Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

Meta Quest: Facebook has users, advertisers and all sorts of people who depend on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and such. Facebook knows that platforms like that fail eventually and doesn’t want to be the next MySpace so it has been struggling to get them into a virtual reality platform that, on a certain level, is well executed, but that people don’t have enthusiasm for. VR games for the Quest platform are pretty good but there are so many good flat games that I barely have time for them. I’d make the case that the 8GB MQ3 has enough RAM to run carefully optimized games but not enough for ordinary people to author content (some of why Horizon Worlds is dead: no way McDonalds is going to build an experience if they can’t import an SVG or PNG of the Coca-Cola logo to out in the cups and instead have to painstakingly make it out of solid geometry using the controller by hand… and the same is true for small businesses and enthusiasts) —- we are seeing 16GB headsets from Apple, Samsung and Valve now and maybe it will be better but quite probably it won’t. I know though that if Zuck gives up and somebody else succeeds he’ll have the most terrible regret.

Unfortunately IBM mainframes are still around. No new customers, but existing ones are too afraid of touching it because it's usually the result of decades of spaghetti hence they're locked in for the forseeble future. So they'll keep renewing contracts and refreshing hardware periodically. IBM prints money with this stuff, hence all their acquisitions of various software companies to leverage their massive B2B to sell oher stuff to those existing customer relationships.

The other end of the problem is Apple which is a consumer company, but they prohibit companies to use their hardware for building new things.

Both approaches suck for consumers and/or startups, but Apple's approach at least works for them from a business perspective.

“Yah”

The general consumer isn't going to hear "the manufacturer hasn't upstreamed stable drivers to the kernel" and suddenly stop blaming Linux if the hardware works in Windows.

Also, thelast few months have been a nightmare for or us as we were doing our migrations to Windows 11 and found how much of a steaming pile of poo it was - I mean, we already had an inclination, but it was even worse than the rumours. Never seen a shittier OS in my life, and that's even after considering Windows ME.

This is because a completely under-appreciated apsect of the iPhone revolution was that it basically created the consumer smartphone market. Until then the only smartphone market that existed was the enterprise smartphone market, which was already locked up by BlackBerry and to a significant extent, Windows Mobile (with all the corporate integrations you mention), the predecessor to Windows Phone.

But that market was constrained to the phones that corporations would buy for specific employees, typically execs or senior employees, because the average consumer could not afford those at all. That's a tiny number.

And then the iPhone was originally released at the same price point.

This is why Ballmer was actually right to laugh at the iPhone at the time. The revolutionary UI could not overcome its fundamental unaffordability. I know because I had one through my employer, and I was the object of envy because none of my well-paid, tech-savvy peers in a relatively cosmopolitan major city could afford one.

What happened then was Apple or AT&T figured out that dropping the upfront price to $200 and amortizing the rest of the cost in the data plan suddenly made it accessible to the consumer market. If you look at smartphone sales, that is the point the hockeystick starts curving updwards.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

But Win 95 and XP were were absolutely built for corporations.

Sure, XP came in separate "Home" and "Professional" editions. But the important thing is that it was the Home version that was missing features to make it cheaper -- not that the Professional edition was primarily a consumer product with some business functionality bolted on.

Obviously Windows has always been used by both home users and corporate users. But the bulk of Microsoft's revenue has always been from corporations. There is no sense in which Win 95 was designed primarily for individual consumers, as opposed to corporate needs.

Lots of things irk me about macOS UX. Finder's lack of tree view sidebar really irks me. Having to disable the silly animations and sounds when I get a new machine irks me. The absolutely terrible window tiling system irks me. When I minimize a window, I can no longer tab into it. The settings dialog's weird behavior with respect to resizing on both axes irks me. Can't use 3 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and the secondary monitors end up with limited refresh rate options. Meanwhile, I can just plug just about any dock into my 5 year old Windows laptop and multiple monitors just work. Still can't find anything as good as IrfanView (as old and dated as it is, it made working with image libraries a breeze).

Finder and the poor external monitor support somehow irks me the most because now I end up typing into the CLI 90% of the time because the navigation experience is so bad and for me this is a work machine and the difficulty in using 3+ monitors is silly.

I get being an Apple Stan (love the hardware), but the software UX is 100% bottom of the barrel stuff. Basic OS stuff like Explorer is just light years ahead of Finder.

But that has basically always been true, at least since Mac OS X. (I liked the earlier OSes too, but they really did crash all the time and have no memory protection, so arguably Windows had some compelling advantages.)

The interesting question is whether recent MacOS releases are ahead of their previous versions. Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about. Maybe dark mode?

The hardware keeps better, and the experience of third-party apps I care about (VS Code and Ableton) is superior to Windows. But the OS and first-party apps seem completely stagnant.

Which, arguably, is OK. Maybe the OS should just be a commodity. But I have to imagine that there are user experience improvements they could make at the OS but I certainly haven't seen any.

Have you _seen_ system preferences?

Nobody seems to like Tahoe, but I can't really speak to it because I don't even want to install it.

At least Windows dignifies you with an error message (even if a hex code and badly tanslated text) when something is wrong. macOS mocks you with a dumb and utterly useless message like "Something went wrong, try again" or "A USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it". Or just flat out not showing the button for the thing you're looking for if prerequisites aren't filled (iPad screen extending, unless the iPad is on the same Apple ID, and has been restarted since, the button just isn't there and there is nothing you can do to debug it other than tryingn to guess what is missing).

Also, Windows allows you to install whatever with a clear UX (this might be dangerous for random crap from the internet vs having to jump through a weird non-existing UX to get it to open, or flat out being blocked from using downloaded libaries).

Someone else on HN has a line that I agree with:”Apple makes the OS apps mundane so that people can write replacements and sell those in App Store where Apple has a fat share”.

The problem isn't really the experience being something like devices as a service. It's that the providers are a rent seeking duopoly.

https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

On iOS, KDE Connect feels like its running a potato sack race with both arms tied behind its back.

Shit like this make rogue AI scenarios totally plausible. I won't wish that on my worst enemy

Since we're basically getting flying cars next year at the World Cup, I guess it's going to be after flying cars.

One or two of these, I could see. Automated progress reports would be nice. But a lot of them aren’t about document generation, but about human accountability, about being a person who commits to something in writing. Automating away paper pushers means all the accountability lands on their bosses, leaving them nowhere to hide. It will be quite something if we manage to rewrite the corporate social context like this.

And yet, one that Microsoft has the best chances. Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams. Google has its Workspaces thing plus its web wannabe-equivalents to Office, but that's it. And AWS is an infrastructure provider.

Microsoft in contrast? They're everywhere and most importantly, whatever is in Office 365 automatically has the "compliant" checkboxes ticked for auditors. And MS can easily ride the time until AGI or something coming reasonably close to it is marketable on that moat.