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Note that this post was written shortly after seeing the News so it's likely modestly incoherent, and only given the most basic of editing pass. As always, hopefully there's enough meat for discussion.
Link to article below, but today I was greeted by an IGN article titled:
That in the same breath IGN and Microsoft feel the need to announce Matt Booty's promotion, is... indicative of how they perceive the public reception of this announcement. Kiwi Farmers are likely feeling vindicated, and potentially mounting despair, as even under the most anti-DEI culture we've had in ages, a man retires and is replaced by a woman, chosen by the venerable Satya Nadella.
IGN provides this quote:
Now, I'm going to ignore all the fluff as it was incredibly well-prepared and likely approved by multiple PR people to have the just-right wording. I am be tempted to ask Satya: What was the point of letting (or directing) the closing of all those existing, profitable studios? You wouldn't need to back these ideas. Xbox has historically been a money-printer and the most present in consumers' minds, the one people would argue on forums and reddit and making youtube videos for days defending your honor? Such that even fanboys are rapidly admitting the rot has occurred under your feet?
And now, Gamers are left with shit on plates and eating it over the last 5 years, as Microsoft has done everything they can to push the limits of their fans' loyalties.
Xbox was already struggling under the thumbs of Phil Spencer, someone that actually enjoyed and was from gaming and gamer culture. Whether or not normies are going to Notice these canned and prepared responses and coincidental promotion alongside her remains to be actually seen, but even worse: the woman appears to have comparable-or-less Gamer Credentials than Zoe Quinn, so Sharma has to tap another person to be the internal "voice" of games. Probably already being talked about on one of the chans at any rate, so I'll leave that discourse to Those Places for the time being.
That said, unless I am blind and failed my reading comprehension like an average "Gamer", as far as I can tell, Sharma has done basically nothing related to games or gaming throughout her career. So the open-ended question is: why would Satya take that risk despite the general consumer climate?
Again, another quote:
So yes, I'm sure consumers, who have been finally pushed off the edge onto switching off windows, and upset that they literally cannot afford gaming hardware any more are extremely excited for the lady that put Copilot into notepad.exe and the beleagured and oft-derided Microsoft Recall.
Satya really loves his wordsoup that's for sure.
Loose thoughts that don't fit anywhere else in this already-eclectic post, and may be duplicated:
Notably, as far as I can read she does not have any qualifications or past interest in gaming.
Seems that Satya wants more wordsalad and wordsoup to throw at consumers to sound like they're Super Advanced and Definitely Things Will Get Better. Watch for more wordsoupification of the Xbox and microsoft gaming division.
More push into renting in order to play games.
CoreAI is one of Microsoft's largest money-sinks in the company-- they have done their absolute best not to discuss the cost vs revenue during earning calls.
Having been at both Meta and Instacart and head over the CoreAI department, means Sharma has some credible credentials toward running large teams and driving some level of product.
The incessant ai push means microsoft has gobs of compute, and gamers are being starved of what little compute they did have access to even a year ago
At any rate, if you're a capital-G Gamer, the sign was on the wall, but if you're actually invested in the future of the hobby, you probably want to migrate off Xbox before your xbox turns into an diffusion-ran agenticifed gas town, maximizing memory, entitlements, and workflows for such world-changing ideas as Microsoft has clearly been driving forward with such ... vision.
I think it could work well. The CEO might influence culture, but it’s not like they’re going to make the games. The best CEOs tend to let the talent be the talent with minimal interference from the top. That sounds like what the new CEO wants.
When the CEO says they're going to let the talent be the talent, expect micromanagement within the week.
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When? The original Xbox was meant to realize Bill Gates dream of putting a computer in every livingroom, a general purpose computer for the livingroom, the games were supposed to be just the beachhead.
The original xbox did not sell well. The Xbox 360 did sell very well, especially in the US, but it was also marred by hardware problems, the servicing of which put the xbox division in the negative for years. I don't know if they ever came out of it, if they did it must have been between 2010 and the launch of the xbox one.
The xbox one was of course supposed to be the coronation of the old livingroom computer dream, its launch was all about watching TV and controlling all of your other entertainment devices. Nobody liked that and it didn't sell well, less than the original NES. And the opaquely named Seris X/S sold even less (of course the current generation of consoles is more of a competition over who can suck the most, so whatever).
Which is probably why since 2021 they've been talking about turning xbox into a platform. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the direction they will keep going in: divesting from hardware and become more of a publisher of sorts.Going with a woman on that role might not even be a bad thing, I think at this point the only people who can tell people to cut the woke bullshit are going to be women, developers aren't going to take it from a man. The worst that can happen is if things keep going like they've been going in the past 10 years and western devs keep putting out woke flops and the money keeps getting tight and gaming keeps moving east and to the PC.
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Hot on her heels is talk of more Indian fraud:
https://x.com/givemebanhammer/status/2025525203762073950
This behavior from microsoft and sharma makes it incredibly difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt in any capacity.
The people bringing up "wokeness is the real enemy" is darkly ironic, as if whites are not watching a DEI hire be chosen over someone with plausible credentials.
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Ok, the fact that she shared an obviously staged Xbox account is a hilarious unforced error, like Elizabeth Warren getting the genetic ancestry test. They realize she has a perception problem, but instead of just... ignoring it, as one of the most powerful corporations in the world, they insisted on trying to appeal to it. They legitimately could go, "she's not from gaming, but she's a good leader, and we think she's the best for the role," but instead they have to try to make up word salad about gaming passion and fabricate a record of gaming. Gamers are going to hate Microsoft no matter what they do, it's just in the culture, why are they trying to appeal to them? Make some good games and it won't matter whether a trained seal is in charge of the gaming division.
Well, exactly, and (to put on my armchair psychologist hat) this makes Sharma seem so much worse. There’s been a bunch of talk on the less salubrious corners of the Internet about the concept of “izzat”, an Indian cultural practice whereby faking credentials is seen as just as good as having the credentials because the real merit, to the Indian psyche, is in Dedication To The Facade, not in the distinction between facade and the reality. For an izzat-brained Indian, setting up a fake account is the smart, meritorious move, because it proves your hustle, your dedication to fake it until you make it, your savvy use of shortcuts, which is better than putting in the leg work like a chump and actually having achievements.
Ignoring a bunch of basement-dwelling no-life babies until they go away is not possible to a person who got where they are due to izzat, because she knows that spiritually, she is also a basement-dwelling no-life baby. Which might explain why she got her little brother to fake her account, idk.
I agree with this and think it applies even more broadly to a global personality type beyond just the sub-continent.
This shares an interesting with the Elon Musk Diablo controversy. The TLDR is that Elon went on Joe Rogan and randomly mentioned how he was ranked in the Top 10 of all online Diablo players. The internet rightly immediately went "lol. whut? How does the CEO of like 5 different mega companies have time to grind Diablo?" The ONLY way to get that high of a ranking is to grind. There is no giga-brained shortcut. You have to put in the hours. The immediate conclusion was that he was paying someone to ghost-play his account to boost ratings.
Well, Elon wanted to shut up the haterz and so live-streamed himself playing. It went as well as you would expect. A bunch of actual Diablo mega-grinders immediately pointed out tactics that Elon used that were dead giveaways that he didn't know what he was doing. IIRC, Elon eventually admitted that he did pay someone to grind for him.
Why in the hell would a literal centi-billionaire care so much about online video game rankings? Isn't it just enough to be the (future) Prince of Mars, the face of American rocketry, and to have had 14 - maybe 100 kids?
Elon and this Sharma lady both suffer from a personality deficiency where they don't actually model social esteem systems well. When a value system is totally objective and external - profit and less, share value, rocket re-use cost - their Autism engines get a turbo boost. But when it's more interpersonally subjective and based on relative-social status within niches (video games or, perhaps, dancing being excellent examples) they lose all bearing. I think it literally flips the "flight or fight" level of anxiety and they reflexively react by trying to "do the thing" at the same level of all-or-nothing that the dedicate to their primary pursuits.
These people don't have a real interpersonal or social core. The "sense of self" in a very immediate flesh and blood way isn't there. This is part of the genesis of the "Musk is an alien" memes. When he was on SNL he opined he may have autism or asperger's (self-diagnosed). Perhaps, but color be doubtful. I don't think it has anything to do with "brain chemistry" (a term I loathe) or even real-deal mental health (i.e. BPD, MDD, Schizo-class disorders). Instead, it's a socially rooted character underdevelopment that never was addressed precisely because they were hyper-indexing on whatever optimization problem was in front of them.
Elon musk and Ms. Sharma know that the piles of money they make are valuable because money can be exchanged for goods and services but they fail to make the domain transition and realize that having lots and lots and lots of money also creates real social value (and, if deployed correctly, political value as well. Musk has tried to do this but keeps fucking up because he truly doesn't get politics or government. His DOGE failure should be more heavily highlighted, IMHO).
As @urquan says, gamers are never going to "vibe" with MSFT because MSFT is an evil corporation that kills all the good games. And also makes them too, or whatever. The point is that the point isn't getting gamers to "like" you but to buy your products. Musk doesn't understand that Chinese EV buyers don't actually care if you can dance so long as you can sell them fucking robot EVs. These people aren't real because they don't conceive of themselves as totally human.
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If she was not a public figure I would assume that save files from non-Xbox-account-registered copies of the games were imported. But the CEO of Xbox can't very well say she's been playing pirated games, can she?
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As some of the other posters note, I'm not sure what overall point you are making here? Microsoft has switched out one (massive failure) corpo for another - an Indian(!) woman(!) - and this suggests all kinds of disasters?
Phil Spencer was a capital-G Gamer. He successfully reversed the absolute disaster that was the Xbone... and then succeeded in little else but spaffing hundreds of billions up the wall on poor acquisitions. He's one of many, many gamer leaders who have been shit at their jobs. You clearly understand the damage he's done, mentioning Xbox's shocking reputation at multiple points. Is there any reason to believe a non-gamer could do any worse?
You also state:
My only response is: What?? What Xbox are you thinking of? It's also been a giant money sink, fortunate that it's an irrelevance to MS's balance sheet or else it would surely have been killed a decade ago. Most recently they sunk another 70bil into Activision just to watch the latest CoD have a disastrous reception. The most shocking thing about this announcement is that Microsoft have actually published this news and are pushing Sharma as some kind of saviour, instead of abandoning it once and for all.
As for Sharma herself, is there any reason to suspect she's not a perfectly capable corpo? As you note, time at Meta is almost an anti-signal at this point, but given her other experience and several years now at Microsoft, it would be a surprise if she was useless. I suppose you could see it as Indian nepotism, but if anything this a downgrade for the woman. She's gone from Microsoft main focus, the all-important AI push, to their failing, irrelevant gaming division, which is surely on its last roll of the dice. She must be confident in her ability to turn it around.
As for her AI experience, well, she also worked at Instacart. Why is no one assuming Xbox is getting into the grocery business?
Anyone gamer with any sense would have long ago abandoned the Xbox brand. Indeed, Spencer ensured such a thing by pivoting so heavily towards their PC presence and gamepass. I don't see much reason to assume it could get any worse.
I actually wanted to post something on this myself, but in a completely different direction. I saw on another forum the most curious reaction to the news:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:aa23o5w4w2afknay44oqxqz6/post/3mfdtqu5wjk2x
The linked post is a negative reaction from noted game journalist Jeff Gerstmann.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this point, but this is absolutely insane. Merely expressing concern over birth rates - from a minority woman no less - is enough to immediately get cast as some kind of super Chud. Sure, the AI angle is an easy attack point for some of the more obsessed members of Bluesky, but for that to filter out to a relatively normie game journo is another step.
Gerstmann, from what I know of him, has never been particularly lambasted as a woke or poor journalist. GiantBomb was popular as far as I was aware. Has game journalism become so poisoned that everyone has to jump onto the latest left-wing fad or risk being cancelled?
10 years ago, sure.
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gallows_first_time.jpg
Gamergate does feel like it was a thousand years ago.
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Is it any more complicated than he's Indian, she's Indian, this is promoting a fellow in-group person to a meaningless but important-sounding position?
I hope so! But i may concede that Satya is just racist.
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The most important new thing for me in this announcement is that XBOX is still alive.
The other is that Indian sounding C level names is the coupling constant of the enshittification field.
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A successful stint at Meta tends to imply you have been able to bring some order to sprawling, argumentative chaos.
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I think this is a good idea. It's not like many AAA games are acclaimed for their dialogue, characters and writing, people literally joke about how crap their writing is. Let people have conversations with in-game characters, why not?
Open source communities have gone out of their way to set up general-purpose AIs to play Minecraft with you in the crudest ways imaginable and it kind of works. Microsoft literally owns Minecraft and they have a ludicrous amount of compute. They could make a minecraft-specific AI model, special servers where the player (players?) could be warlords with whole armies they direct and manage. The sky is the limit. This is a GAAS subscription goldmine just waiting to happen if they can cut down the inference costs, which they should definitely be able to do with a specialist model.
The real problem Microsoft has is dysfunctional culture. It's really not that hard to make Halo Infinite and have it be actually good. They have the money but not the necessary organizational skills. How hard can it be to make Windows 11 run smoothly enough for people to risk their computers and 'upgrade'? Windows 10 was OK...
I think an your typical AAA game needs LLM-powered NPCs as much as a drowning man needs a rock. If nobody thought to give the NPCs more dialogue, filling the gaps with AI slop is not going to help.
I think an LLM might substitute for a mediocre DM in an RPG, though. Certainly in text-based formats, but possibly also in something with graphics (e.g. Neverwinter Nights). The benefit would be that it could accommodate player character ideas. So rather than saying "You can not play a lycrantrophic half-elf changeling", it would modify the setting. Perhaps figure out how the fey fit into the cosmology and the overall plot. Invent relevant side quests, just like a human DM would.
The problem with this approach is that presently, if I have to pick between a pre-generated character with a questline written by humans (BG3) and a character of my own invention with quests written by AI, then I would much rather stick to BG3. Likewise, even if I were totally into dinosaurs, it seems highly unlikely that I would enjoy a version of Tolkien's epos where all the non-hominid animals (horses, ponies, eagles, black wings, dragons, spiders, etc) are replaced by appropriate dinos better than the original, simply because AI is nowhere good enough to write something like LotR from the scratch.
Ah but the typical AAA game is not Baldur's Gate III.
Mass Effect Andromeda. Or Dragon Age Veilguard. Or Concord. This is what I'm thinking of: https://x.com/celestesangels/status/2003911076988260714
https://x.com/deadlock/status/2015887428964266047
An underlying issue is that the people who can't write good dialogue surely can't write good prompts or lora/finetunes for AIs either.
Still, some fun can definitely be had in a version of LOTR where Saruman is shilling NordVPN: "50% off with code ISTAR15". I saw an AI make a great pun about Isengard's no-logs policy.
Trying to replicate the peak of human literature should not be the target for AI gaming, better to focus on things that only it can do in terms of reactivity and dynamism to create new kinds of fun.
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I was using chatbots to help me train dynamic Japanese vocabulary recall or whatever. Discussing random topics with it wasn't working, as those tended to focus on abstract vocabulary. I had the idea of trying to play RPGs with the AI, with the AI being dungeon master and posing scenarios I would need to use more concrete vocabulary to interact with. Should have been simple, right? It's got all sorts of RPGs in its dataset to crib from. Anyways, the results were one of the many things that totally dispelled any illusion that LLMs possess intelligence for me. I can't provide a total summary of its extreme and numerous flaws, but everything it tried to do as dungeon master ended up being cliché, nonsensical, unstructured, inappropriate from every point of view, and it quickly lost context of what was going on after only a few prompts. You could probably create a much better virtual DM through pre-LLM computer generation technology.
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This would only require ousting Satya and a purge of every manager and new hire in the windows division, firing all the h1bs and rehiring the old microsoft os engineers and QA divisions and an eight-year long purge of the last few years of slopcode.
Just don't accidentally go all the way back to Windows ME.
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I didn't play it any real depth but recent Chinese triple A game Where Winds Meet did the AI chatbot npc thing I believe. There's some funny memes of people hacking them off topic but I think there are some enjoyers.
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It depends on implementation (as with everything...)
Consider: AI art. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks this and this look absolutely tasteless. If companies start replacing even background elements with slop, their games will look noticeably worse.
I'm ambivalent regarding coding agents. In my experience, they are very useful, but you still need real skill to avoid writing horrible code. They write code in one shot that "just works"...except there are small issues: outdated patterns, slow algorithms, unnecessary operations (e.g. copying), missed opportunities for abstraction, no high-level design. It really does just work, and quite often does not work for edge-cases. Except, my understanding is that most video game code is already like this, and AAA games regularly get flamed for buggy launches, so I have a hard time imagining worse. Hence I'm ambivalent.
A genuinely good use of AI would be for more human-like, or at least more fun, NPCs and enemies. AI-generated writing is like AI art, very bland, but if the NPCs are more dynamic that could be interesting. Perhaps the best use I can imagine is playing a single-player game and getting a multi-player experience, against players who are at my skill level and have good etiquette. But can LLMs do that?
I wonder if populating generated worlds and settings and such would be a better place to start.
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It'd be super cool to have access to a Google Genie like world-model game, perhaps with an AI 'dungeon master' overseeing a larger storyline or controlling game mechanics. In a more freeform mode, you can type in something and it just happens (apparently this was too fun and interesting for the public demo of Genie 3 but it exists in principle, since it literally just generates everything you see).
More of a longer-term thing though since world models are quite costly to run in real time.
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We've known since the middle ages that some parts of any picture are important and others are less important. Masters who supervised junior artists would farm out parts of a painting and then come in to paint the most difficult or important parts.
It would seem like AI could be used similarly, to fill the background and let an artist do the important parts of the image. A composite like this would mean the artist could make more pictures with the same time and critical eyes would see human made things in the parts of the image that matter (the clouds see fine for example and too basically no human time to make).
Or transitional frames in animation. Not sure there is much reason for humans to do that, beyond possibly some impact frames.
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Not if their training data includes chat from real multiplayer humans, no.
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AI slop was unheard of even a few years ago - where’s your imagination?
Look at what Seamless2 is doing now … this shit will be unbelievably real in a few years time.
Every year even on forums like these people are showing examples of how bad AI is but every year it’s monumentally better than the year prior.
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LLMs really are the best argument for GAAS I can think of. They would sway me, if done well, and I've literally never paid for a game that's on a subscription model.
There are significant costs involved in serving tokens, and the average consumer/gamer can't run very good models on local hardware (especially if they need to run a remotely demanding game at the same time).
The Chinese are already doing it, with positive sentiment. I predicted and continue to predict they'll become ubiquitous, and a genuine improvement.
Both you and @RandomRanger expressed this sentiment, and I'm a little perplexed. When I've noted concerns about the financials of some of these big AI companies, people have assured me that the inference side of things is profitable. Is this a different enough use case that it would be a significant cost, or are you including all the infrastructure necessary for it in this calculation as well?
I think the inference side of things is profitable. That's precisely why they need to make it more efficient for gaming purposes...
The general trend is that businesses looking to make money will spend a lot more than consumers looking for fun. Coders have a huge appetite for the highest-quality tokens. Consider the GPU shortage, the RAM shortage, compute is being reallocated from consumer command to commercial demand via pricing... Gamers are not prepared to pay that much money, there's already a lot of unhappiness about GAAS, a move up beyond 60 USD games.
It would be stupid for Microsoft to lower their margins by reallocating compute from lucrative Azure to less-lucrative Minecraft gaming. They need to keep margins high or raise them by reducing cost of production. And they should definitely be able to get better results at lower prices with a dedicated minecraft AI, even if it's just a finetune. It's like the Chinese paper where they finetuned an AI to play Genshin Impact, solve puzzles, complete hours long missions... Presumably that's quite expensive to run since it's a full video model that plays like its a human. But Microsoft could easily make a smaller text model that gets data directly from the game, maybe it calls stronger models for particularly difficult building tasks.
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Cheap tokens have to be paid for anyway. If you're using an LLM to stream tokens to users, or doing something more complex like AI voices, then you have continuous running costs above and beyond whatever costs you were paying for the multiplayer servers etc.
This is completely unrelated to the profitability of AI companies. They charge you a subscription, or a per-token basis on the API. The game dev/publisher has to pay those costs, and unless they go for aggressive rate limiting, it's possible for power users to cost them more than a single up-front sticker price for a game can manage. The ideal solution would be local LLMs, since the consumer shoulders the burden, but they're not good enough because the average consumer doesn't have the hardware to both serve the model and play games at once.
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I've fooled around with AI chats for like DND-level RP and found the inherent 'yesman' aspect making it hard to have a genuinely adversial interaction. They're fine for cursory NPCs though.
There's probably a level between static dialog trees and completely open conversations with memory to keep npcs interesting without letting them off the guardrails or hearing about that arrow they took to the knee for the 100th time.
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Properly-done NPCs wouldn't have the same "yesman" prompt as the current chatbots. LLMs are a brand new kind of magic and we're all still figuring out the right incantations. There's going to be a big learning curve as we figure out how to make AI-driven NPCs that feel natural, but IMO it's perfectly possible to get there (once the cost of decent models falls to where it makes economic sense).
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Head of XBox role is closest to a producer role.
Your job is to be a ruthless bean counter while individual studios focus on the core creative pursuit. This is especially true for Microsoft, which unlike Nintendo isn't as strongly coupled to its 1st party IP. Zenimax, Bethesda, Activision & Blizzard will probably keep doing their own thing.
Xbox should not be driving forward with vision. It should be funding game directors with vision, and keeping them on a leash of the correct length.
Todd Howard has maintained control over Bethesda, Sam Houser still runs Rockstar. Still no Elderscrolls 6 or GTA 6. Despite being run by 'capital G gamers', AAA Game studios are dysfunctional frankenstiein's monsters.
The primary thing that gives me pause about Asha's Linkedin is
hmm.....
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Only tangentially related, but is there a single Microsoft product that is prevalent by virtue of its actual quality, as opposed to inertia from widespread business adoption decades ago? Windows is so much worse than OS X. Outlook is so much worse than Gmail. Teams is so much worse than Zoom. XBox is so much worse than PlayStation/Nintendo. I don't know a single person who uses anything from Microsoft by choice.
Strongly disagree. Windows is going downhill, but OS X has always been inferior to Windows.
I've always found OS X to be extremely barebones as far as functionality goes. I do like that, but I also like most DEs except for maybe GNOME 3, so maybe I'm not the best judge.
Windows does a lot more, especially because it allowed itself to advance beyond the state of the art in 1984 (or rather, 1980, since OS X is just a copy of OS 1 is just a rip-off of what Xerox was doing at PARC). The Start Menu, and searching within it, is far and away superior to the way macOS handles applications (and Linux splits the difference and fails at both; both KDE and Gnome suffer from this, though in different ways).
OS X still has some weird bullshit, too- specifically the way it fails to allow you to copy folders in anything resembling an intuitive way. "So you don't get confused"? Yeah, not buying it.
Oh yeah, and keyboard shortcuts belong on Ctrl, not Alt/Command. It's a stupid compromise and Apple is just straight-up wrong here- I get you can customize it but it's still bad. I mean, they literally had the NOMODES guy [Larry Tesler] working for them and they still couldn't figure out that the ergonomics of holding down Alt-C are strictly inferior to Ctrl-C? Come on.
By the way, the best mobile OS ever designed was webOS and I will not hear slander otherwise. Yes, iOS and Android ripped off some of the good parts, but they didn't get all of it...
The superior way to start an application is to type the name of the binary, optionally followed by a space and arguments, optionally followed by an ampersand, followed by the enter key.
I have about 4k different programs in /usr/bin/. Menus are tolerable if there are a few options to pick, like at the ATM: Do you want to withdraw money, see your balance, recharge a prepaid card or quit? I certainly do not want to specify twelve bits using some GUI. Yes, keyboard searching might make that more tolerable, but can only hope to approach the comfort of the command line interface. (I should mention that I am not some purist, I think that it is fine to use a GUI and mouse for things which map very well upon a concept of a 2d surface, such as vector graphics, CAD or first person shooters. But 'pick a program to run' is not one of the problems which has an intrinsic 2d representation.)
Apart from that, judging operating systems by their user interface is a bit like judging a motor vehicle by its infotainment system: sure, it is relevant, if the navigation system is too painful that is bad. But at the end of the day, most vehicles are not picked for their infotainment system, but for a mixture of other factors such as signaling, price, capabilities, TCO and so on.
I respectfully disagree; 2D ancillary menus have several significant benefits over a bare terminal, but they still need a 1D terminal in that menu. And I get that there was a significant time period, specifically between 1986 through 2006, where this wasn't the case.
But when I have two programs that start with the same name, like say Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, I'd have to type out the entire name to access the second application. (I'd also have to know the name of the binary, that doesn't necessarily match the name on the box, and sometimes it isn't even a binary, but a part of one [so now you have to memorize the launch argument, and tab-autocomplete generally won't help you with that].) With a proper menu representation (and I admit the Windows 10 and 11 are very much not this; StartAllBack is mandatory on Windows machines), the sequence is 'vis' (or similar) + [down arrow] + Enter, speed the terminal cannot hope to match (unless you decide to manually configure an alias for it- but a general purpose solution for this is a lot more convenient, because it works everywhere, which is the same argument vi users make about learning it).
Selecting text and objects is something else that has an intrinsic 2D representation for reasons that become obvious if you don't know how long the line is (which you kind of have to for terminal-based selection), or if you need to see the document you're copying from as well as the document you're pasting to.
Menus are preferable here because, on an ATM, they're literally just keyboard buttons that map directly to the action. If you want to withdraw 200 dollars, you don't have to translate '1. View Balance. 2. Deposit. 3. Withdraw.' -> 'Enter amount to withdraw' into keyboard commands, you press the [equivalent of the] 'Withdraw' keyboard key, and then the '200 dollars' key. There's no potential of anyone misreading or mistranslating the input, since the menu changes based exactly on what's relevant at the time; it's drastically more intuitive.
Computer interfaces have legitimately advanced since 1970 and that's OK. They took a huge leap forward back when the OS wars weren't yet won, then slowed down, then came back for a time when OS X became relevant again, then desktop UX took a backseat to mobile UX. (Which made a great leap forward in 2007, then another just as large one in 2009 with webOS, and then regressed to where we are today.)
In my opinion the world is overdue for a new desktop UX paradigm, since unlike the 2010s it's now crystal clear that desktop PCs (including laptops) will never go away, and it's time we go after the things we missed the last time, like how to display text in readable locations and not to truncate the important parts (which is also something the terminals still have problems with in applications that show data in tabs). Maybe once someone figures out how to get an LLM to spit out all the hooks and hacks you need to reliably replace explorer.exe (not that the Windows source code isn't in LLM training sets already, of course), we'll finally get someone applying the UX research the rest of the way.
Yeah, they're clearly picked in spite of it.
Unless you're Tesla or (to a point) Rivian, but those are software companies that just happen to make cars. Every "X drives" video I watch on YouTube has the infotainment clearly lagging by a half second or more, and with the absurd power of even 15 year old computers this is just not a thing that should happen. Car UX was legitimately better when the engineers (or rather, the execs directing the engineers) were forced into the simplest embedded development; as soon as they got access to something more advanced than embedded C it all went to shit.
And at this point I think good car UX is dead and buried because consumers aren't even in any position to care. Hey, at least the auto lanekeep will stop you from leaving the lane after you get flashbanged by drivers who are too brain-dead to turn their fucking brights off (or you're too busy fucking with the infotainment's lack of switches to be able to stay in your lane).
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Vscode was a breath of fresh air when it released.
Microsoft teams was quite good at release. They made it progressively worse, but its V1 was pretty good. Then they added the telemetry.
Windows 7 was excellent.
Github copilot was an excellent V1. They failed to capitalize on it, conceding ground to cursor and later Claude code. But, the first release was magical.
Linkedin has stayed good-ish. For a platform that was meant to be corporate-slop by design, it has stayed inoffensive. Compared to the decline of Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook & Twitter, Linkedin is the only era-1 social network that still functions the way it is supposed to.
If we imagine a possible world where Linux was widely adopted so that all common software ran out of the box on both Linux and Windows, are there any advantages that remain for Windows 7 over a contemporary Linux distro with a straightforward GUI (say Ubuntu)?
I've spent years using both Ubuntu and windows on different occasions. Ubuntu is never as simple as it's touted to be. It has many of the same jankiness problems of windows while having odd driver & config problems that screw you over when you aren't looking.
I liked windows 7 because it was stable and there was 1 way to do most things. Windows 8 introduced the Tile UX, app store and touch apps which turned windows into 3 operating systems in a trench coat.
I dislike Ubuntu & Linux as an end user because there are a million ways to do things. That's just a million ways to break things. App store, snap, apt, flat pack....fuck off. The laptop is a tool. It should do what I need it to, reliably.
I have since moved to mac, and it correctly understands the assignment. I still miss window's workspace management, screen splitting and the explorer experience. Finder is trash. Screen management and workspaces in mac are unintuitive. But, that I can work with.
Well, I've used plenty of windows and unfortunately still have to use it for my job and I've been using Ubuntu for ~15 years now and I guess we just have very different preferences. It's not that I've never had issues with Linux that would have been solved by using Windows, but all those issues stem from people making software for Windows rather than Linux, not some inherent issue of Linux itself. I also feel like Ubuntu/Linux and just the whole suite of common opensource software around it has improved significantly in recent years. Although to be fair we were talking about Windows 7, not the current situation. Admittedly maybe my current positive experiences with Linux and negative experiences with Microsoft have biased me a little bit when looking at the past. I've always had a strong preference for basic, clean, minimalistic software, which does what I tell it to and nothing more has always made me prefer Linux over Windows. But in recent years the feature bloat and the clunky annoying UI of Microsoft - not just in the OS but in every single piece of software they make - has really been out of control. I feel zero temptation to ever switch back to Windows currently.
As for mac, I've never used it. It's probably fine, but the fact it runs on overpriced devices and tries to get you locked-in on a bunch of Apple hardware and software is enough for me to have never seriously considered using it.
I love Linux, but hard disagree here. FlatPak (or snaps or apparmor or whatever) have fixed the worst of these issues, but Linux made it needlessly hard for non-technical users to install software that wasn't part of your distro's repositories for years. There's even a video of Linus talking to a conference full of distro maintainers about how obnoxious an issue it is.
On Windows, for better or for worse, you can usually just download an executable and run it.
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After a decade of fighting config decay on one Linux distro after another I landed on nixos and have stuck here since, I think exactly because it avoids the problem you're describing.
If you don't fight the paradigm it's pushing (your system definition is explicit, you shouldn't try to make changes outside of the explicit system definition, package your projects for nix) there is only one way to perform each task and mistakes are all recoverable - no chasing down a nest of udev rules from the last time you tried to flash an arduino.
The downside is you have to learn their system definition language, though most relatively-modern LLMs can handle it well enough.
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Windows 10 was actually amazing on (pre)release -- I still have somewhere an install disk from one of the first Tech Preview versions that I wouldn't mind figuring out how to hack the time-bomb on. It ran great on old Core2 era laptops, and was generally unobtrusive -- I even put it on an original Intel (white) Imac, and it was miles ahead of Snow Leopard or whatever OS Apple decided to abandon those with.
Since then basically everything about the OS has gotten worse -- work put Win11 on my laptop, and it's not so much a new OS as a slightly shittier Win10 -- essentially just following the pattern of previous Win10 update versions.
It's like they have a competent team who builds stuff, and then hands it off to the enshittification team who fails (for instance) eliminate the remaining XP-era dialog boxes and fucks around with misfeatures and generally bogging things down.
My favorite is that with the newer settings you can only have a single instance of settings open at a time. From my old help desk and sysadmin days, it was a very regular occurrence for me to have both network settings and printers opened at the same time.
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Those are the consumer facing products, Microsoft makes the majority of their money through selling to other companies, in particular cloud services and servers like with Azure/GitHub/SQL Server/etc and Microsoft office products like Excel. Even Windows now is mostly a product for other businesses to pay.
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C#/.NET is rock solid, that's about the only one I'd give them credit for.
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Microsoft Excel is better than other spreadsheet software.
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