Everything needs to be branded or monetised.

It's why I want large commercial organisations as far away from my data, computers and workflow as possible.

I do not care about you, I don't want to be reminded you even exist, and I certainly don't want to give you money. Go away.

I want to turn on my computer, load up the browser of my choice, and that's it. I don't need to see a single brand, no "notifications", no messages of your choosing, nothing. My boot screen is a spinner. My desktop is a flat, blank, plain colour. I have my browser pinned as a single recognisable icon (doesn't even have the name).

That is what an OS should be. That is what most services should be. We shouldn't be spending our life subject to the whims of a corporation trying to wheedle money out of us or "foster brand engagement" or whatever nonsense they class it as.

The one good thing about hitting limits on CPU clock speed, memory shortages, etc. is that they might finally have to start actually making programmes vaguely efficient again.

There's also yet-another reason that I don't use Windows, and that's that everything seems to want an app running on startup to cache what it needs to to present these shitty web UIs with any semblance of performance, to do the most worthless things.

There are far too many programmes that just don't function correctly if you have a software firewall other than Windows Defender and you deny them web access, for instance. Windows Defender just lets it all through, but if you have a "ZoneAlarm-type" firewall, you see that EVERYTHING wants to talk-home or connect to a local web service and, when denied, it hangs up and falls over itself rather than deals with it gracefully.

Not what you want to see in critical services, for example.

Best isn't the question. Sales is the question. If you do a poll of photographers, the names you'll hear when you ask what they shoot with are almost always going to be Lexar and SanDisk. Sony won't be in the top five. IMO, that's mostly because they spent a decade with their own Memory Stick nonsense while other manufacturers were claiming the SD and CF card market for themselves. It's hard to force your way into an already crowded field where everyone has already picked favorites.

Yeah, but approximately nobody uses CFExpress. It was an attempt by the CompactFlash folks to stay relevant after the SD card standard ate their lunch. No still camera I've never owned, nor any camcorders (including fairly high-end 4K gear from major manufacturers) uses it. Everybody uses SD. Even most cinema cameras (which as far as I'm aware, are approximately the only gear that *ever* used CFExpress) mostly use SD cards now, or else have removable backs with SATA SSDs or similar.

Put another way, today I learned that somebody still actually made CFExpress cards. I thought the standard was thoroughly and completely stillborn. This is a tiny niche of a niche. And saying that Sony is price-comparable on something that is so niche that it is compatible with only maybe a dozen cinema camera models built by two or three companies within a narrow range of years doesn't exactly contradict what I said about suspecting that nobody uses them because of the cost. I doubt any other CFExpress cards are affordable, either, because economies of scale basically don't exist for a product that's so low-volume.

When I go to buy SD cards — and yes, at this point, almost everybody uses SD cards — I'm not even looking at products made by Sony. I'm looking at products by SanDisk and Lexar. I would be okay with Kingston or Transcend in a pinch. I guess some folks also like Samsung, though I've been burned by other Samsung gear often enough that I don't trust them with something critical like an SD card. Sony isn't even on my list. And pretty much every photographer and videographer I know does the same.

Given that Sony screwed around for more than a decade with their own proprietary "Memory Stick" format, they basically missed the market for SD cards, and other companies claimed that market.

Based on that, at least in my mind, I kind of assume that the people who buy Sony flash cards are probably the ones who have always bought Sony, because it's the only name they know and trust. Most of those folks probably started on Sony back in the 1970s when their products were actually built to last for decades, were top-tier in features, rather than being hobbled by pressure from their entertainment division, and when repair parts weren't priced so high that a power switch costs more than a whole new camcorder (not kidding). They're probably the ones who used to buy overpriced Sony headphones for $150 that fell apart instead of the $50 Koss headphones that didn't. They're also probably the ones who still have analog land line home phones, and most of them are probably retired or dead by now.

*Maybe* some of their mirrorless camera purchasers from the last few years buy Sony cards out of some bizarre sense of brand loyalty, but I'd imagine most of them talk to other photographers and ask what to buy, and again, I'm pretty sure Sony won't be on anybody's list.

I'm just struggling to imagine them having much of a market except perhaps in niche products like CFExpress or in cheap CF cards sold at Walgreens or CVS for high margins to people who don't know any better.

But maybe I'm wrong.

No, they would only consolidate their product line if they thought that doing so would make it more profitable. That would require a high enough volume of sales to matter. Companies don't usually cut entire swaths of products because of the price point. They usually do it because the product line makes so little money that it isn't worth the extra effort to keep it going.

That's plausible.

I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what I could do to a document.

Ribbon feels like they decided that power users didn't matter, and also corresponds with the end of the free Wordpad light-duty word processor and long after Microsoft Works was killed off.

They seem to have forgotten why some of their most popular applications became most popular in their respective categories, and that wasn't just leveraging their OS marketshare OEM install dominance. It was a combination of reasonably good UI design that had a degree of intuitiveness along with fairly easy access to more advanced features, with an added dash of the ability to use data from one application in another without major headaches. Arguably MS Office in the days before Ribbon and Metro UIs exemplify this.

Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake, ie, because users wouldn't recognize that they now had a shiny new version of the product if they didn't flagrantly change the UI, and they chose UI designs that frankly sucked. They also seem to have harmed that interoperability by trying to push too much of it when it doesn't fully work right.

Obviously there have been software companies that had products that for the professionals constantly using them were better, like WordPerfect to Word, but those didn't generally work well for both the power user and the casual user. Originally Microsoft had managed to bridge that gap. But Ribbon and Metro interfaces have harmed the power user, it's now harder to do things than it should be, and power users have incentive to look for software that gives them the features without the bloat.

I doubt that Microsoft is going to understand this in this revamp. They're going to try to cram some UI change solely for the purpose of making it different than the prior version, and even if it's now "native" it's still going to suck. And they're going to try to force any remaining users on prior versions of Windows off of those and onto Windows 11.

For most of humanity even the most creative jobs had a bit of thinking and a ton of drudge work.

Now, for certain jobs, the drudge work is gone, and all that is left is thinking.

Real thinking is very very hard. The human brain uses more energy than any muscle, even the heart.

Trying to do the real thinking 100% of the time is draining. It's like playing chess for 8 hours rather than 30 minutes.

Sony has this tendency to sell overpriced hardware. Could it be that nobody was buying Sony's SD cards?

Does not matter how much tech they use to increase efficiency.

If your company is firing people, it is past it's prime. It may be a solid, safe investment, but it is not going to double profits for the next two years.

Tell me how you're ever going to implement this on any open-source operating system ever?

Because people will just patch it out.

It's not like it's even a boot-time requirement (thus necessitating it being in the kernel/initrd, etc.). It's an account requirement. Which means that it can be patched out in no time at all.

As far as I know, not one single open-source OS has actually implemented this requirement (they put a field that would be useful for it into systemd, but nobody's actually using it).

Apple push an silent automatic update just for your computer that the next time you type in that key, it sends it to the FBI.

Next?

We're not dealing with a bit of software piracy or finding out who stole someone's Bitcoin, you're talking about agencies dealing with anti-terrorism and wars.