alt Hacker NewsiPhone'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.
Replies
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.