where physics says no, and that is so unacceptable that we'd rather burn down the entire global economy than accept less than exponential growth. It isn't that growth is impossible either, there just can't be enough growth. Break-even is apparently a fate worse than death
In my experience so far with Azure, it shines at one single thing: IAM and to be used as an IdP.
Even with the free version you get phish-resistant MFA, SAML, OIDC, OAuth.
But go beyond that and it is messy:
- creating a single VM is an extremely convoluted process
- Intune needs up to 24 hours to appply changes to a managed computer
- There are at least two management consoles for Entra. Each with slightly different functionalities.
I don’t know how Microsoft is organized internally, but it feels like product organizations don’t talk to eachother and everybody is is just building stuff on top of Azure as if their thing is the only product MS ships.
Is a greed/not greed scale really useful to discuss company behaviors ?
I wanted to say I get what you mean, but even thinking about the company I root for the most, I can't think of a point where they're not driven by their desire to make a lot more money.
If your point is that there's good and bad ways to seek money, I'm not sure it's properly encompassed by "greed", which I interpret as the intensity of a desire, not its nature or validity.
To you "greed" might mean something else, but is it properly conveyed ?
The Seven Deadly Sins provide an interesting perspective to human psychology even in modern times. Greed / avarice is defined as wanting more than you need.
I was recently using an inexpensive paper shredder. I had an urge to put in too many papers at one time, which jams the shredder. Taking into account the time needed to unjam the shredder, the end result is that it takes more time for me to process the papers if I give in to my urge than if I resist the urge and only put in just the right amount of papers. Then I can claim that the "shredder is of bad quality", instead of seeing how I contribute to the problem.
As my aim was to shred papers efficiently, my "sin" (sin = to miss the mark, not to hit the aim) was greed, and the virtuous path is to successfully to resist the urge. The blessing I get from the virtuous path is the joy of the flow when I efficiently shred the papers.
Yesterday, I was in a shop when I was hungry, and I felt the urge to buy a large chocolate bar. Being hungry, it would have been a constant struggle not to eat all of it if I had bought it. Eating a whole large chocolate bar does not make me feel so good.
As my personal aim is to feel good, eating a whole large chocolate bar at one go is a sin in relation to that aim. I successfully resisted the urge to buy the large chocolate bar -- and did so by buying a small one. That way I did not "sin" too much towards my aim of feeling good, because small chocolate bar did not affect my well-being almost at all.
On the surface, it might appear more virtuous to not buy any chocolate bar. However, I know myself from prior experience that if I had "successfully" resisted the natural urge at the shop, it might have caused me to later to be unable to later resist the urge to buy a large chocolate bar from a kiosk.
So knowing myself to be the imperfect human being in these scenarios, buying a small chocolate bar at the shop was actually more aligned with my aim of feeling good than not buying it, because the end result was more aligned with my aim of feeling good.
Modern psychology would probably say that this urge is in my superego. Maybe as a child, I learned that I don't usually get what I need, so when something is available, I feel the urge to take as much as I can -- i.e. greed is something that I will encounter in many things that I do, keeping me from hitting the mark. As this is very common way humans miss the mark and deeper in the psychology, it is a Deadly Sin.
Some theological and psychological perspectives posit that the belief that this urge is a part of me -- i.e. I identify with the urge, I believe that "I am greedy" -- is actually part of the problem. So a better formulation would be instead of "WHO decides how much I need" to ask "WHAT IN ME decides how much I need". And then, what is a healthy and useful relationship towards those urges. And it may be different in different circumstances, hence resisting the urge to put in too many papers, but replacing the urge with a lesser one in case of chocolate bars.
The point might not be to learn to "control" the urge -- we can learn from system theory that excessive control might cause a backlash -- in terms of some systems even literally. More healthy relationship is often to just observe -- and then learn how such urges affect my well-being -- i.e. to learn more about myself. Often the observation itself is enough to have an effect.
We can take a corporate analogy (literally, corpus = body) and ask, what in organizations (again, organization has the same literal root as organism) cause them to be "greedy". In other words, what drives organizations to have an urge for excessive profits that they ignore the harms they cause to employees, society at large or even customers (i.e. enshittification). This urge appears very similar as the urge in humans.
That question will lead to other interesting questions about politics, economics etc. For example, you can ask, what is the aim of such corporations, and whether that aim produces results aligned with the aims of societies at large, etc.
maybe long term vs. short term is the key idea. apple, for example, could rake in bountiful measures in the short term if they ventured away from their boutique-electronic-consumer-goods niche. in the long run it would hurt their bottom line to do so
Greedy people put the desire for more money above the welfare of the business, themselves, and other. Greedy people literally put their desire for more personal wealth above the very lives of others.
Greed/not greed is a very fair way of putting it. One can operate a business that requires profit without wanting to destroy everyone and everything that stands in the way of more money.
I think there's one more factor that is crucially important — greedy people lack long-term vision, and care a lot more about money now than they do about potentially much more money in the future.
I suppose it's kind of interesting that you could measure greed as an unusually high discount rate for the time value of money?
I'm old generation and almost forgot for a while. GitHub was good even on their hands at the beginning, C# is amazing, TypeScript is amazing, wsl2 is game changer (which includes the change in Microsoft's position about linux), vscode is amazing, microsoft great increase in presence on opensource was nice (rushstack for example), etc...
But well, they still have the garbage side, which seems to be spreading again.
I second the C# praise: we have a few teams building software with C# and having to debug it here and there, it is very modern, compiles cross-platform and has lots of functionality already built-in and from the release notes I read from time to time, the people behind it know what they are doing.
> Probably they thought the new generations forgot about how awful they were in the not so distant past.
More likely, never learned about it in the first place, save a few whispers. Who's got time to go digging in deep, when there's 'experiments to run, research to be done' ...
> I think they set it all on fire because greed got the better of them again.
AI psychosis. Divide between rich and poor. They live in their own golden bubbles and there's no sanity checks. The workers are so far removed from the realm of competentance and influence it's just CEOs and VPs trying to pump the next 6 months stock value regardless of anything.
It's like the zeitgeist has decided the only thing that matters is their own farts and how they dont smell.
Isn't that just like.. what Microsoft has always been? Browser wars, Tay, bad behavior around open source software.. This is how they roll. They're being their best selves.
Thank you for this. I completely agree. Microsoft has always been awful, and the likely always will be. However, the did strike gold a handful of times, and they are just reliable enough to feed enterprises.
Apple, Oracle, Adobe, Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc... All the established players have their own distinct flavor of awful. This incident is just a very on-brand flavor for Microsoft.
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