Hacker News Reader

Comment by HoldOnAMinute | Hacker News Reader

The trend of "non-functional software" is happening everywhere. See the recent articles about Copilot in Notepad, failing to start because you aren't signed in with your Microsoft Account.

We are in a future that nobody wanted.

View on HN

Not quite everywhere. There's a common denominator for all of those: Microsoft.

Their business is buying good products and turning them into shit, while wringing every cent they can out of the business. Always has been.

They have a grace period of about 2-4 years after acquisition where interference is minimal. Then it ramps up. How long a product can survive once the interference begins largely depends on how good senior leadership at that product company is at resisting the interference. It's a hopeless battle, the best you can do is to lose slowly.

Things don't always ramp up after 2-4 years. Sometimes MS just kills the project or company after that period of time.

See also their moves in the gaming industry.

Heh, I was working at 2 of those gaming companies when they were acquired by m$. I almost fear taking another job in the gaming industry, there seems to be some kind of bastardised version of Murphy's law that any gaming company that hires me will be acquired by ms 6 months later.

I mean, that's obviously not the case, but it's weird that it happened twice!

Very weird it happened twice! But that's a kind of a cool factoid to tell people haha.

Even with devs and publishers that don't die or are killed, they still lay hundreds off when a game is done. Then the studio limps along in pre-production mode on their next game for 4-5 years it seems like...

Maybe the only job stability in the industry is with indies, and... Nintendo?

I'd add the hugely successful studios to that list. Even after ms acquisition, to the best of my knowledge neither of the 2 studios I worked at had any layoffs.

But they boast the most sold video game in the history of videogames (Tetris a close-ish second), and most downloaded free mobile game, respectively. Each have player bases larger than the population of the country they're from!

Here's to hoping ms is hesitant to gut either!

> But they boast the most sold video game in the history of videogames (Tetris a close-ish second), and most downloaded free mobile game, respectively.

Just out of curiosity, I guessed Minecraft which tracks, and Subway Surfers respectively, rather than Candy Crush Saga. Is CCS actually the most downloaded free mobile game ever?

Call of Duty and Candy Crush I would say (if you count Farm Heroes as CCS because it's just a reskin for APAC then it's probably not even close).

Common misconception that. I also thought the hardcore gamer games would be in the top. They're not even close.

Minecraft has sold 350 million copies. Call of duty: black ops a measly 43 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

I would have said that the OP meant the Call of Duty series in general, rather than a specific instance.

Given the mobile thing mentioned also, it's most likely to be Activison (which has been acquired by Microsoft).

Hmm... My source here is internal king communications, they were very proud of it. But I left there years ago, so I guess it might've changed?

Pretty sure it was the biggest at the time at least.

I for one am shocked--SHOCKED, I say!--to learn that anything bad could happen as a result of a) putting everything in "the cloud" and b) handing control over the entire world's source code to the likes of Microsoft.

Who could have POSSIBLY foreseen any kind of dire consequences?

Nobody. Nobody at all could have seen it. Microsoft is cool now, haven't you seen VSCode? They do Open Source, they run Linux, they've joined the fold, the tiger shed its stripes.

More like a wolf in sheep clothing

Ironically they are enshitifying vscode too. Even products them make themselves can’t survive long.

You're obviously being sarcastic, but for the longest time the dominant position of a huge chunk of HN (and the tech world in general) has been that the cloud is the answer to any problem, and that anything deviating from it is either impossible, too expensive or too stupid.

After a generation of indoctrinated people, Microsoft (or any FAANG really) can't even afford to do anything differently.

For this entire time, my position has been that the people trying to put everything in the cloud were idiots who would come to regret this. Thus explaining my sarcasm. It's time to fire back with both barrels at the dumbasses who rolled their eyes and said I was stupid, wrong, had no idea what I was talking about, blah blah blah. (Same shit they always say about every word that comes out of my mouth. So tiring.)

Laughs in Linux

I remember how crazy Skype originally was.

At my first company we used Skype to communicate with each other. Mostly chats and files.

One day our internet cable to the office got cut by someone. Well, we didn't realize that for some time, because Skype just continued to work without Internet. It was like a miracle. It was unique software, there's nothing like it even today.

I think that the first thing Microsoft did after they bought Skype is making Internet mandatory, probably to spy on all chats.

> We are in a future that nobody wanted.

some people wanted this future and put in untold amount of money to make it happen. Hint: one of them is a rabid Tolkien fan.

Rent seekers paradise (ft copilot)

It’s just feudal with Capital.

the irony of Tolkien being associated with a techno-dystopia makes me nauseous

    Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.

    Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.

Indeed, a theme throughout his works to the point of directly saying it was to beware things that are of a deeper art than you possess.

He was also pretty openly anti-industrialism in the Victorian tradition of guys like John Ruskin and William Morris.

Who is it?

Peter Thiel.

Evil incarnate and the next president of the United States you've never heard of. Vance is his sock puppet, he was chosen because he is guaranteed not to have a single independent thought so when Trump croaks Thiel will be the president in all but name.

It was also he who willed OpenAI to be in order to help destroying American democracy.

IDK what you're smoking, but he was born in Germany so can't be the next potus.

> IDK what you're smoking

Or maybe it's a problem with your English? (Note: I'm being offensive just because you are :-) ).

> when Trump croaks Thiel will be the president in all but name.

This means that he will have the power, but not the title.

Ok I get it, sorry bout that and thanks for the laugh!

I can’t follow OpenAI as a ploy to destroy democracy when he already has Palantir.

Fascism can only thrive in an alternate reality and LLMs are excellent at producing such propaganda on an industrial scale. Accordingly, the political right uses it for that purpose much more and conservatives are much more receptive to it, too.

https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcpy.1461

https://arxiv.org/html/2512.13915

This thread has complaints about software coming from the same supplier both degrading.

The person(s) who wanted this want Azure to get bigger and have prioritized Azure over Windows and Office, and their share price has been growing handsomely.

‘Microslop’, perhaps, but their other nickname has a $ in it for a reason.

MS PM's wanted it, got their OKR's OK'd, got their bonuses, and moved on.

> We are in a future that nobody wanted.

Nor deserved.

Then why is it the future we have?

It was a complete accident. Nobody could have foreseen it. We are currently experiencing the sudden discovery that Microsoft is an evil corporation and maybe putting everything in the cloud wasn't the best move after all.

> Sudden discovery

Sudden for 15-years old's only.

Some people, sure. I never thought that putting everything in the cloud is the best move, but I guess N=1.

In fact I was shocked to see that so many allegedly tech-literate people were so blindly pro-cloud (and they still are).

Let’s just say there are a couple of guys, who are up to no good. And they started making trouble in our neighborhood.

jokes aside it’s all because of hyper financial engineering. Every dollar every little cent must be maximized. Every process must be exploited and monetized, and there are a small group of people who are essentially driving all this all across the world in every industry.

>small group of people who are essentially driving all this all across the world in every industry.

The federal reserve?

Laughs in my own Linux distro

Care to elaborate? How do you deal with the constant churn?

What constant churn? Nothing changes on my system unless I desire it to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com