Random trivia: there was also a dog
And a wizard, genie, cat, robot and more
I kinda got sucked into that Clippy thing for a while then took a moment to think about like everyone.
Kinda cringe, to adopt anything coming from microsoft for a pro ownership movement.
I agree 100% with the cause but we could go with any other resistance symbol that could mean actually something.
Well, to be fair, it’s not utilizing Microsoft as a mascot, but the era of buying and owning and keeping, as opposed to the current era of renting forever.
Back then, you bought a computer and it came with the programs you needed and they were yours until you got rid of the computer. Then they were the property of whomever got the computer next.
That’s what people are calling for. Which is depressing in and of itself because it’s so little to ask for. They’re the hand that’s starving and robbing us. We shouldn’t be asking for them to stop robbing us, we should be taking the hand and using it to distribute to all who need.
And we, working class traitors that we are, would have helped it.
Random trivia: The clippy movement is not saying that Microsoft was noble. It’s saying we need to go back to the 90s version is the internet.
new meta: putting “random trivia:” before your contrarian comments
I kinda miss the days when computers and the Internet were so slow that you would notice if something else than what you were running was happening. Data logger calling home on my 28k modem would have been noticed right away. Trying to screenshot my pc screen every time I type or click, no way I could miss that. Scanning my HDD would lock it down so much I would have been stupid not to notice.
Move out to a rural area were our speeds are mind-numbingly slow and you can still experience the phenomenon you describe. Only problem is now a days there isn’t much you can do about it if forced to use Windows.
You used to be able to tell what every process was doing on your computer. Nowadays there are so many processes running and they all have tons of child processes that you can’t tell what is doing what.
And they have so much processing horsepower anymore, things that weren’t conceivable just happen and there’s no easy way to disable them, like how Macs run
mediaanalysisd(which you can at least see, but disabling will break OS updates) that scrape every image file on your computer and OCR/categorize them and tag them, iPhones/iPads do too, and you can’t even find or see the running process let alone kill it.So every piece of media on your computer/phone just gets analyzed without your consent. Sure, maybe it is neat that you can search for a word that was in an image and that image comes up, but it would be nice if users of devices were allowed to choose what is/is not indexed.
Its like you’re a passenger on your tools anymore, rather than the driver.
And media analysis is like the least creepy shit Apple does. They also analyse your social networks (based on who you interact with using Apple services), and the database where they store that shit has labels for eg. political affiliations etc. (can’t remember off-hand which of the many many Apple spyware dbs it was. One of the sqlite databases under
~/Libraryin any case. Might have been the appropriately namedIntelligencePlatformdatabases, but I’m too lazy to check right now)
Even on Linux where it’s easy to find what any running service does, the are so many
I don’t think they would’ve, they already had the market, and the attitude about privacy was very different back then
This also was before late-stage capital converted to endgame capitalism, back then they wanted to protect the cash cow. They cared about customer loyalty, because they cared about future revenue
Now? Companies are dismantling themselves for one more good quarter
Companies are dismantling themselves for one more good quarter
Any example of this?
Intel.
Pretty sure Intel is still alive and their problems are systematic from many years ago when AMD released Bulldozer and Intel decided it can stop innovating. So don’t think they fit here.
They’re failing because they hired a string of accountants as CEOs. Undoubtedly they conceded to Wall St pressure to sacrifice research and engineering funding to goose short-term profits. 4 of those and there’s no recovery from that nose dive.
Tomato tomato.Undoubtedly they conceded to Wall St pressure to sacrifice research and engineering funding to goose short-term profits
That’s an interesting statement. So let’s go like 15 years ago. What short-term profits were they pursuing? And how can you call them short-term when those profits lasted for so long?
What do you think laying off your workforce does? These are the people who produce the things that make money
For a clear cut example, Microsoft and gaming. They lay off entire studios the moment they release a hit
It costs like 18 months+ of salary to replace a role like that, and you’ll have to pay them more. It’ll make you a bit more money next quarter… But in 2-5 years when there’s no new game?
Microsoft is doing pretty well so I wouldn’t call it “dismantling”, it seems to be working for them.
Microsoft is dismantling itself to keep “doing well”. That’s my point
Their gaming division keeps acquiring and killing game studios. They’re killing off consoles, instead they’re going to sell prebuilds running windows. They’re scaling it all way back and releasing their exclusives, letting steam run the infrastructure, and milking all of their current IP, but not really making more
They’ve ended support for a ton of different product lines. Azure is a mess. Their desktop market share is falling too.
They’re all in on AI at this point, literally every tool they offer has it now. It’s not even opt in, it doesn’t require an account anymore… They’re desperate to inflate the numbers so they can project growth a little longer
What do you think happens when you continuously lay off your workforce and kill projects? When you stop actually doing things, and run a company based on speculation?
Eventually, the bubble pops.
Microsoft for 8 years now is a company that sells Linux and opensource.
Non of their divisions you mentioned were profitable for many years now(especially Windows), just look at their yearly reports. Only logical to get rid of them. Don’t agree with your Azure statement, don’t mind me, numbers don’t agree with it.
I don’t get why you wrote so much about gaming, Microsoft never was a gaming company. And frankly nothing important for gamers was lost with them buying those empty shells of game developer companies, then shutting them down.
I can agree on the AI hype especially with recent github news. But those are recent, we’ll have to see if that was bad or good decision.
I don’t know how else to explain it to you. Microsoft is doing well on paper
These unprofitable divisions? This is the result of the layoffs. This is what happens when you stop doing the thing, and you start living in speculation land
Azure is a mess propped up by AI. The numbers don’t account for shuffling money around. It’s related to why every Microsoft product has ai shoved into it
And I’m keep bringing up gaming because their gaming division is the most egregious example of what I’m talking about. They’re the third largest game publisher, and they’ve played a huge part killing AAA gaming. And in doing so, they’ve killed their own revenue stream
Random trivia: The clippy 3D animations were created by Deadpool director Tim Miller (of Blur Studio).
Microsoft sees Clippy everywhere: Oh they must really like him, let’s make him our new AI mascot!
I remember struggling with the idea that all companies care more about the bottom line than anything else. People are good and care about good things. How can companies who are made of people always cause problems? There must be at least one good company out there, right?
It’s only after I spent some time in the world that I figured out that money really messes with things. It pressures companies to do whatever they can get away with. It separates the people who run the companies from the bad outcomes that company creates.
And at the end of the day everyone needs to make a choice. Live and participate in a system that causes problems, or die. I chose to live and I don’t blame anyone else for choosing to live.
Here’s the thing… Once an organization grows to a certain point, it takes on a mind of it’s own.
Decision making becomes fragmented. Details are lost between the decision and the decision maker
It’s impossible to manage 100, let alone 1000 people directly, so metrics creep in as a way to reward good performance (and maybe punish low performance).
And because we’re a hierarchial society, we further group into divisions and teams. The people who get the best metrics out of their teams are more likely to move up, the bad managers are more likely to be towards the bottom. And honestly, good lower management is mostly taking care of your people
So you’re more likely to get managers who don’t have the integrity to take a firm stand, so maybe when a worker realizes “oh shit, were leaking into the groundwater” it gets watered down to “we found a leak, but it won’t impact production” before it gets up to someone who could authorize a shutdown and fix
It’s possible for a company to do horrible things without any bad actors, and we do have plenty of bad actors around.
It’s possible to fight against this sort of thing through culture or policy, but the natural inclination is always going to maximize the metrics at any cost
Companies, especially larger ones, abstract away human responsibility and ethics from the decision-making process, making it easier for people to do bad things.
“We do this for the company!”
Plus, an individual’s ability to live being tied to the continued success of said company doesn’t help things either.
“If I speak out, I’m not a ‘team player’. And those people get fired.”
There’s also diffusing responsibility across the organization. It’s easy to achieve unethical things, when the individual’s part of the job hardly seems “bad” at all.
At least in the US, companies have a legal fiduciary duty to protect their investors interests above all else.
A change made through court cases in the mid-century. Basically the result of a neoliberal ideological campaign that first normalized the feduciary duty concept in the business world before forcing it on board rooms through the justice system. Before that, boards of companies could make decisions on ethical grounds and not just fiscal grounds. Today, that precedent has transformed boardrooms into terrifying financial automatons.
The way laws and bylaws describe the jobs of CEOs and CFOs, the most qualified people to do those jobs are sociopaths. Empathy is practically a disqualifying personality trait.
People are good and care about good things.
We have trouble understanding what’s going on because the average person can’t comprehend the levels of greed that modern Wall St capitalism selects for.
Just like the average person cannot comprehend a million years, the average person can’t appreciate the level of avarice some of our rich and powerful operate at. Only a few of us have interacted with people that broken.
There a tons of good people and good businesses out there. They are currently victims to levels of avarice we can’t bring ourselves to admit exists.The love of money is the root of all evil.
Remember that one time Jesus lost his cool? He made a whip and went H.A.M. on some crypto bros in the temple.
So yeah….
Thank you for sharing analognowhere content
I guess not many people remember that Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violations against Netscape (which effectively destroyed that command).
Microsoft nowadays is one of the evil companies. Microsoft back in the day was the evil company.
What about Monsanto (Roundup) and Philip-Morris (lol)? You could probably include Dole. As well as the East India Company.
Fair point. Has meant IT companies.
The video that started this clippy campaign mentioned that. The message is that those sort of transgressions seem so minor compared to what companies bot only do, but get away with now
Clippy was hated at the time, but an annoying useless assistant that doesn’t send anything to the Internet, let alone your personal data, seems like a dream now.
I remember Microsoft in the late nineties.
Stop trying to make clippy look bad! He is our symbol to fight against the enshitification now!
Clippy would’ve never!
steal your data
Do they break into my computer or accounts & take it unauthorized? Is it data in my private systems/networks/accounts that I exclusively own or is legally protected as exclusively mine?
You sign ownership away when you scroll past 35 pages and click “I Accept”
So, it’s their system & it’s not theft by usage agreement?
It’s your system and you agreed to licence your data to them. So technically it’s not theft. But also technically, pirating isn’t theft either, you’re not breaking into microsoft HQ and stealing a product key.
On a practical everyday way, yeah, I would say they are “stealing” your data, since they hide that as a clause in a massive EULA that can be altered at any time, and you either accept it or don’t get to use what you bought.
It’s your system
Evil techcorp’s servers (hosting online services I send requests containing data to) are mine? Cool! How do I sell those?
Or are we referring to local software that gets & sends my data without authorization?
you either accept it or don’t get to use what you bought
Claiming that’s theft seems like (taking artistic license with the word steal to express) wanting an agreement that wasn’t offered. Like
How dare evil techcorp make a service I want to use with voluntary conditions I don’t want? That’s stealing!
I don’t think computer hardware typically has those types of agreements, and I can change the software & choose online services.
