There is certainly some Schadenfreude here, but I suspect it would be more fun for millions of Apple customers in the EU if it opened up its walled garden as the law requires so all those users could benefit.

My point is that it doesn't have to upset their customers. It can also upset the EU authorities, who are demonstrably willing and able to hand out 10-figure fines. That will definitely affect its bottom line.

For reasons I cannot fathom, Apple seems determined to pick that fight. It's a policy living somewhere between stunning hubris and utter madness.

When is it time to start shorting Apple? Its leadership seem absolutely determined to pick a fight with the entire EU over a predatory business model that the EU leadership clearly has no intention of allowing to continue. There seems little chance Apple wins that fight and even if it gets close it will surely cost astronomical amounts of money one way or another.

But why wouldn't you want to build your business around a company with a track record of shutting down entire services on a whim and innovating in the space of not offering customer support?

But what if I want to use my car when I'm not physically present?!

Oh, wait...

(Someone will be along in a moment to justify restoring the previously near-totally-solved problem of vehicle theft because they want to remotely turn on a seat warmer on a cold morning or something.)

What law exactly is that?

On evidence already heard by the official inquiry it seems all but certain that several senior people at both the Post Office and Fujitsu knew something was badly wrong and continued anyway, which would likely make them guilty of perverting the course of justice at a minimum. The questions that now need answers include exactly which people were involved in both the original inappropriate actions and the subsequent cover-up and the degree of culpability and harm in each case.

Look, I know each user is making us -$67.51 on average, but look at the size of our user base, we'll make it up in volume!

Same here, probably. We dropped Windows as our default choice after 7, and now run most day to day stuff on some flavour of Linux. A lot of the businessy applications that used to have a lock-in effect for Windows have gone online now anyway, so it doesn't really matter what OS you use as long as it can run at least one safe, modern browser. We still get situations where having a "genuine" Office document that will definitely be compatible with someone else's system matters, but only occasionally. I can't remember the last time someone sent us graphics in an Adobe format instead of one of the online tools or some standard file type they'd exported to. Permanent documents for distribution are 99% PDFs. The modern, online-first world not always be progress in the right direction, but it's certainly done a lot to break the MS stranglehold over both personal and business computing.

But modern Microsoft is very binary in its approach, so really that's just a fancy way of saying it goes up to 3. My Apple laptop is already on 14 and my Linux workstation is on 23, so they must be much better.

That's why standards matter. It's a good bet that I can take a tool written in C and using POSIX APIs from last century and compile and run it on a modern Linux or BSD with few if any changes. Even if it's a graphical application using X for the UI, a lot of it will still just work. If it's trying to talk to other software running on the same system or to another service elsewhere on the network, those foundations are very stable too.

Backward compatibility is important. Microsoft used to understand that. It famously went to extraordinary lengths to make sure new versions of Windows could still run old applications, sometimes even if those old applications relied on undocumented APIs they shouldn't have used. Sadly those days seem to have passed, and Microsoft 2023 is on the same bandwagon as the big Internet firms, more interested in how much they can exploit their users than in providing a good product that the users want and are willing to pay for. It'll take a while, but I don't think this is going to end well for Microsoft. They're slowly becoming IBM, still a big tech firm with a big war chest, but also a shadow of what they used to be.

And how is any normal person or even any normal small business going to even get Enterprise level Windows 10+ onto their computers, never mind maintain it in Enterprise fashion?

IMHO one of the biggest missteps Microsoft made with Windows 10 was nerfing Pro so it was basically just Home plus a feature or two but still with all of the downsides that power users and professionals don't want or simply can't accept. Until 7 or even 8/8.1 the Pro edition was a step up and suitable for professional use by individuals or small businesses that didn't need all the Enterprise baggage but still needed a system with the power user features and most importantly under their full control.

The Schadenfreude will be almost as strong watching Microsoft's control over the desktop market fade away as it has been watching how quickly credible competitors to Creative Suite have appeared since Adobe went subscription-only. It takes time for an entire tech market to shift away from a dominant incumbent product that was a clear industry standard, but that doesn't mean the shift isn't happening, and once the formerly dominant product no longer has a big enough market share that everyone else has to have it because of the networking and lock-in effects and actually has to compete on merit, it's basically game over.

It is? The same source has Windows (all versions) on 68% of desktops and macOS on 20%, which in combination with the other stats would mean macOS now has a greater share of desktops than Windows 11. That doesn't surprise me. Plenty of my friends and family have Apple laptops now, and I'd guess the majority of the tech businesses I work with do as well. Obviously I'm the kind of person who reads /. so the people and businesses I interact with might not be representative of the global market, but there has definitely been a big shift everywhere I look over the past few years and it's not difficult to imagine reasons why that might be.

For comparison, Linux (excluding ChromeOS) currently seems to be at around 3%. Not a huge percentage, certainly, but if you consider that maybe 250-300 million new PCs are sold globally every year, that could still represent tens of millions of Linux desktops out there. Not so very long ago, Apple was in a similar position and Windows was basically everywhere.

For my own companies, we use as light a process as we can get away with. Usually something that is essentially a prioritised to-do list in an issue tracker. We rely on our (relatively experienced) people talking to each other as needed, actually writing useful documentation and engaging peer review at multiple stages to make sure we're all on the same page internally, and regular contact with our clients and ideally end users to make sure we're all on the same page externally as well.

For context, the majority of our clients make hardware products and are outsourcing the software development to us and sometimes others for different parts of their system as well, so we have little interest in some of the processes involving extremely short cycles that are popular with those building web apps (and neither do many other people working in this huge part of the software industry, because the priorities are often very different when there's physical hardware involved).

As for clients who do in-house software development as well, including those that do have web apps or APIs where very rapid iteration is desired, I've seen just about everything from 20-step Jira nightmares to very light processes built on a Kanban-style board, and yes, that includes some groups who were using the full Scrum process.

I can search just fine, thanks. I did, in fact, before replying to your previous comment, just in case my experience really was exceptional. I found very little evidence that Scrum was in widespread use among Big Tech firms. Here is the top result when I searched for "big tech scrum", for example; it's a widely reproduced article with a lot of content about how a lot of famous Big Tech firms avoid Scrum and a few who have tried it in the past did not do well with it. I didn't find a single article from any primary source at any Big Tech firm within the first 50 search results that said they were using Scrum. In fact the sources favourable to Scrum within those first 50 results were almost exclusively content marketing by companies that provide training or consultancy related to Scrum and other Agile methods.

I know people who work at Big Tech firms too. Do you know what none of them use? Not a single one, as far as I know? Scrum.

It's strange that if you have indeed worked personally at these places and you're confident that they're not shy about blogging about their methodologies, the only links you provided were a data-walled report by a consultancy I've never heard of and some random paper with a scope limited to Agile methodologies that was written in questionable English and published in a journal I've also never heard of. If Scrum is so widespread, surely you could have found some primary sources from the dev teams' own blogs at a variety of Big Tech firms?

How many of those people were developers, though? I've seen the "manager who once read a book" types who suddenly decide that their team must adopt Scrum right now. And once or twice I've seen them go through with it and watched the exodus of good developers that immediately resulted. But I have literally never seen a developer-led shift to a Scrum or Scrum-like process, which given the values that Agile supposedly supports is quite a surprise if Scrum is such a good process for developers.

That hasn't been my experience. I know plenty of very capable developers who will advocate for improvements in their processes and tools. I've seen recommendations made for small improvements that would make someone's life a bit easier. I've seen recommendations made -- and sometimes successfully adopted -- for much more radical changes of the overall development process or for moving the entire team to some new tool because the old one wasn't working well enough. I've just never seen any developer in real life, as far as I can recall, arguing positively for adopting Scrum or a Scrum-like process.

[citation needed]