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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.
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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