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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.
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.
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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