Is anyone else driven into a frothing rage by the peculiar use of “experiences” found in such places as a software company declaring a “Experiences & Devices” division? Something about it makes my skin crawl.
That pet peeves aside; I honestly am finding MS’ decline rather depressing, and that’s coming from someone who was never exactly an enthusiast.
‘Classic’ Microsoft was less tasteful than Apple(though substantially more accessible); and was perfectly willing to be a dick when it thought it had the market power to do so; but their heyday was also(in no small part because of their efforts, in some places because of people resisting them as hard as possible) perhaps the high-water mark for general-purpose computers(heavily standardized because all the wintels had to run Windows or they were basically unfit for purpose) running software that was locally functional and, even when the shrinkwrap said ‘licensed not sold’, yours until you decided to upgrade.
Microsoft was sort of the IBM Lite of personal computers; and so hardly a sympathetic figure; but their decline isn’t primarily about a competitor doing what they did better, or cheaper, or with more software freedom, or any combination of those things: it’s about the entire PC market as we used to know it foundering in a sea of cryptographically crippled consumption appliances (and even the ones without locked bootloaders tend to be such a moving target that you are lucky to have a port available; much less be able to install from the same media on a wide selection of them) and ‘cloud’ subscription and surveillance services.
I don’t look back fondly on Microsoft’s old days because Microsoft was any good; but because those were the days when cuecats were a crude laughingstock, with ambitions of precise consumer surveillance stymied by being clumsy nonsense; not the days of everybody and their competitor having a voice assistant that is basically the apotheosis of the cuecat with text to speech capabilities.
Microsoft’s offerings were not the best way to experience that time(expect for Wintendo purposes, that was pretty fun); but the changes that caught them off guard have substantially been grim and sad(though admittedly with higher spec numbers for lower prices); and whether they succumb or succeed in embracing these trends themselves(Cortana knows they are certainly trying…) it won’t be a pleasant change.
