While everyone works in the Metaverse.

It's really absurd how worthless Zuck and Meta as a company are compared to how much money they make.

I feel like we're at that point around 2010, where Internet Explorer was still dominant, but cracks were appearing. IE was invincible . . . right until it wasn't. If Microsoft doesn't play their cards just right, it won't happen overnight, but the same thing is going to happen. Ten years from now will look unrecognizable.

Windows is in trouble, and they know it. Conservatively the Linux market share has more than doubled globally in just a few years and will likely do it again over the next few. It's not new like Chrome was, but from their point of view, I don't think it matters. It's growth is new, and it's the same.

I would bet virtually anything, behind closed doors, this is exactly how Microsoft execs that have been there for 20+ years are discussing this. They are scared for Windows in a way that has never happened before. And it must be extra dissonant for them, because frankly, Microsoft would be relatively fine even if Windows somehow completely died at this point, but it's also their most important brand, and still a money machine.

It's not really clear to me. This was the thing they broadly referred to as "the Metaverse" . . . right?

Like the demo of avatars finally having legs, that's the thing being shut down and nothing is really replacing it except a mobile app that makes it not even really be that thing anymore or am I misunderstanding?

I caught in the article that they say they are "doubling down" and such, but I don't think it really said what "the Metaverse" is anymore . . . it's nothing right?

It'd be hilarious but it's basically just what I expect at this point.

That is not a quote from Stallman.

That is from a statement from Krzysztof Siewicz, and I would assume it's just an odd turn of phrase from someone who mostly speaks something other than English.

RTFA is alive and well.

The housing crisis, in the US at least but many other places too, only exists because existing home owners hold legal power. It's an incumbency problem.

We have to somehow make housing cheaper, while not reducing anyone's property values.

It's absurd. Until we reconcile that, robots don't matter. People will vote down any effort to put up cheaper housing that actually drives prices down, whether it's built by robots, humans, or trained squirrels has nothing to do with it.

I gave up on streaming years ago and I don't think this will get me to go back.

But in terms of consolidation being bad for consumers, this does seem much, much, much better than Netflix buying HBO to me. If Netflix had bought HBO, it would be a year tops until Disney or Amazon bought Paramount.

A weird silver lining I haven't seen discussed, is Paramount and Waner Brothers both still put stuff out on physical media. You can buy DVDs of their shows and media, and I figured that would stop under Netflix, but hopefully it will continue for a while at least now.

Caclulator manufacturers were never trillion dollar companies who controlled the math curriculum in K-12 education through their "charity."

If Texas Instruments had been literally 1,000x larger in 1995 we might have gone that way.

Code.org is a sham.

They said this about tarriffs and it had the reverse effect. People rushed to buy them before the increases, creating record quarters.

I'm not all that convinced this will be so different. The low end will be affected the most, new models will have less memory in them, but I really doubt we'll actually see sales tank like this.

The Xbox has gotten absolutely *destroyed* this generation. Sony has outsold them solidly 2:1, but it's worse than that. Basically they did alright when both were unavailable for a solid year in covid, but once PS5s were easy to buy, Xbox sales really fell off a cliff, it's a disaster.

Combine that with Windows gaming suddenly being under serious threat from Valve, Microsoft gaming is truly a nightmare right now. It's worst case scenarios on all sides.

I would not be all that shocked if they aren't seriously considering abandoning the business altogether. They are positioning her to be the face of some pivot of the brand, but I couldn't guess exactly what.

https://www.vgchartz.com/artic...

It's almost like Code.org is and always was just a shill for industry messaging.

I worked in K-12 education for a long time. And one of the things that genuinely shocked me is how much curriculum is in fact just sponsored by giant corporations.

Seriously, virtually any time you see someone advocating in K-12 education for something like "skills students will need for jobs" just look, and you don't have to look very hard, at who's funding it. It's disappointing every time.

There was a story maybe 20 years ago where some state lottery nearly got broken because a fortune cookie company I think it was, printed a number that *almost* won. Something like 20 people won the second tier prize.

It would be utterly ridiculous if we saw 20 people win the lottery trusting ChatGPT to pick unique numbers for them.

I'd bet literally thousands of people ask that every day.

I mean for decades every developer has known number of commits or lines of code is a horrible metric.

I have to wonder how much it is like last year, there was a similar story on /. about how Github said something like 90% of users had tried copilot. But then you read the article and realize that means how many had clicked the link they had repeatedly thrown on the front page for every single Github user, the metric was flat out a lie.

Claude *is* a game changer. It and tools like it are here to stay, but this can still be a hype piece, and I'm pretty sure it is.

This is fair but the pitch/summary still seems very misleading, which I think is the above person's real point.

It's not the funding that keeps open source alive, it's the funding that keeps some smaller open source alive.

The summary acts like this is some existential threat, it's not. I mean I'm typing this into Firefox, on GNOME, on Fedora, on Linux.

Virtually no part of that stack is impacted by what they're talking about, but it's phrased like all of those things are about to implode. They're not.

This isn't just the same old Apple joke anymore, this is pretty literally how they built the system.

Even if you go build a high-end M5 MBP, it defaults to 16 gigs only. And there's an edit button to reveal 24 and 32 gig options. And then a further button to reveal the 64, 96, and 128 options, where the price goes up *fast*.

It wouldn't shock me at all if pushing those options out of the UI was a bigger reason for the change than anything else, RAM prices are insane right now.

These numbers were released as part of an earnings call that drove the stock down more than 10%. It's taking the market with it today, it's a really, really bad day for Microsoft.

These numbers aren't really what did it but . . . still though.

Does anyone have precise numbers? I'm pretty sure Windows 8 was supported a full year longer into the Windows 10 cycle than Windows 11 was into Windows 10's. The adoption rate is not at all impressive considering that . . . though if they wanted to take credit for the surge in the Linux desktop . . . that is much, much, much, much bigger than the last cycle.

Even as an old man on /. I've never been in the spelling Microsoft with a $ camp of haters, but this is just embarrassing.