I very much agree. Technology moves far too fast in this century for companies, who will only need to invest less as AI improves, to have a monopoly over things that would inevitably (or were already) also being developed. It made sense when you invested 20 years into the research for a thing, back when that was necessary due to the slower pace. People had to travel places more often, spent more time doing so, communications took longer, and generally everything took significantly more time. Those policies served companies well in the last century. These days a grad student tested something on a weekend, a professor viewed the results in the morning and a reaction is already in progress. It simply isn’t reasonable anymore; they should have a right to recoup a reasonable costs, of course, paying off their investment. When that investment becomes a company worth more than at least 50% of the others, maybe they should need to compete more, not less? Make them innovate to maintain customers rather than simply sit on their patents. Just an opinion, but I believe that internal competition will only help us innovate.
I feel like some of the frontier models are approaching run-of-the-mill engineer who does dumb stuff frequently. That said, with appropriate harnessing, it’s more like go-karts on a track; you can’t keep them out of the wall, but you can reset them and get them back on a path (when needed). Not every kart ends up in the wall, but all of them want to go fast, so the better defined the track is the more likely the karts will find a finish line. Certainly more likely than if you just stuck them in a field with no finish line and said “go!”.
Yes, I’m sure aircrew never get so violently sick as to affect millions or billions of dollars in crew and and supporting assets due to an emergency, and armed service members are never transported by emergency transportations for eye-watering costs. Technical inequity that ignores facts is the argument of those without arguments.
The specifics of “who” has zero relevance to what is necessary for an ongoing situation; you don’t get to dictate your access and timeline to information just because you contributed a fraction of a penny to something.
Corporations get their software into businesses through the exact same process software gets replaced in those companies… usually through IT and/or users using things personally who become their champions.
So which paragraph do you think was more relevant to their recommendation…the one where they already have most of the customers they will ever have, or the one where people are increasingly moving away from them in their daily lives?
in just last 5 months they got two new corporate customers with 1400 and 550 employees. and this is just me, one nobody that knows about. if you think they are not getting new corporate customers not daily but hourly you mite be tad misinformed.
as an exercise see how many job openings there are where you won’t be using MSFT products if you get the gig :)
Likely using a rather generous definition of “new”. There is a difference between a new customer, and buying a license. Im also fairly doubtful that every server, docker, vm, and appliance is also running Windows. And even if said 2000 users are using Windows for absolutely every system, it’s still a meaningless anecdote about a drop in the bucket. I don’t think anyone suggested that Microsoft doesn’t have customers? But I suspect they were far from “new” customers, even if a new company, because I guarantee something somewhere was replaced for every one of them; bankrupt businesses they replaced, old hardware, whatever. Arguing the opposite would certainly seem to be naive on face.
wasn't expecting to read that Microsoft is not getting new corporate customers but here we are, you learn something new every day :)
none of this is anecdotal, I make a living as contractor and in just past two years have worked on numerous moving-to-microsoft projects, Oracle to SQL Server, AWS to Azure, Sharepoint etc etc... I am not a fan of MSFT by any means but what you are writing makes absolutely no sense. You should read MSFT quarterly earnings reports and not read few anecdotal things people on HN write about MSFT. It is M7 for a reason and practically has no competition (which is why they are able to do shit like Windows 11 and Copilot and... people on HN might be bitching but it is just for entertainment purposes)
Anecdotes like “I’ve done blah blah over two years”? Correct, I ignore anecdotes just like that. You can argue whatever you like — you seem to be heavily financially motivated to do so while I neither own Microsoft stock nor earn my money by convincing people to use their products. As a result, feel free to continue your evangelism while I go ahead and extricate myself from your sphere of biases.
Exactly. Brands have happily devalued themselves in favor of profit for many years; if you are presented with two options of equal quality, why would you choose the more expensive simply for a logo, except out of insecurity? If that brand is no longer meaningful in that goal because it is no longer admired, there is no value in paying more. People went with brands because they were supposed to be “better”, and their expense made them less obtainable (therefore more desirable). They are no longer desired because they sold their value for profits.
There is a certain colonialism attitute in such capitalism corporations, as if the countries that are exploited for low production costs, the people weren't able to gather the knowledge and do something for themselves instead.
Naturally they are only collecting what they planted, and unfortunely all local economies suffer from the side effects from this, in jobs, and acquisition power.
Libreoffice can handle most office documents these days. Steam can run many games via proton/wine. In fact, for normal “day to day” stuff, I find Ubuntu is a solid replacement. The problems arise the moment some non-mainstream/non-prepackaged install is needed on any distro. The newest drivers, some alternative program, a non-standard networking configuration, etc. The moment any of that is needed the Linux distros immediately fall back to terminal commands which are not end-user friendly. I would guess that 99% of “normal” (but non-standard) things can be done with Mac and Windows via GUI only. Installing another driver, a program, etc. Linux is far from there and only seems to achieve that for the absolute most common operations overall (basics). I like Ubuntu, and I am coming to hate this new Windows approach, but the ecosystem of flexibility and “just use a terminal command” mentality will never really let it go fully mainstream (at least until that is resolved).
Unfortunately LO can not handle most people's document requirements. Not at any fault of LO, it's Microsoft who make comparability hard or impossible. So when working with most people who will be using Office, LO will fail to correctly format a document.
To be a little fair to Microsoft, they have made it much harder to enable macros over the years. So when stuck with a bank's spreadsheet that requires a win32 macro to convert for upload, I blame the bank.
Luckily grey market keys for both windows and office are so cheap I can just relegate these to a VM for those times it's needed.
The above is probably enough to keep the typical user on Windows forever though.
Necessary has never been the deciding factor for Apple’s decisions, especially when it comes to design. Nor has “optional” ever really been part of that discussion. They know, like most people, supporting multiple interface simply creates more BS to maintain for the few resistant people who don’t accept change. Like it or hate, you bought an Apple.
I don’t particularly like it either — reality is what it is and if I don’t like it that much, there are other phones I can buy when I upgrade.
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