Well, everyone was a poor high school student 25 years ago and couldn't afford crap and we were all losers that nobody wanted to hang around anyways.

It's one thing to download a movie without paying for it. It's not good if you share it with others. It's absolutely wrong on all levels when you turn it into a commercial service. It's a few hundred orders of magnitude worse when you you're doing this at the scale of the generative AI companies.

Could have fooled me.

I mean, the other stuff was bad, but what the hell did the Navy do to deserve being cut from the constitution?

But really, they're just boiling oceans for a poor implementation of Rogue.

Of course Microsoft is gonig to be slow to the market with something that's obsolete by the time they release a product.

They only care about what they can monetize, and they hang around with way too many marketing and advertising people to be trusted.

Right, but what *brand* of android-based device outsells apple? It's probably not even going to be cell phones, but voip phones in call centers.

The only time I've done that was because it was a sales person from a company on the "do not buy from these jerks" list because, well, they were annoying and called all the time, despite being told to never call again.

People aren't going to be paying angry birds while taking a shit by shouting instructions to a chatbot.

So they're killing the product.

The de minimis exception was fine when it was for something like shipping a knicknack back home to your Aunt Gertrude while you're on an overseas trip. It's a completely different beast when there are massive direct-to-consumer marketplaces for products that are not legal for sale even in their country of manufacture. In the olden days of less than 20 years ago, if you wanted to sell cheap crap you ordered it from some company that was an importer, and they took care of all the import hassle, and you got to sell your weird-smelling plastic products. You could also go through the hassle of becoming an importer yourself, which wasn't all that difficult.

They were outcompeted and are giving up. They're in the process of folding up shop, and liquidating everything, even though they just laid off thousands to push their market cap to four trillion dollar mark.

All because they sell Office as a subscription and shitty AI.

So that means Google is killing this off soon in favor of Gemini.