Dunkey has a great overview of how Microsoft handles studios/IP: https://youtu.be/GWrcUh2GuPQ

For the last decade they acquire studios/IP’s, let them languish, then without warning strip them for parts. Make a successful game? Doesn’t matter, you’re all fired. Y’all want to make a game? Sure! We can even promote it! 12-18mo of no news after an announcement ah dang guys we were so hyped but we’re pulling the plug.

It is baffling how many studios they own and yet they have almost no exclusives/big cross platform hits developed for the Xbox this generation.

> There's no point to keep the IP of games that are shuttered.

Any movie studio that rebooted a franchise after a decade or two of dormancy would beg to differ

I don't think MS considered any of this. For example there were situations were they had a meeting giving green light one day, and cancelled the next.

Seemly what happened is that MS high-level decision makers, concluded that MS need a lot of cash for AI research, and decided to mass-close studios and cancel games with little verification, just go firing people until the cash liberated for AI is enough, doesn't matter if those people gave even greater revenue recently.

> why not just sell them back to their staff/former owner?

Saving corporate face

I assume most Americans don't run into the CSV hell that other countries do. In my current country, whether CSVs open as a comma-separated or semi-colon seperated document depends on whether the OS is set to use a , or a . for decimal numbers. It's absolutely annoying.

OMG--we had a worfklow where less-techy folks were supposed to edit a csv, then check it in to github, which would kick off a whole process automatically for them. I kid you not--anyone who edited the csv in Excel would eff the whole file up every single time! They just needed a text editor, which we told them to use, and the changes were literally simple, either editing an existing entry or adding a new entry. Nope, these college educated "IT" workers could not handle it! We ended up having to scrap the entire automation workflow because the employees were simply too dumb to use a text editor and github.

CSV is data only. Excel handles way more than that. XLSX is the preferred file format because it's compressed XML that can hold all kinds of things.

Also, CSVs seem to open just fine on my Excel. If it's not formatted with a standard delimiter or isn't handing quoted strings the proper way, sure maybe the data wizard is needed.

Excel is terrible in a lot of aspects, but CSVs seem to be something it handles as well as anything else in my experience.

> Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard.

Ofc you do. In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.

Much like iOS/Android & the Web killed MSFTs stranglehold on OSes, google docs & markdown killed MSFT office's stranglehold on office. So many businesses are google doc shops, vast majority of schools are google docs, vast majority of casual document usage is google docs and google docs is open-enough with it's export formats.

Excel at this point is specialist software, like adobe photoshop. Everything else is 'good enough'.

That's being charitable to OSS office packages' UX.

Some wounds are self-inflicted, and open source has a well-known last-20%-polish problem that's especially painful in mass-user scenarios like office software.

OOo wasting the 00s with a circa-90s UI (and Oracle being assholes) is equally responsible for MS Office's continued popularity in enterprise.

Related

Cognitive Style of Powerpoint - Edward Tufte

http://makingdatatalk.com/Lecture01/Reading/Tufte-TheCogniti...

I actively prefer Libre Office.

Yes, Excel is probably a lot better if you use English setup and advanced functions.

For me,

- not having to use Norwegian for formulas (my work machine has Norwegian setup and Excel insists on using Norwegian formulas)

and

- not having it trying to find something it can misinterpret as a date, preferably some random place in a list of thousands of items

makes it worth it.

What you fail to realize is that (nearly) everything you think of as a flaw here is a key feature.

Excel allows norm(al users)ies to scale Mt Impossible from the bottom where they don't care about types, or relationships, and don't want to (because it's too abstract). They want to solve a problem. So they start with simple data given meaning by physical space, and work up from there.

It's genius. It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.

Everything you say is not wrong. But despite being so horrible, the business world still runs on excel. Finance, underwriting, accounting, engineering tools, fantasy football leagues… Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs. It’s timeless and hated by many for valid reasons, but its impact is vast.

I would dare to say that all business apps start as an Excel sheet (or Google Sheet) and after the usefulness of data collection and data arrangement/presentation is validated (often long after the usefulness is validated) they eventually become a full-fledged business web app.

And as a casual Excel user (to get data from CSV, remove some rows, move few things around, etc.) it isn't even great. You can't open two files with the same name because Excel seems to have some "global state" between windows; to the point where you might be hitting Control+Z to undo some changes, and it's undoing stuff on the other spreadsheet without you noticing.

Doing something as "simple" as a LEFT JOIN of data requires having two separate documents (or one, but saved on your system), open them in the Power Query editor (if it's the same document you do it twice, once per table) which creates two "queries", and then you can either use one to join against the other, or create a third one "joining" them. In the end, you get three new sheets on your docs: the original tables and the merged one.

Then there's the annoyances: if you use Excel in English (US at least), apparently you get a CSV separated by actual commas "," (ASCII 0x2C) but using it in Spanish (Spain) you get it separated by semicolons ";" because commas actually separate number decimals. Meaning whenever I build a program that parses/writes CSV, I need to consider the chance it's using semicolons and commas instead of commas and dots. Not that it's non-standard: CSV doesn't specify a delimiter, but you could stick to the same format everywhere, or give an option to customise, or create "Tab-Separated Values" (essentially CSV with tabs separating values).

Another one is formulae, that also change based on language, and their arguments separator also changes. In en_US you'd use `=SUBTOTAL(109,B2:B7)` while in Spanish it's `=SUBTOTALES(109;B2:B97` (plural instead of singular, and semicolon instead of comma). Meaning any guide, documentation or tutorial in English requires me having to "guess" how the function is translated, and manually changing commas to semicolons.

With all this, I mean to say: Excel isn't even that great for the "normal" user. Or perhaps I'm too "power user" for this and just lazy enough to bother with it instead of using "proper" tools like Python or R.

If pleebs can understand it, surely it’s not as foul as you state.

Nonetheless i hear your argument. I feel that python is the same abomination of the programming world. Yet it flourishes and is even loved.

Haveth we stockholm syndrome to our own garbage tools?

Apple barely does it and only for their products.

With the recent notable exception of the F1 movie advertisement that arrived as a notification from the Wallet app. https://daringfireball.net/2025/06/more_on_apples_trust-erod...

I disabled Wallet notifications immediately :-(

>Apple barely does it and only for their products

And U2

Apple pushes their products often on iOS and many of them can't ve turned off or can't be turned off easily.

So you have notifications that you can only get rid of by engaging with the Apple ads.

News app is part of the OS image and littered with ads. I just got an ad in Settings for the month to month Applecare because mine is expiring. Took a few tries of declining to get the badge on Settings to go away.

A few times over the years Ubuntu included Amazon ads in the OS. Each time, afaik, the community reacted angrily and it didn't last.

Enabling Cambridge Analytica[0] alone ranks Meta far worse than Amazon. Amazon has done nothing remotely close to necessitating abandoning their own brand AFAIK.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

Project Nimbus is Amazon and Google together. Meta was early on the genocidal train, in e.g. Myanmar and Ethiopia, as well as adjacent to the 'regime change' obsession of usian elites.

Arguably they're all atrocious due to effects on environment and labour rights.

They merged with DoubleClick¹, an advertising company. The combined company was about twice the size of the old google so it severely diluted their ranks with a huge cohort of the worst kinds of MBAs: Advertising & Marketing executives.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick

Nothing fundamentally changed. The only real difference is they hit that inevitable point for any business that they had to start making money. They weren't evil then and they aren't now. They're a business, and they are responding to market demand for free to consumer products paid for by advertisement. What nobody on HN wants to admit is that the vast majority of people would rather have that than pay for their software in dollars. People love to complain about the Google panopticon but aren't willing to grapple with the fact that it has tremendous benefits too.

> Google seemed so great in the beginning.

It's almost like they were good at marketing.

Adobe would be far more evil if they weren't so bad at making software. I think their intentions and business practices are clearly equal to or more evil than Apple, they just don't have nearly the scale and market reach that Apple has.

> Does google collect more information than Apple

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261

Yes. Yes they do. Collecting data is most of the point of Google apps/services/devices.

Google then aggregate all that data in the cloud, whereas even if Apple do collect data it’s almost never sent to the cloud for cross-analysis, it’s almost always on-device and therefore private.

DRM is probably something that people take issue with, and it's probably harder to buy physical media that you "own" more than streaming services.

Cancelling popular shows in the second season because it makes marginally more money to do that

Ads in the OS? That isn’t Microsoft’s idea, or even Apple’s (they have places they do it too). No, that was popularized by the mobile OS made by an ad company, Android.

Ubuntu had ads in the terminal in 2022: https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-plac...

Unless you're going to call letting users know they have access to onedrive for free an "ad", Microsoft didn't do anything until Windows 11 in 2024.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-pushes-start-menu-ads-t...

But ... they literally did that here? I don't think it's malicious in this case. In fact I think they're giving away genuinely useful tools here with no obvious downsides to their use.

But I do think it qualifies.

Bit like the example of Martin Luther King being a criminal.

And Windows, that one obscure product from Microsoft that people here keep forgetting about.

Well, for starters: Linux is of Finnish origin.

Linus Torvalds might be a U.S. citizen today, but during the first years of Linux he was certainly not thinking U.S. values and that someday his biggest userbase would be there.

> Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-American:

Yeah, typical Ballmer-era.

You really don't. It just requires messing with some group policy and settings. I did this 5-10 years ago and haven't had to really mess with it much since. I've never used an OS that did not require some effort to get in a state I like.

You can create an unattended answer file to skip the MSFT account.

https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

> insufferable Apple Walled Garden don’t force you into all of this shit

No, but they will lock you out of your account if you have a long gone debit card on there that you don't remember the numbers for or access to that school email your uni yanked back.

I wonder how many college kids got locked out of their iTunes account permanently after they graduated.

Install, maybe. Configure? Maybe not.

Glove80 is a lot nicer in several ways if you're ok with the Chocs

It is crazy how they managed the bungle the Xbox One launch at just the right time to cause this cascade of issues over a decade later. It doesn't help that MS haven't had a huge AAA exclusive title in a very long time. Now that they have started cutting in hard on their game dev teams, they may end up more like the Microsoft Studios before Xbox was a thing.

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I'll give you that the laptops models fare better, I said as much already I think, but I feel you're overselling the support for the form factor most people associate with the Surface brand:

The 5G version of the Surface Pro 10 (second to last) is completely unusable, the SP8-10 need a kernel fork just for keyboard and touchpad (!), SP4-10 need it for the touchscreen (SP4 is 2015), and the cameras won't work at all since SP7 (2019).

Don't get me wrong, I still run Linux on my devices and would be willing to tinker with custom kernels if certain hardware were worth it. I just can't consider this "runs perfectly fine".

Also no one cares about it positive or negative because it’s such a nothing burger. No one even thinks apple thought it would be big, it was an experiment that’s all.

Apple and Google directly, No.

I actively invest my personal income to organizations / businesses that are working to provide viable alternative. All are fruitful in reducing the barrier to a viable product. From improving hard-ware design to getting software in a stable state. Currently waiting on a phone from EU from a company on their attempt.

Went with a Farirphone 4 running /e/OS/. Yes, /e/OS/ is based on AOSP. This phone has a high chance of full postmarketos support. It is the closet from being disconnected from Google that I find to be stable. Postmarketos would allow for a quick jump.

In the mean time, still investing in companies and organizations that don't want to help Google in the smartphone market. It is a long-term investment.

Me and many people don't.

Just laptop is good enough. Although currently switched back to apple silicon ATM for LLM, price and convince reasons, and as soonest linux on Apple Silicon reach some maturity, will switch over completely.

However not using a smartphone is probably good for one's mental and physical healthy now days. It is understandable if your work require you to have one, but if I'm not getting paid, why would I even get a smartphone?

Back in the 80's there are investment people managing billions dollars and deals over pen paper and a land line!

Because antitrust enforcement has been so lax, we only have two options.

The DOJ/FTC/EU/ASEAN/etc. need to force a breakup of first party app stores, first party payment, first party web browser, and first party messaging. They also really need to require web installs without hidden menus and scare walls.

We'll see a proliferation of offerings if that happens.

Never had issues with other ARM chips other than the Apple co-designed ones.

Oh, and if you have problems running Linux on Macs... That isn't Linux's fault.

Linux works fine on ARM devices. The problem is lack of good (non-Apple) ARM devices, not Linux.

"Apple silicon?" Man, how well does OSX run on a raspberry pi? Clearly it's the inferior OS. /s