IMO there's an even more real story at the heart of this idea than stratechery's predictable, banal attempt to compare Microsoft and Apple's competing visions of the future, and its part of why I've become so bored of stratechery's articles lately. He glances against that Microsoft video, recognizes that the video does a horrible job of communicating their vision, and then carries water for Microsoft by working overtime clarifying their vision for them; instead of doing the obvious and totally reasonable thing of asking: Why the fuck is that video so incomprehensible? Microsoft used to be pretty good at aligning themselves and their customers around a shared vision of their future, but since the advent of AI the company has seemed more-and-more adrift at sea without a bearing.

Much more needs to be said and discussed about this; in comparison, Siri AI is boring and predictable. Siri AI is Apple being Classic Apple: shipping a solid, decent product that works as advertised and isn't that surprising. That's Apple. They lost their bearing as well for a couple years, but they re-found it. Good on them. Meanwhile Microsoft is in meltdown mode behind them shrieking buzzwords and everyone is pretending that everything is fine because they're microsoft, they'll figure it out.

lol thats actually funny and kinda spot on. some of my coworkers regularly move goal posts to double down on windows in the face of microsoft doing absurdly hostile shit and it feels like watching some kinda stockholm syndrome. i sort of get it like many i was born and raised in a windows computer household and it wasnt until i dunno 7 years ago or so i started dinking with other stuff, i think if i try to remember hard enough there was some perceived inner feelings of tribalism there. but really once you start getting proficient in another OS it's hard to make the case for windows, windows just feels kinda dirty.

so yeah, it's interesting to watch microsoft pitch a piece of hardware or something, see a couple coworkers gawk at it, sometimes buy it, only to have it repeatedly turn into vaporware rarely with a refresh from microsoft or to end up in another line of products thats sunset forever. microsoft appreciates their business tho, i'm sure. i just wish they could see how funny their relentless hope looks from the outside that microsoft might someday reign supreme and be everyones computer sweetheart again. i had a coworker actually express frustration because we didn't select the microsoft fabric solution or whatever for a datalake. took a hot minute to just get him to relent on trying to only champion microsoft services and products at every corner it's wild to me that someone should have so much allegience to a massive tech company. especially one that is not just hostile to it's users but the industry at large, microsoft has kinda always been a hostile part of the computing history story.