What's interesting to me is how many people went like 'Oh, Satya really gets open source, this time it will be different'.
What it is, is purely incompetence. Revolving door of executives forcing shit ideas because they need to assert control.
Big Tech has become a space led by lizard brained nepo babies who have nothing to contribute to the world, but think they're entitled to it all.
Just as with politics, the only way to get them to do what’s in our best interest is to make them come to the conclusion that they’ll risk losing money (or status or power) if they don’t.
Did people honestly believe Microsoft is cool. I'm not so sure. The company has access to a large amount of surveillance data about computer users, it understands what it can and cannot get away with and actively manages its online reputation through whatever means necessary
Time will show the wiser
With Office, well, your employer is paying for it, so you have no say in it anyway.
It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this?
This is why I say, marketing driven development is garbage.
Capitalism (and it's demands of the market) at its finest.
So in this context, the "theoretical fact" as you put it, is relevant.
More generally, I would argue that such things are relevant because we're all using words to communicate, and it helps a great deal if we all understand what those words and phrases actually mean.
When it comes to communicating, the meaning of a word is how it is used in practice. Use creates meaning. In practice, capitalism means ownership by investors. In the world that exists, the Capitalist Class is the Investor Class, and the dynamics created by this reality have caused non-hypothetical products to be ruined time and again.
Proprietorships and partnerships where the management is also the owner(s) are an older economic system that predates the innovations of modern capitalism. Even businesses that begin this way commonly seek investment capital, get bought out or go public. The ones that don't are considered stable and therefore uninteresting, such as lawyers, but private equity will eventually gobble them up too.
If you look at the products that have avoided enshitification, they are the ones that have avoided or subjugated investors.
Capitalism is the reason the internet sucks. If you don't agree, think about it longer and consider if it might actually be true.
Gee, I dunno, maybe state sponsored research?
The people who invented the internet came from all over the world. They worked at places as varied as the French government-sponsored computer network Cyclades, England’s National Physical Laboratory, the University of Hawaii and Xerox. But the mothership was the US defense department’s lavishly funded research arm, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) – which later changed its name to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) – and its many contractors. Without Arpa, the internet wouldn’t exist.
Because we're special. Full stop. I talked like this when I was a teen. "How are you gonna run your computers if you destroy us" (because we were the only people who could make software and computers).
> get to find out what these envious, spiteful people will spawn if they manage to destroy the system that has produced more wealth and prosperity than any other invented by man.
We generated a lot of wealth via slavery. Do you get it? The USA has exploited and HARMED other countries. If you're unaware, research it. Did your clothes become cheap because workers in Indonesia got a fair paywage similar to your loved ones? Or were people paid almost nothing to finance your lifestyle.
Oh, also the countries who hate a bully are envious and spiteful. It has nothing to do with throwing our weight around to eliminate and install autocrats because we love democracy and freedom.
At some point, a business should shift from growth state to a steady state. The idea that businesses have to grow forever is a sad consequence to how we fund companies.
The only thing that grows forever unchecked is cancer.
I was on a department-wide call; many, many years ago. The person talking was telling us how well we were doing and how we needed to grow. At the end, they asked if there were any questions (which, thinking back, seems odd given the size of the meeting, but.. it was a long time ago). I asked them "Why? Why do we need to grow? We're doing a good job at our core business. We're making money doing it. Why do we need to expand; specifically expand our offerings into something that _isn't_ our core".
My question didn't get answered. But it _is_ a valid one, imo.
One famous example is See's Candy, which Warren Buffet famously discussed in one of his newsletters. See's is a mature company with zero mandate to grow. It turns the profits over to Berkshire and Berkshire uses that to invest in other companies.
The economy as a whole keeps growing because human desires and ingenuity are unlimited. But a specific firm reaches its natural limit, at which point it turns into a cashflow machine to generate dividends for owners.
The problem you are facing is that Management does not want to acknowledge that it's time for them to start paying out dividends and leave growth alone, because that would be an admission that the profits of the firm are best invested by some other firm, and not by them.
It is all about management ego, in not recognizing their limitations, and then destroying the core company as they invest in areas where they can't compete. Shareholders and boards need to replace management when this happens, but it is hard to do because Management keeps insisting that they can earn an above average return if they keep the money rather than returning it to shareholders. And people love to hear stories of above average returns.
>Windows ultimately sucks
I actually want a generalized tool for my OS, a specialized OS sounds like a pain in the ass.
Not specialize in the sense of "here's your civil engineering operating system, which is different from your structural engineering operating system, and neither bear any similarity to your gaming operating system".
A long time ago, a scorpion came to the edge of a great river. Not being a good swimmer, it asked a nearby frog if it might get a ride across.
The frog eyed the scorpion warily. “I’ve heard of your kind. I see the stinger you hide behind your back. I wish I could help you, but I cannot risk it.”
“Why would I sting you?” the scorpion reasoned. “If you die, we would both drown.”
The frog was convinced. It let the scorpion climb atop its back, then began to swim across the great river. But when they were halfway across, the scorpion suddenly stung the frog.
As the poison spread through his body, the frog cried out, “Why did you sting me? You have killed us both!”
The scorpion replied, “I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.”
Microsoft just can't help it that they end up destroying the goodwill they inherit when they buy a property. It is in their nature.
Are we living in the same world? GitHub is not ruined at all, it still works great (as in it’s completely usable), it’s still where 99% of open source projects are hosted, and it’s still a no brainer to use it for public or private repos (having used Gitlab extensively, GitHub is just so much more user friendly). There is more competition, which is good, but GitHub is still the default option for open source by a long margin
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131406 "Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487584 "GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037365 "The GitHub website is slow on Safari"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 "Why is GitHub UI getting slower?"
GH notification search doesn't search the title or description of the notifications. https://docs.github.com/en/subscriptions-and-notifications/r...
GH cannot search code that exists in non-default branches. Have fun responding to the next supply chain compromise in any org that has repos with multiple supported branches.
It no longer feels like a polished product.
microsoft, you suck at aquisitions.
stop shoehorning copilot into everything. holy hell, stop it. just stop. please. no customers ask for this. none. zero open source developers ask for anything like this, ever. stop it. stop. holy moly, stop. i mean it. but you won't stop because you don't understand why we don't want it, because you suck at acquisitions.
stop usurping github culture and replacing it with microsoft culture. you know what happens when microsoft culture arrives: all of the things that people love about your company vaporize almost immediately. you dorks don't understand this, though, because you suck at acquisitions, so this'll never change.
stop letting people with MBAs make decisions. this is the big one. people with MBAs know enough to be catastrophically dangerous, and they don't know enough to know if what they're doing will drive people away. MBAs lose all respect for customers and only see things in terms of value. MBAs do not see customers as valuable, they only see product as value. MBAs are insane. Fire the fucking MBAs and get some older engineers who do not have MBAs to assemble teams to help them pick product direction and product features. This is obvious to everyone except you dummies because you dummies suck at acquisitions.
you CAN keep the "GitHub" brand, and the clout, but you must stop doing everything you started doing since you acquired them. and I do mean that. you must let GitHub culture return. GitHub will die a slow, painful death if you do not. It will live on a bit longer as the git host of choice for some enterprises, but it will not last very long in that form. This is obvious to everyone except you because you suck at acquisitions.
you look at your shiny new pet and you grab it and you dash its head against the concrete wall until you see its eyes poking out and then you cry because it's dead, not understanding that it was you who killed it. you only wanted to make it better! but you didn't make it better, did you? you killed it. as you always do.
you strip everything that customers love out of these companies and you crush everything that the employees love about the companies with extreme efficiency because you don't fucking respect these things. you don't even know that you SHOULD respect these things, because knowing that requires that the MBAs be taken away from the acquisitions steering wheel and be permanently banned from the company. you are filled with cancerous MBA decision making and those MBAs will never admit it to you, because they are the engine behind these acquisitions you fucking suck at.
Happens almost every time.
Profit has a tendency to fall over time. A growing company can escape this for awhile by expanding their marketshare or expanding into new products. Eventually the only way to head this off is by raising prices and cutting costs.
Entshittification is fundamental to our system.
Consider this too: the people who are making decisions about Github's future have no investment in it's long term success. They're VPs, directors, managers and ICs who are simply trying to get promoted and get their bonuses by squeezing out short-term revenue. They'll be long gone before it all goes to shit.
It's almost like we have a distortion based on the workers' relationship to the means of production.
Of course, MS every once in a while says that it makes a lot of money, but they don't really say how much is costs to keep it up. Their free tiers are still very generous, even they are buggy as hell - I can't imagine that the profit it makes even dents MS' bottom line (assuming it's not in the red). But at the end of the day the model training is done.
I guess Github doesn't have a lot of use anymore, beside having a lot of users that you can use to experiment with such shenanigans to see what can you get away with.
So this logic doesn’t pass the smell test to me.
EDIT: seems there was only a year in between them buying GH (2018) and investing in OpenAI (2019). So _maybe_ they had that foresight.
I think this gets the timeline wrong. Microsoft acquired GH in 2018 and started the partnership with OpenAI in summer 2019.
I'm sure there was some strategy to extract value from it that wouldn't serve its users but I think OpenAI was not initially meant to be the beneficiary.
But your timeline is off, however. Their partnership started in 2016[1]. In 2019 MS started to invest publicly in OpenAI - but by then they have had some history.
To me, this is at least suspicious. Granted, I have no hard proof.
[1]: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/11/15/advancing-ambiti...
can we please blaming randos.