[wiseowise]

iPhone's last stand? More like Microsoft's last stand. Nobody wants their garbage hardware and software outside of enterprise shmucks more interested in filling their pockets with fat contract money than delivering value.

> The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive

Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services?

> consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services.

What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids?

> What they do want to do is watch short-form video

Yeah, it seems so.

[dang]

Can you please not post to HN in the denunciatory/indignant style? I know it's popular on the internet but we're trying for curious conversation here, and those things can't co-exist.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[cultofmetatron]

> What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids?

brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

[sph]

My pet peeve is that every flat earther there are 1000 people complaining about them and keeping the meme alive at every chance possible.

At those rates you might as well be complaining about people who believe they are Jesus Christ reincarnated, or that they are trolling for the fun of it.

[cicko]

Mate, I was buying a kebab and the guy was convincing me that the Earth is flat, there's no Moon. And it's proven by... something with shadows. At least I got a real kebab in the end.

[jollyllama]

Nice snark, but they're not all convinced of that via short form video. You can reach the same conclusion from 4-hour podcasts. Your point is kind of irrelevant.

[thunky]

> brother,

Why am seeing "brother" a lot recently?

[wett]

It’s kind of a meme

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ

[derwiki]

I heard it with the voice of Macho Man Randy Savage

[matwood]

That's the only way I hear it. I wonder if that gives away our age?

When I was a teenager WWF came to my town. The day before the event a bunch of the wrestlers randomly showed up to my local gym to get a workout in. None of the guys, and especially Macho Man ever broke character the entire workout. They were super nice and after a bit of handshakes with us there we all just went back to our workouts.

[MisterTea]

Let me tell you something, brother - whatcha gonna do when a thousand Hulkamaniacs come tell you Macho Man was known for his Oh Yeah!

[parpfish]

Annyong hermano

[Ancapistani]

"Bröther, may I have some öats?"

[Cthulhu_]

Kind of, but younger generation will prefix every sentence with "bro" so you can kind of see a generational difference.

But also, Warhammer 40K is popular.

[sanex]

Tiktok addicted kids, brother.

[bushwart]

It enters your vocabulary three weeks into growing a handlebar mustache.

[hightrix]

The kids have made it come back over the last few years and it is finally filtering into adult lingo. My dude.

[Chrise_N]

right???

[yladiz]

Access to knowledge doesn’t mean you automatically acquire that knowledge.

[koolba]

Sadly access to knowledge strongly correlates with access to mindless entertainment that competes with the absorption of said knowledge.

If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them.

But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.

[yladiz]

This doesn’t make any sense. We have more access to entertainment, be it comics, porn, or films, than any period in history, yet we continue to make more substantial scientific progress than any point in history.

[angiolillo]

Scientific progress is typically the result of outliers at the upper end of the normal distribution which doesn't inherently contradict a decrease in average knowledge. (i.e. a larger standard deviation could overcome a lower average)

Consider nutrition. Technological advancements mean that people have access to both higher-quality food and lower-quality food than their ancestors. In practice that seems to have resulted in some people eating healthier than their ancestors could have, and others worse.

[adjejmxbdjdn]

We have one of the most incredible vaccine technologies in mRNA and yet vaccination rates are going down.

We have the best medicines we’ve ever had, and yet life expectancy is down in many countries.

We have more wealth as a globe and yet we are fighting more wars than in generations.

We have more automation than ever and yet people are working harder for less.

We have more capability for democratization of knowledge and capital and yet inequality is higher than ever.

The list goes on. Technology/science are not ends in themselves, and the positive ends they allow are going in reverse.

[komali2]

The things you describe may be problems in your country, but they're not universal.

Something or set of things must specifically be going wrong wherever you live. It would probably be interesting to identify what.

[skywhopper]

I think you have the causation backwards: we have people thinking the world is flat because they can access the sum total of human knowledge, both true and false. There’s so much available, with similar production values, that going down brainwashing rabbit holes like flat earth, anti-vax, and more is a lot easier than it has ever been before.

[iamnothere]

Let’s be real, some people are going to believe absurd things even if you strap them in a chair Clockwork Orange style and force them to consume your favorite propaganda 24/7.

There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, because mass culture’s failure modes are even scarier than small subcultures.

Attempting to stamp out competing worldviews leads a certain kind of (relatively common) person to dig even harder for forbidden knowledge. If you’re not careful this will lead people directly to the arms of your geopolitical enemies, as it’s not possible to fully stamp out their narratives—they have a big budget!

[flohofwoe]

Say about the Eastern side of the iron curtain what you will, but we didn't have flat earthers or a chemtrail conspiracy - teaching rational thinking is the very least requirement for an education system, but even this seems to fail in the 'free world'. Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly, but nobody believed in communism either, everybody knew it was just a carrot dangling in front of the people - and at least Marx tried to put some rational thought into the idea by extrapolating from history - but how does one get from at least 2300 years of knowing that the Earth is round back to believing the Earth is flat?

[iamnothere]

True, the USSR just had Lysenkoism (quite mainstream!), abiotic oil, deep research into psychics and telepathy, ufology, and Pamyat.

You can’t escape fringe beliefs, but admittedly it seems like there were fewer of them in the USSR. Or maybe they were just ignored, poorly documented, or still untranslated.

[flohofwoe]

Ok yes, true. I guess Lysenkoism qualifies at best as 'pseudoscience'.

I'm talking mostly from a East German perspective in the late 70s and 80s (so quite late). I actually need to find out whether Lysenkoism was taken seriously in 1950's East Germany or whether it was silently ignored (open rebellion wouldn't have gone well with the 'Big Brother' in the East).

[komali2]

> Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly

But the communists are smarter than the free world, at least the Americans, which I take it to represent the peak of capitalism and western liberal traditions. The PRC literacy rate is 96.67%, the USA is 79%. In 1937 the Soviet literacy rate was 75%, the USA appears to have been 97% literate then? [1] so somehow the Americans have become nearly as illiterate as a recently industrialized nation of peasants.

Ah, apparently late 70s literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 99.7%. [2].

> but nobody believed in communism either

I really recommend reading some Mao/Stalin era publications, not just from folks like Lenin but general notes from standing committees or national congresses. Even today the national congress of the PRC will get into all sorts of debates about communism. I don't believe their current system is socialist, but they sure do, and there's no doubt that there were a lot of true believers around Mao. I strongly doubt the cultural revolution or red guard could have happened without a lot of peasants genuinely believing in the cause.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy

[2] https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016...

Edit: Cuba's literacy rate is 98% lol https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?location...

[glpgeFwac]

The 79% and 99.7% literacy numbers are tracking completely different concepts —- reading comprehension versus being able to read/write a sentence.

This should be obvious if you’ve ever been to a restaurant or airport in the USA, do you really think 1 in 5 adults can’t read a menu?

[hylaride]

I've been slowly coming to the realization that a large percentage of people are just counter-cultural, be they smart or stupid. We think of the term in 1960s hippy movements, but some people want or need to believe there is a conspiracy or that everybody is wrong and they have some truth to believe in. Ignoring the people profiting off of these movements, I'd be curious to know if they just crave some kind of intellectual stimulation, are looking for an alternative to religion, or if it's something else.

[graemep]

> yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

Very few. They are louder online. I have never met one in real life.

Yes, the internet does spread misinformation, but I think its pessimistic to think it outweighs the benefits. A lot of the problems are economic and social at the core too.

[librasteve]

but, the earth is flatter than it looks … since, according to GR, spacetime is convex around it gravity well

[wiseowise]

> brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

And even more people believe there's an old man on a cloud judging everyone, so what?

[Forgeties79]

I’m not religious but there’s a significant difference here.

Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion in both cases, but we can’t prove without a doubt that god doesn’t exist even if we don’t feel there’s enough evidence to suggest he is. There is, however, concrete evidence the earth isn’t flat, so no matter who the burden is on it’s demonstrably false.

Put another way: You can concretely observe without a doubt that not only is the earth not flat, but also that it can’t be flat. We can’t confidently say god can’t exist.

[graemep]

and most people who believe in God will cite some evidence - religious experiences, or philosophical proofs or whatever. Whether you accept that evidence is sufficient or not, it is in an entirely different class.

[Forgeties79]

Sure but I’m just not even opening that can of worms. I’m just focusing on the very clear cut difference here

[technothrasher]

I don't think you've thought through what you're trying to assert. A god could make you believe anything they wanted to about the earth. So if you cannot disprove a god, then you cannot disprove the theory that the earth is flat.

[virgilp]

You can still believe that the scientific method works; and might leads you to 2 conclusions:

(a) "I can prove earth is not flat" (using this methodology) (b) I cannot prove there is no God, though I may believe the prevalence of evidence does not support the hypothesis, there's no scientific test that I can design.

[graemep]

The scientific method is partly inspired by belief in a God who is good (so no deceit) and created a universe that runs on laws. If you have particular beliefs about God, you can build a lot on that (as Descartes did).

[Forgeties79]

Just because you think I am wrong does not mean I have failed to think through the various components/implications of my statement.

I can disprove that the Earth is flat with the incredibly varied, concrete, observable evidence that it is not. It comes in many forms and is undeniable, hence the lengths flat earthers have to go to to “prove” the evidence is all just a collection of lies that serve some nebulous, nefarious purpose (they don’t even agree on what that is) that serves some faceless evil group they prop up (usually “the deep state” or Jewish people). On the other hand, I do not have concrete, observable evidence that God does not exist. That’s the thrust of my point.

[hnfong]

GP's argument is essentially this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon

Perhaps you might think this is bullshit because *obviously* this world is real and not an illusion and there is *obviously* no evil demon to deceive us into thinking the Earth is spherical instead of flat.

And yes this is what philosophers do. Nobody here is arguing that such demon exists and is actually deceiving us, but since you've accepted you can't prove god doesn't exist (maybe mis-step for you since you're probably not the philosopher type), well, can you prove such demon doesn't exist? Seems to me the same thing.

[detourdog]

I’m not sure you thought this through. Why would G-d want to or care to make one have thoughts.

[DiggyJohnson]

why are you censoring the word 'God'?

[hnfong]

Don't know why you're downvoted so much, but your observation is spot on.

This is essentially Descartes evil demon issue. If you can't disprove that an evil demon (with god-level powers) is deceiving you at everything you perceive, then how are you going to be sure about anything? (including that the Earth is not flat?)

It has always been a difficult philosophical issue about how much we can trust reality itself.

[Forgeties79]

That’s an interesting big picture philosophical question with big picture implications, but it’s not really what we are talking about here. We are confirming the things we can about our shared reality, not questioning its very nature.

[graemep]

That is a strawman. Who believes in an old man on a cloud judging everyone? Far fewer people believe anything like that than believe. Even online I have never come across anyone whose beliefs could be reasonably characterised that way.

[mcculley]

> capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge

No. Lots of knowledge is still behind paywalls or not yet digitized. Some models have been trained on books that we cannot search or download.

[alnwlsn]

Plenty has already been lost due to being buried in search, removed for lack of interest, or simplified so far as to be too generalized.

[coldtea]

>and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

I'd take those over the people who want to shove AI down our throats any day of the week!

[baal80spam]

This hurts.

[imglorp]

I think Microsoft does have a point here: hosted services and thin clients are going to make money. (1) Their main focus is selling services, selling you, selling your data, and showing you ads. Children are being raised to think that asking chat to add two numbers is normal; they will enter the workplace in this state. Everything for MS is a service: this is going to work for them. And (2) because those hosted services will also replace some jobs, as the enterprise schmucks want.

[thewebguyd]

Microsoft winning here requires them to actually execute well which they have a long storied history of completely missing the window. Tablets, phones, MP3 players, they were always either too early or too late and their consumer marketing is terrible.

You could be right, but I don’t think it’s going to be Microsoft that’ll be the leader here.

[debugnik]

I still can't get over people calling ChatGPT "chat" instead of it referring to a stream chat.

[engineer_22]

How is that different than using a calculator

[imglorp]

Kids are absolutely using chat for calculator tasks.

There was a meme going around last week where a child saw a phone calculator app and remarked "wow there's an AI just for math".

Generalizing, they're using chat for everything else, like search. Actually reading a source is not on their radar.

This is frightening. A whole generation that will not, and can not, think. At all. "Do it for me."

[trumpdong]

If you want to get rich quick there's a huge lesson here: sell to children early. If you can get 5-year-olds hooked on your product and growing up thinking it's the only way to do things, they will give you a huge amount of money later in life. Such as paying ChatGPT to be a calculator.

[ceejayoz]

It's less likely to be accurate, it's slower, and far less efficient as a bonus.

[jstummbillig]

The anger is real, but it's misguided (as anger mostly is). The benchmark is reality. Everyone is more "TikTok addicted kids" than not and the analysis is quite apt.

[wongarsu]

If enterprises were really focused on saving employee's time, Jira wouldn't sell. At least not the bog slow SaaS version

Saving time (==saving money) is something you can sell to companies. But above all, they are willing to spend on saving their managers time. The higher up the hierarchy, the better. If that involves wasting a lot more time for the underlings, then so be it. The underlings aren't the ones making the purchasing decisions after all

[parpfish]

i dont think jira (or linear or any other ticketing platform) is about saving anybody time. they know on some level that they are all a burden.

but they will gladly take the productivity hit from that time sink because it gives them teh ability to track employees. they'd rather know that everybody is working at 80% productivity than release that burden and just trust them. it's either this or filling out frustrating timesheets.

[hylaride]

The previous place I worked had the Head of Product become VP of Engineering after the CTO left (don't ask, it's a long story).

They literally implemented the most orthodox scrum you can imagine, with the one exception that they could sit on the sprint planning meetings and override the teams pulling tickets off the backlog into sprints (technical debt of course started to pile up).

The kicker is that after a few months of this, productivity slowed to a crawl. The retrospectives showed that the planning wasn't working because the planned work rarely got done - because we were always fighting fires. Work also slowed due to all the overhead that was added to implement scrum (I also had to participate, despite being in an DevOps role - that at the best of times is inherently interrupt driven and I'm servicing the work of developers). Despite the fact that the powers that be knew things were not working as well as they used to, no amount of feedback could loosen the reigns - probably because it inherently meant losing some control. We had to try everything else to get back to where we were, when empowered developers could make decisions. Things got worse of course as within 6 months we lost half our most experienced talent that wasn't going to put up with it (this was the peak 2022 tech hiring levels).

Eventually there was some mild "improvement" as we were allowed a "15% time" to work on what we thought was best, which still had to be justified and it was still the lowest priority during any given sprint. I still shake my head at the whole situation.

[csallen]

> What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids?

It's not a "callous view," it's reality. Social media, entertainment/streaming/media, gaming, and porn make up the vast majority of minutes spent on the internet, and it's not even close.

[Traubenfuchs]

> Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services?

Microsoft is still simply one of the very best at enterprise dealmaking.

[jmuguy]

Thompson is speaking broadly about markets, not trying to put anyone down. The point he's getting at is that Apple and MS are just playing (or trying to play) to their strengths. Did you see anything in the new Siri AI demos that looked all that much like someone getting work done? I didn't. And that's fine, for Apple and the iPhone. Microsoft for better or for worse is what a large part of the American business world is using to get work done, and so Microsoft is trying to position their AI strategy towards that.

For what its worth I wish Apple would care more about those of us that want to use AI to actually do work and not these weird contrived examples asking if focaccia can be made gluten free. And I personally couldn't care less what Microsoft does as I'm lucky enough to never have to use their products outside of Github.

[gradientsrneat]

That last quote is when I stopped reading the article. The opening with the premonition of personal computing moving to the cloud, followed by the heavy use of the word "consumer", made it clear that the author has a cynical view of humanity, but at that point it went too far.

I honestly think the use of the word "consumer" is intentionally dehumanizing, a way for corporate figureheads to ignore the humanity of the people they interact with directly or indirectly. This in turn makes them numb to the markets and institutions they are degrading.