Apathy Now (or, Faint Praise Revisited)

When Microsoft announced Windows 10's Creators Update, my reaction was one of profound disinterest. The announced features weren't bad, but none of them was great, either, and almost all of them replicated 3rd-party programs that people were already using. At the time, it struck me as a lot of sizzle with no steak, and unlikely to earn back much by way of users' trust or goodwill.

That was a week ago. Now that we've have had time to evaluate what Microsoft is offering, the emerging consensus is closer to apathy than excitement.

MS removes over half of the apps from Win10's store [UPDATED]

From MSPowerUser:

Earlier this year, Microsoft sent out emails to Windows developers, warning them that they would be removing apps from the Windows Store which did not update their apps to include new app age ratings.

That process only started a few weeks ago, but according to WindowsBlogItalia has already removed 100,000 apps, at least in the Italian version of the store, with the number of apps dropping from 329507 apps on the 26 September 2016 to 239216 apps on the 19th October 2016.

...

While it is often hard to separate apps which are genuinely abandoned, vs apps when have not been updated for a long time but are still being monitored by the developers to fix new bugs etc., most would consider developers who do not respond to Microsoft’s warnings as no longer interested in the fate of their app.

When the makers of 100,000 apps can't be arsed to spend five minutes adding an age rating, it's probably fair to say that they aren't exactly excited about Microsoft's UWP vision.

MSPU try to spin this as good for the Windows Store in the longer term, but seeing the number of apps in their Store dropping, rather than rising, probably wasn't something that Microsoft was hoping to see, or expecting to see, just over a year in. If those apps had been selling, then their developers would've taken the time to update them; clearly, though, for 100K of them, the lost units of sales from the Windows 10 Store wasn't significant enough to worry about.

In other news, Microsoft have finally patched Centennial/desktop bridge so that non-UWP apps that get ported to the app store won't brick your PC anymore, so that should help, but still... total apps dropping by 100K isn't exactly a sign of a thriving ecosystem.

UPDATE: It appears those first 100,000 apps were just the beginning.

From Softpedia:

A few hours ago, we told you that Microsoft removed approximately 100,000 apps from the Windows Store because they had no age ratings, but it turns out that the number is actually bigger than that.

According to a report that was published in German media, Microsoft actually pulled half of the Windows Store apps, at least from the German Store, as part of the same cleaning process.

It appears that the number of apps available for download experienced a dramatic drop from 328,639 to 164,436, which means that no less than 174,203 apps were removed because of the age rating rule.

The affected apps didn't include any of the "big names," and de-listing an app only removes it from the Store, leaving it installed on PCs, so it may be a while before the change would normally become noticeable to the average user. Still, when over half the apps on your year-old storefront are "orphans" whose developers don't care enough fill out a five-minute questionnaire to keep them up for sale, its a pretty clear sign that your ecosystem is far from healthy, and the problem is clearly worse than anyone expected.

Q: Will Microsoft's new VR headsets work with Windows 7 & 8?

We don't know what November 1st's PC market share numbers will look like, but as of October 1st, Windows 10 was only 22.53% of the PC OS market, and had actually ticked slightly backwards relative to Windows 7 compared to the previous month. That's problematic for Microsoft for any number of reasons, but here's another one that's just been added: VR.

VR is extremely prohibitive technology, with a ton of barriers to entry, not the least of which is cost. Microsoft is looking to lower the cost barrier significantly, partnering with multiple 3rd party vendors to release VR headsets for PC at a $300 price point, which will bring the cost of PCVR in line with PSVR, and possibly giving it a fighting chance to at least get started on the path to becoming a thing.

So far, so good... or better than it was, anyway. There's just one problem: Microsoft themselves.

Microsoft is all about pushing Windows 10 these days, and the PCVR headsets were announced at a Windows 10 event. VR, though, is still struggling to find mainstream acceptance on any platform, and needs to appeal to the broadest possible audience in order to have a chance at becoming established. On PC, that means Windows 7, which is still 48.27% of the market generally, and 34.72% of Steam users.

Thus, the questions:

• Will Microsoft do their best to get PCVR established by supporting these devices on Windows 7 & 8, thus undercutting their (apparently stalled) drive to push Windows 10 onto every PC on the planet? 
• Will they use PCVR to push Windows 10 instead, cutting side deals with all five of their hardware partners to keep the new VR headsets exclusive to the new OS, and adding a new barrier to VR entry in the form of a Windows 10 requirement (not free anymore, remember), even as they lower the PCVR cost barrier?
• Since HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, and Acer are all going to want to sell as many headsets as possible, would they even go along with Window 10 exclusivity, even if it means they sell half as a many PCVR headsets as they might otherwise?

These are real questions; I honestly don't know which way any of these companies are going to go.

I don't think anyone saw this VR problem coming

I've blogged quite a bit about how unimpressed I am with VR, and why. From simulation sickness, to the unsolved problems of navigating VR spaces and interacting with the objects in VR environments, to the prohibitive cost of the hardware, to the simple fact that there's just not much that VR is actually good for, VR just has too many issues that need to be solved before it can achieve mainstream acceptance... and it probably needs to see widespread adoption before its remaining problems can really be solved.

Even if we can sweep all of that out of the way, though, it now looks like VR, especially in the form of VR arcades, has a new problem: public health. Specifically, ocular herpes. Yes, apparently that actually is a thing.

From GameRant:

Virtual reality hasn’t quite completely taken the games industry by storm, due in large part to the high price of entry associated with other headsets like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, but many industry watchers have said that Sony has a real opportunity with the more affordable PlayStation VR to get a lot more people interested in virtual reality. With the PlayStation VR also starting to pull in positive reviews following its launch two weeks ago, things appear to be going really well for Sony and VR fans in general right now.

So in other words, this is a really bad time for virtual reality to be associated with a major health scare. But that’s exactly what is happening if a screenshot originally posted by YouTuber Drift0r is to be believed.

The Daily Dot reports that the screenshot features a conversation between two anonymous VR developers who are talking with each other about an ocular herpes outbreak among individuals who have been using VR headsets. It seems that the disease is being passed from gamer to gamer at places like trade shows and demo booths where multiple people share the same headset. 

Yikes.

VR's precarious position is particularly vulnerable to headlines like this, simply because of the barriers to entry that it presents to the consumer. Apathy already abounds, and for VR evangelists, the cure that's often prescribed is for doubters to strap on a headset and give it a try... which requires the sharing of VR equipment. Which would now appear to pose a public health hazard.

Even if the risk is low, the disgusting possibility, added to VR's existing barriers to entry, could be enough to discourage people from even trying the technology, which is potentially crippling for tech that needs to be experienced in order to win badly-needed converts. Microsoft just announced partnerships with five different third-party vendors, all aimed at bringing $299 VR headsets to market next year, but that might be just in time for them to all fail completely because VR has already failed to catch the public attention, except in negative ways.

Damn, that's some faint praise

Damning with faint praise, i.e. saying apparently complimentary things which are so marginally positive as to add up to no compliment at all, or even serve as thinly-veiled criticism, has become something of a lost art in today's hype-fuelled Internet culture. Everything seems to be either "The Best" or "The Worst" lately, with positions in the middle being left largely vacant.

Perhaps that's partly why I found this piece, from Reuters via Fortune, so oddly satisfying:

Microsoft Just Added This Free Creative Update to Windows 10

Gamers might be pleased.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced a free update to its Windows operating system that lets users take photos and edit content in three dimensions, in a bid to raise excitement for its declining computing business.

Ouch.

Other favourite recent headlines include this one, from Stuff:

Microsoft’s finally done something cool with Windows 10

Windows 10 announcements haven’t traditionally made tech fans drool with desire in the past, but Microsoft has managed to tease our saliva glands into action with its latest Windows 10 Creator’s Update announcement.

although that may say more about the terrible year that Microsoft's just had, rather than anything in particular about their event yesterday. Microsoft has hyped their "success" with Windows 10 to a ridiculous extent, but the truth is clearly otherwise, as demonstrated by pieces like this one, from Business Insider:

For Microsoft Windows, it's do or die

Microsoft is set to unveil a bunch of new hardware on Wednesday, with the star attraction likely to be a new Surface PC to compete with Apple's all-in-one iMac.

Microsoft is billing this event as the future of Windows 10. That's not surprising: The reason Microsoft got into the Surface business in the first place was to push Windows forward into a touchscreen future, whether PC manufacturers wanted it or not.
But we're fast approaching a moment in time where Microsoft is going to have to do more than introduce new kinds of PCs if it wants Windows, first introduced in 1985, to stay relevant for the next three decades.

The PC industry is shrinking and Windows is increasingly irrelevant in a mobile world ruled by Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Even worse, Microsoft's own attempts to break into the smartphone realm have landed with a resounding "thud," exacerbating the slow decline of the Windows business (fortunately for Microsoft, its cloud and productivity businesses are exploding, propelling the company's stock to new highs).

It's gotten to the point where some, like Infoworld Editor-in-Chief Eric Knorr, have openly wondered whether it would be best if Microsoft put Windows out to pasture now, rather than let it bleed out slowly over the next few years as the world passes it on by.

Don't believe me yet? How about this piece, from Computerworld:

Windows: When no growth is an improvement

Revenue from OS flat in Q3, but evaporation of phone business again drags More Personal Computing group under

Microsoft yesterday said that revenue in the September quarter for the More Personal Computing group was down 2%, the second consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines and the fifth contraction in the last six quarters.

Windows revenue, which accounts for the bulk of More Personal Computing's (MPC) total, was flat. But that was an improvement over the prior quarter, when sales of the operating system were down 4%.

It's reached a point where the actual stuff being announced by Microsoft has become almost secondary; Microsoft has made such a mess of their core business, missing the boat on mobile completely while annoying or alienating desktop and laptop users, trying and failing to push its newest OS onto so many PCs that its previous failures could be forgotten. Make no mistake, there is actual announced stuff in most of the articles I've linked to (all of which are worth a read, BTW, so please do click through and give them some love), it's just that none of it feels all that hype-worthy.

I'm still looking through the list of actually announced things from yesterday, but so far it all looks like stuff I have no interest in:

• the $3000 (and up!) all-in-one Studio Surface (which, Gizmodo be damned, absolutely isn't going to kill PCs as we know them, any more than tablets killed PCs as we know them, for reasons I've already gone into at length); 
• the Surface Dial, a gimmicky interface thingy which only users of $3000 (and up!) Studio Surface all-in-ones will even be slightly interested in; 
• a bunch of 3D creative apps (which might be useful for creators that aren't already using other tools for that, but won't mean much to those that are already creating in 3D because there are other tools for that); 
• a bunch of VR and AR hardware, and more HoloLens stuff (which also won't mean much, either, for reasons I've already gone into at length); 
• the Beam game-streaming app, which totally isn't going to supplant any of the tools that Twitch streamers are already using; 
• the ability for gamers to make their own tournaments for Windows 10 apps, which means nothing when Steam is the #1 platform for games distribution; 
• better audio support, which is nice but why wasn't it already in there? 

So... yeah. Lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing, which none of which even begins to win back the trust and goodwill of Windows users that Microsoft has spent the last year squandering.

Yes, the Studio Surface is very pretty, but at $3000 for the bare-bones version, and $5000 for something which can actually match the gaming performance of my 3-year-old rig, I won't be buying one. The prospect of $300 VR headsets for PC (made by third parties, details TBD, i.e. vaporware) will mean nothing if they don't solve VR's other problems first. The ability to paint in 3D is neat, but with so many other options out there, it's not exactly a "killer app" for Windows 10. It's nice that they're finally fixing Windows 10's audio support, but why is that newsworthy? Why is any of this newsworthy?

No wonder the coverage is full of "faint praise."

This is the problem with VR

Well, one of them, anyway.

(Thanks to Kotaku for the link.)

Tactile feedback is an essential part of how we interact with physical reality; its absence in virtual reality will always be disorienting. Every time you try to pick up a "heavy" VR object, its lack of mass will be a problem; every time you try to climb on, or climb over, or sit on, or lean on, a virtual object, its lack of mass will be a problem.

Virtual rock climbing works only if you have a physical wall to actually climb while the VR headset shows you the virtual scenery with which you won't actually interact. As a purely virtual experience, it fails completely. You can see the same thing at work in this video from Superbunnyhop's recent trip to Japan:

(Skip to 10:52 for the part with the VR arcades.)

Watching VR guy fall down and go boom because the VR experience is lacking necessary physical resistance and tactile inputs is kinda funny... if you're not banking on VR experiences like this becoming a thing. The same applies to watching George wobbling his way across a narrow physical plank in a supposedly virtual experience, terrified less because of the 40-story virtual drop in front of his eyes than because of the instability of the physical plank under his feet. It's funny... if this isn't the business you're trying to create out of essentially nothing, and betting billions of dollars on.

If your company spent a billion US dollars to buy Oculus, though, then this video should be chilling, not humorous. This is a problem that VR has to solve, before it can become a thing, and nobody working on VR is working on this problem. Not only is nobody working on this problem, to the best of my knowledge, none of them have even got as far as formally acknowledging this as a problem. That's a big problem.

There's a reason why Star Trek's holodeck is depicted as creating physical objects with which its users can interact. There's a reason why those sci-fi "VR" rigs that eschew the physical connect directly to the brains of the people using them, bypassing the need for physical stimulus and movement altogether through what amounts to telepathy. Neither of these approaches will be an option for our nascent VR industry anytime soon, if ever.

I'm using "room-scale" VR to illustrate the point, here, but even seated VR experiences suffer from this problem. And while it's fun to point and laugh, actual injury (and the legal liability which accompanies it) probably won't be a laughing matter for long:

Until VR technology can be used as directed without elaborate accompanying physical staging, or constant "VR nannies" who will assist the user through every part of a very limited experience, it's really not going to become a thing. Not at $800 a throw, anyway.

Why Nintendo Switch has such a strong focus on handheld, explained in one chart

From the Wall Street Journal:

Apparently even the massively popular Wii never matched the sales performance of the DS, and while sales of both consoles and handhelds have dropped steadily after peaking in 2009, their console sales numbers dropped far more quickly than their handhold sales numbers. If I was Nintendo, looking at that sales history, I'd be wanting the relative performance surety of a handheld device, too.

The problems, though are still legion, and WSJ raises another issue that I hadn't thought of: support from third-party publishers.

The price is still unknown. But one thing well known is that game consoles need quality games to sell. The rival PlayStation and Xbox platforms sell well because they offer blockbuster game franchises like “Call of Duty,” “Madden NFL” and “Grand Theft Auto” that are made by big game publishers like Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard and Take-Two Interactive.

But Nintendo’s game consoles in the past have largely depended on games the company makes itself, based on characters like Mario and Zelda. The top 10 best-selling titles in the U.S. for Nintendo’s current Wii-U console are all games the company made exclusively for the system, according to market research firm NPD. The Wii-U has been a disappointing seller, moving only 13 million units since its launch four years ago. But the same issue existed for its wildly popular predecessor. The Wii sold more than 100 million units over its lifespan, and Nintendo still accounted for eight of the top 10 selling games for that console.

By contrast, none of the top 10 games for the PlayStation 4 come from Sony. Only one top game for the Xbox One—“Halo 5: Guardians”—was made by Microsoft.

Nintendo will need to do better at attracting games from other developers, as the popularity of its own game properties has dwindled. Both console and game software sales have fallen on a unit basis every year for the past seven years. Nintendo sold more than 57 million total console units a year at its peak in 2009; it expects to sell less than six million units for the current fiscal year ending in March. Unit sales of its game software have followed a similar track.

So, basically, Nintendo's entire strategy, a decades-old set of practices which depended heavily on Satoru Iwata's hand on the helm, and on the total brand control which made them their own #1 publisher... all of that is wrong, and all of it needs to change before the Switch drops in March. I know that Nintendo fans are really, really pulling for Nintendo on this one, but I'm still smelling a whole lotta "if" on this whole situation, so I really hope that nobody's getting their hopes up too high.

The entire WSJ article is worth a read, by the way, so go give them some clicks.

Today in D4 hype...

Spotted in the wild on surgar.net, and presented here with all of its original formatting intact, because it's amazeballs:

Holy wall of text, Batman! Who needs punctuation, or paragraph breaks? Apart from, you know, readers. Seriously, I have no idea WTF is being claimed there, and no intention of reading through that mess to try and figure it out. 

I guess this answers that question...

Yesterday, I wondered if Nintendo's shareholders were "clueless enough to be happy about [Switch's] product reveal." Today, we got the answer.

From the Financial Times, via Polygon:

Following Nintendo’s unveiling of its new console yesterday, the Nintendo Switch, the company suffered from a 7.3 percent drop in its stock overnight.

Shares in the company hit a high of 27,180 yen ($261.60) after the hybrid console’s unveiling yesterday, but are currently sitting at 25,185 yen ($242.40), according to the Financial Times. The drop comes one day after Nintendo received a 4.6 percent increase in shares the night before the Switch was revealed, adding $1 billion to Nintendo’s market value.

...

Yesterday’s reveal of the Nintendo Switch left plenty of unanswered questions about the new console. We still don’t know if its display is a touchscreen, how powerful the console is, how long the battery will last or what the launch lineup will consist of.

Ouch.

On the one hand, I shouldn't be surprised. I think this is the appropriate response to the amount of "if" with which the whole Switch concept is laden, and Nintendo's apparent continued cluelessness about why people liked their products in the first place, or what the current state of the consumer electronics market says about the viability of things like tablets, mobile gaming devices, underpowered consoles, and the like.

On the other hand... shareholders, man. There's a reason why non-stop hype has become such a prominent feature of the AAA games industry; a lot of people are invested in these companies because their financial advisors told them to buy, rather than because they have a deep love for, or understanding of, the gaming industry.

Nintendo's had a really crappy year. Apart from Pokemon Go, with which they were barely involved, the year has been a non-stop stream of bad news, and the announcement of the Switch has the look of a "hail mary" play. Sometimes that works, and the result can be game-changing; more often, though, it fails, and even Nintendo can only absorb so many more failures. The fact that confusion seems to abound, rather than excitement, may not be a good sign.

About that Nintendo Switch commercial...

Just for fun, let's compare this: 

to this: 

Apart from the radically different video quality (and, goddamn, does 480p ever look like shit now), what do you see?

In the original Wii ad, I see a memorable sales pitch to families, about families. I didn't have to think for more than a second about how to find the original Wii commercial on YouTube; "Wii would like to play" is still stuck in my head today, for fuck's sake. The games in the ad are nothing special, in hindsight, but damned if everybody playing them isn't having a blast, regardless of their ages. There were plenty of games on display, too, that nobody had seen before (you know, launch titles).

The Wii's ad made 100+ million people want the Nintendo Wii. Hell, it made me want a Nintendo Wii; I almost went out and bought one of these things, back in the day.

In the Nintendo Switch ad, I see none of that. It's well-produced, to be sure, but today's jaded media consumers are well used to that, and the Switch itself isn't doing anything in the ad that people can't already do, with devices they already own. I see ad-people going to ad-places where there are tons of fun ad-things to do, which they then ignore completely, instead (improbably) pulling out their Switches to play Splatoon. 

Yes, Splatoon. Not only was there not a single game shown in the Switch ad that we haven't seen already, some of them (like Skyrim) are years old. They're popular, yes, but they're not going to sell an expensive, experimental new console design.

It brings me back to a question that I asked near the end of my previous post. Who is the Switch for, really? I've watched their 3-minute ad a couple of times now, and still can't answer that. 

This is lifestyle advertising; like every beer commercial ever made, it puts a lot of attractive people together on screen along with the product, and has them pretend to have fun that's at least tangential to the product, and hopes that you end up wanting to buy the product. In a purely technical sense, it's not a bad ad; it's well-produced, the music is good, and lifestyle advertising has sold a lot of beer over the years, so maybe there's something there. But I didn't see anything in that 3-minute video that made we want to know more about the Switch. 

I just don't care, at all, about Nintendo's Switch, and 3 minutes of highly-polished advert didn't change that in the slightest. I know that some people will get very excited, so the jury's still out on whether the Switch and its marketing campaign will succeed or fail, but as far as I'm concerned... it's a fail. Sorry, Nintendo fans.

They should have stuck with "NX"

From CBC News:

After months of speculation and anticipation, Nintendo has formally unveiled its new video game console: a hybrid home-and-portable machine called Switch.
The 3½-minute trailer posted Thursday morning reveals a tablet device that can also connect to your television via a dock.

The main controller comes with detachable components Nintendo calls Joy-Cons, which attach to either side of the Switch tablet and allow gamers to play the device on the go.

These Joy-Cons can also be detached and played with one in each hand, or used by two people using a single Joy-Con.

Players can also connect multiple Switch tablets so a crowd of people can sit and play together (local multiplayer).

...

"Nintendo Switch allows gamers the freedom to play however they like," Reggie Fils-Aime, president and chief operating officer of Nintendo of America said in a release.

"It gives game developers new abilities to bring their creative visions to life by opening up the concept of gaming without boundaries."

The video is, of course, on YouTube... which I find hilarious, considering all the ways in which Nintendo's relationship with the YouTube community has been fraught with fraughtiness recently, but that's a different topic. For now, let's just focus on the "Switch" itself.

My immediate impressions are:

#1 - Nintendo is, yet again, "innovating" for innovation's sake, rather than going back to fundamentals. 

I've blogged before about Nintendo's total failure to understand why people loved the Wii, and why nobody wanted the WiiU, but basically it comes down to elegance of design.

The Wii had a design so elegant, so clean and simple, as to be inviting and immediately accessible to people who'd never touched a gamepad before, people who found all the complexities of modern gaming intimidating, and it sold like hotcakes. The WiiU ditched that inviting simplicity, but didn't bring enough power to the table to make it competitive even with other consoles, yet alone with PCs, and it sold like shit. There is a lesson in there which Nintendo seem determined to ignore.

We don't yet know what the Switch's specs will be, but the fact that it's a mobile/tablet form factor with removable "Joy-Cons" doesn't bode well for the potential power of the new system, and the business of Joy-Con configuration is anything but simple, especially when compared with the current dominant mobile gaming platform. Which brings us to...

#2 - Why the fuck is this a mobile gaming platform?

OK, I get it; prior to the original Wii, Nintendo's last big seller was the DS and its variants, so they're wanting to go back to the well. The problem, though, is that the DS didn't have any competition when it first launched; there were no other mobile gaming platforms at the time, and none of the others that game along were able to compete with Nintendo's established market share and loyal fanbase... at least, not until smartphones.

But that's the rub, innit? Switch does have an established, even entrenched, competitor in the form of every iOS and Android device on the planet. Everybody already has a mobile device that plays games. Nobody needs or wants another one, which is why PS Vita sold like shit.

Not only is it competing with existing mobile devices, Switch's tablet-like form-factor positions it squarely in the same space as iPad and Surface, both of which are already struggling because nobody wants tablets, either (I've blogged about that before, too).

So you have a mobile device which nobody needs, with an inconvenient form-factor that nobody wants, and complicated detachable controls which undercut the inviting simplicity that have been hallmarks of Nintendo's most successful devices, and a dock which converts the entire business into an overly-fussy, likely-underpowered console, at a time when other console makers are trying (and failing) to find ways to compete with the PCs that are currently dominating the non-mobile gaming market. What could possibly go wrong?

#3 - Local multiplayer. 

It's a nice, old-fashioned idea, which totally ignores the fact that multiplayer games are all about online and esports these days. Even ten years ago, this feature wouldn't have been much of a selling point, since it's only valuable if you know enough other players with the same devices to make this set-up work. In today's videogame market, and given the Switch's other shortcomings, the likelihood of players needing or wanting a local multiplayer feature are close to nil.

Let's be brutally honest: Only the most die-hard Nintendo fans are going to buy this thing, and there are only about 10 million of them globally. You, reading this, are probably not going to buy a Nintendo Switch; none of the people you know are going to buy a Nintendo Switch; and with a local player community of zero (or close to it), local multiplayer is a waste of resources.

Oh, and the connected Joy-Con configuration, which you use when playing at home? Apart from the missing touchscreen, which Nintendo could never figure out the use of, or tell developers the user of, the ergonomics of the connected Joy-Cons don't look much better than those of the WiiU's controller. It's probably more comfortable than it looks, but that's not saying much.

Whether Nintendo's shareholders are clueless enough to be happy about today's product reveal is anyone's guess at this point, but I'm not seeing anything here for gamers to get excited about. After months of watching the WiiU flounder, and months of suspense about "NX," this first glimpse Nintendo's next big thing is something of a letdown, and that's putting it very mildly. It's like they've crossed a WiiU with a PS Vita, ending up with a new product that should totally fail to appeal to all the same consumers who passed on both of those devices.

I'm not the only one to be underwhelmed, either.

Consider this headline at Polygon:

Nintendo’s Switch announcement could have been better
Will this “Hurt” them?

Or this one, also from Polygon:

Nintendo Switch reveal video has a surprising lack of kids
No kids allowed?

Actually, that's a damn good question; considering that kids were the main market for the DS, and families were the main market for the Wii, exactly who is the Switch's target demographic supposed to be? Who is the Switch being made for? Does Nintendo even know?

I've said before, repeatedly, that I believe this will be the last console generation. Nothing I've seen from Microsoft or Sony has changed that, so far, and Nintendo's Switch does nothing to change it, either. Of course, I'm not a Nintendo fanboy, or the sort of over-privileged, oblivious tech blogger who's spent the last year gushing over the nothingburger of VR, so we'll have to wait and see what some of them have to say. They'll probably gush over this shit, too.

NX is coming...

... does anyone still give a shit?

From Gamespot:

In a week crowded with big game releases and a new Red Dead Redemption trailer, things just got a little bit crazier. Nintendo has confirmed it will broadcast new details about the company's next big console on Thursday, October 20 at 7 AM PT/10 AM ET/3 PM BST.

According to the Japanese Nintendo Twitter, the company will release a three-minute trailer for the NX. As of yet, we don't know if we'll see games, hardware, or both. Notably, Nintendo calls the announcement a "trailer" and not a full direct presentation. We'll update this page tomorrow with a link to whatever Nintendo unveils.

So, Nintendo's basically just confirmed that the NX exists, something we've known for months, and is confirming that they're going to release a trailer for their new console, but no actual details. Not only are they pre-hyping the hype for something that won't be out for six more months, the thing that they're pre-hyping is a console that nobody much cares about, and a follow-up to the WiiU which nobody cared about. 

Seriously, this is news?

Q: If Nintendo hold a pre-hype trailer party and nobody gives a shit, does it still matter that it happened? Because I have my doubts about that.

Satya Nadella makes hilarious claims about Windows 10's open-ness

Seriously, you can't make this shit up.

From ZDNet:

When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he asked what the company's place in the world is, and how it could make the biggest contribution.

What he kept coming back to was that the company builds things that empower people to build their own things. When he looked at Microsoft, he saw software that could be a force to "democratize and empower people."

Nadella articulated what that vision means for the future of Azure, Windows, Office, Cortana, Linkedin, and more during his keynote address--on a telepresence link--at Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2016 in Orlando on Tuesday.

In conversation with Gartner analysts that featured lots of Nadella's usual well-crafted, nuanced statements, he also boldly declared:

"Windows is the most open platform there is."

Really? Windows? Not Linux, or FreeBSD, which are both open source and both free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer?

Sure, the Windows platform overall, from Windows 95 to Windows 7, has been open in the sense that anybody who wanted to write Windows software could do so -- Microsoft didn't have the ability to vet every piece of Windows software before it was released, and so didn't try to control what developers did or didn't sell for use on the platform. 

By Windows 8, though, Microsoft was already working hard to change all of that. Win8 was extremely unpopular, in no small part because it turned peoples' desktops into iOS-style App Stores, which Microsoft curated, all while taking a cut of all proceeds -- the very definition of a "walled garden," in other words, which is exactly the opposite of open. Windows 10, with its Universal Windows Platform and Windows Store bullshit baked right in, is significantly worse, not better.

The trend has clearly been going in the wrong direction for years... which is why Nadella is making this ridiculous claim to a roomful of Gartner analysts in the first place. It's damage control.

But wait! It gets better worse:

The other topic where Microsoft's approach to data privacy came up was Cortana, the company's AI-powered virtual assistant that is competing in an increasingly crowded field that includes players such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and IBM Watson.
Nadella highlighted several key principles in Microsoft's approach to privacy on Cortana:

• Whatever data we have, we have to keep it secure
• Provide transparency (users know what Cortana knows about them and can control it)
• Be compliant with regulations

That last seems to be a reference to CNIL's regulatory action, to which Microsoft is required to make an official response in the very near future. ZDNet's bullet points kinda gloss over what Nadella actually said about Cortana, though, which is a shame because it's amazeballs.

IDG's Good Gear Guide has the goods:

Cortana will operate on "four pillars," which include keeping data secure, as well transparency, meaning that users will "know exact what Cortana knows," said Nadella. There is also an ability to turn off data access. The fourth pillar is to be compliant with regulations, he said.

I've highlighted the missing pillar (i.e. the one ZDNet chose not to mention at all): the ability for users to turn off Microsoft's data access. This is especially noteworthy in today's context, since Windows 10 Home users currently can't do this. At all. Does this mean that the ability to turn off Telemetry and Cortana, and have Windows Update respect those decisions and leave the shit turned off, will be coming to Windows 10 in the near future? Because it's sure as fuck not in there now.

This is the very heart of consumers' current lack of trust where Microsoft is concerned. Nadella's team have been harvesting users' data, disregarding and resetting users' privacy settings, and forcing Cortana (and Bing!) down users' throats for months now, and now Nadella has the shitting nerve to claim that transparency and the ability to turn off data access are now "pillars" of all the Microsoft does? Seriously?

Even compliance with regulations is only something that Microsoft is doing belatedly and grudgingly, after being on the receiving end of regulatory action -- it's not something they did proactively, on principle.

When I read that quote, I was so nonplussed that I didn't really know how to respond, beyond "Fuck you, Microsoft." That's still where I am with this. 

Fuck you, Microsoft, and fuck you, Satya Nadella. After this past year, you don't get to claim that your compliance with regulations is some sort of principled stance you're taking for the sake of Windows openness as a platform, especially when everything else about Windows 10 is aimed directly at a monopolistic, walled garden, iOS App Store experience, with you as the corrupt gate-keepers, creaming your percentage off the top of every software sale to every Windows 10 user from this point forward.

Did I mention that I'm rooting for Microsoft to fail at that? Because I am. Even if I hadn't been before, I definitely would have been today, after reading about the latest bullshit to come out the mouth of Satya Nadella on the subject.

#FuckYouMicrosoft #FuckYouSatyaNadella #MonopolisticBullshit #ThatsNotWhatOpenMeans #Unreal

Diablo fans still holding their breath for a big BlizzCon announcement

Q: Why? 

A: Because they're gluttons for punishment. That's why.

Exhibit 1, from Digital Trends:

World of Warcraft: Legion just released to critical acclaim and Overwatch continues to be the best competitive game of 2016, but Blizzard’s loyalists are hoping that another popular franchise, Diablo, will also be getting some love this year. For a few hopeful fans, this could mean a full-fledged fourth game.

The rumor mill and speculation came after Blizzard North co-founder David Brevik tweeted that he was “proud to be the adviser for the game that pushes this genre [dungeon crawlers] to new heights.”

...

So, just what do these posts mean for the future of Diablo? According to Brevik, absolutely nothing. About a day after his previous tweet was posted, he released an update.

"There has been a lot of speculation (and hope), but I’m not working on the Diablo franchise currently or in the near future,” Brevik says.

Roper clarified on his account, as well, writing that it would “be an honor” to come back to Blizzard to develop a fourth game but that the stories were just rumors.

And don't forget the tetrahedral die (a "d4," in pen & paper RPG parlance) that came in BlizzCon goodie bags, and was (mis)printed so that one set of results reads "1-1-4" rather than the usual "1-1-1" -- an unmistakable reference to Nov. 4th, i.e. the opening day of BlizzCon (unless, of course, you know something about the printing of such dice, which actually get misprinted in exactly this kind of way with some regularity).

Just forget entirely the fact that the Diablo series didn't have a director until about five minutes ago (assuming they've actually hired one, that is, and not just stopped looking -- Blizzard haven't actually announced anything yet), or the fact that anonymous sources inside the company are leaking about D4 being dead, with the next Diablo project possibly being a mobile game of sort, or the fact that Diablo's booth at BlizzCon is, once again, the same size as the nearest washroom.

Brevik visited Blizzard! Surely that must mean something! Except that Brevik himself says otherwise...

These are the knots that Diablo fans have been tying themselves into for months, now, and the speculation seems to be approaching something of a fever pitch as BlizzCon draws ever nearer. And, for a wonder, Blizzard themselves are almost entirely blameless. They're not hyping anything; this time, fans are hyping themselves, aided and abetted by exploitative click-bait articles like Digital Trends'.

Gamespot did a somewhat better job, bluntly stating that "at this point, there's little reason to get excited yet," and admitting that there's been "no official indication about what the future of the Diablo series holds," but even Gamespot go on to assert that "its success guarantees it isn't going anywhere," concluding by promising to "report back with details of that event, as well as any other possible teases that emerge in the meantime." Really, nothing to see here, Diablo fans, but stay tuned anyway!

I wish that these people would just stop, already. The only new morsel of information here is a wee bit of something about Dave Brevik that was immediately debunked by Brevik himself. Diablo fans are already setting themselves up for yet another crushing disappointment -- they really don't need any help with that.

UPDATE: Not only are Brevik and Roper not advising Blizzard on another Diablo project, Brevik has actually joined rival Grinding Gear Games to consult on the upcoming launch of Path of Exile in China.

From Diabloii.net:

We now know what game David Brevik is advising on, he’s joining the Grinding Gear Games Path of Exile team in an advisory role and will help them with their launch in China.

The news comes via a press release put out by Tencent addressing Chinese Path of Exile players and news that both Chris Wilson and David Brevik will be heading to China to meet fans.

Grinding Gear’s CEO Chris Wilson confirmed the appointment and told Diabloii.Net, “David is an advisor, primarily for our launch in mainland China, but we hope to learn from his experience as much as we can over the coming months.”

The search is now on for the next Diablo-related breadcrumb that can be turned into a click-bait lede and draw some views over the next two weeks. Man, BlizzCon can't get over with soon enough...

"There's no substitute for human contact."

So says Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in this article from BuzzFeed, via CBNC:

When it comes to virtual and augmented reality, Apple is typically — and inevitably — inscrutable. As several of its biggest competitors, including Google and Microsoft, have shown their hands with augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) strategies, Apple has mostly kept a poker face. But in an exclusive interview with BuzzFeed News Japan during his visit to Tokyo, Cook clarified Apple's position a bit, suggesting the company is most interested in AR because it can enhance and amplify human experiences.

"There's no substitute for human contact," Cook told BuzzFeed News. "And so you want the technology to encourage that." It's not the first time Cook has indicated that Apple might favor AR. "We are high on AR for the long run," Cook said during an earnings call this past summer. "I think AR can be huge." Huge, indeed — one could look to the sudden and explosive success of Pokemon Go to see an immediate real-world example.

[...]

"VR, I think, has some interesting applications, but I don't think it's a broad-based technology like AR," Cook explained. "Augmented reality will take some time to get right, but I do think that it's profound. We might … have a more productive conversation, if both of us have an AR experience standing here, right? And so I think that things like these are better when they're incorporated without becoming a barrier to our talking. … You want the technology to amplify it, not to be a barrier."

The article goes into a lot more detail about Apple's AR strategy, and moves they've made towards building an AR ecosystem, and it's an interesting read, but Cook's take on VR (i.e. technology as barrier) was the thing that leapt out at me. I couldn't help but think of all the VR evangelists I've read in the last few months, many of whom were claiming that the workplace of the future was a goggled-in VR dystopia, usually with a lot of telecommuting and teleconferencing. 

Your future office won't be a VR-powered "virtual desk," I promise, but an information-augmented HUD for the workplace? That really could find more widespread use and acceptance... someday. Once they've addressed AR's shortcomings, that is.

Diablo III @ BlizzCon 2016

For months now, fan forums and games media sites have speculated breathlessly about what Blizzard might announce at the upcoming BlizzCon for their Diablo franchise. The gist of all the speculation, apparently based on a single tweet and a misprinted four-side die, is that some sort of announcement was coming, and it would be "awesome" -- whether it was a sequel, or a prequel, or a 2nd expansion, or maybe a mobile game, there would definitely be something announced in November. Surely Blizzard aren't about to let a third BlizzCon go by with nothing substantive to show their Diablo fanbase. Right?

Wrong. At least, so say Blizzard themselves.

From Battle.Net:

From all over the world, members of our community will band together to invade the halls of the Anaheim Convention Center. Whether you’re planning to be there in person or tuning in at home with the Virtual Ticket, here’s what intrepid Diablo fans can expect at BlizzCon 2016.

Diablo 20th Anniversary Panel
Get the inside scoop on what’s in store for Diablo III! Join us as Lead Designer Kevin Martens, Senior Game Designer Wyatt Cheng, Lead VFX Artist Julian Love, and Art Director John Mueller share the gritty details on the celebration plans that lie ahead for all our eager nephalem.

• What: A retrospective on Diablo’s 20-year legacy and first look into upcoming content.
• When: Friday, November 4 from 5:00 to 5:45 p.m. PDT

Diablo III Dev Talk and Q&A
Get the inside scoop and ask your burning questions about Diablo III! Join us as Lead Designer Kevin Martens, Senior Game Designer Wyatt Cheng, Senior Game Designer Adam Puhl, Senior Game Designer Joe Shely, and Senior Game Designer Travis Day review upcoming content and features for Diablo III and take live questions from the audience.

• What: A deep-dive and Q&A on the content and features headed to Diablo III.
• When: Saturday, November 5 from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. PDT

Darkmoon Faire: Quick Talks
Similar to the miniature panel-like chats we had last year at the Slaughtered Calf Inn, quick talks are making a return at this year’s Darkmoon Faire! Join our developers as they share insider details about their most passionate Diablo projects and hang out after to chat about your favorite Diablo memories.

• What: A series of quick talks from our developers on various aspects of Diablo III.
• When: Friday, November 4 at 1:30 p.m. PDT and Saturday, November 5 at 12:30 p.m PDT

This should look very familiar to Diablo fans, since it's basically the same lineup of events from BlizzCon 2015, where they had one panel (which opened with 20 minutes of the D3 devs enthusing about their love of Diablo's "legacy"), an announcement of patch 2.4's content (mention of new D3 content is notably absent in 2016's announced events), and the Slaughtered Calf Inn, a space smaller than the nearest washroom and located behind the face-painting booth, where players could chat informally with the D3 dev team (most of whom have now either left D3, or left Blizzard entirely). 2016's offerings appear to be slightly more formal than the Slaughtered Calf Inn, but no more substantive; in fact, if anything, there's less substance on offer.

In 2016, Diablo fans will get 45 minutes in which Blizzard will try to convince them that they really did love the Blizzard North Diablo games, 1 hour in which they'll answer (some) questions about the current state of the game, and a series of "quick talks" in which the remaining D3 devs will talk about other Blizzard games, and reminisce about their time at Blizzard, generally.

That's it. That's all Diablo fans are going to get, this BlizzCon. And, yes, the Diablo area is, once again, the same size as the nearest washroom. To say that Diablo fans are underwhelmed would be something of an understatement.

I wish I could say that I was surprised, but I'm not.

Make your Win10 PC work like new again

From Gizmodo's Field Guide:

Reinstalling Windows is an easy way to fix a PC that’s been giving you problems. It can resolve most common issues including lagging to mysterious app crashes. With Windows 10, it’s easier to do than ever before. Here’s how to get that brand new PC feeling on your machine.

Microsoft went ahead and made it insanely easy to reinstall Windows 10 by building the option right into the operating system. Some of you probably remember the old days, when it was much harder and required system discs, hard drive reformatting, tedious backup processes, and service packs. Luckily for us, Microsoft realized reinstalling Windows is a great way to fix a broken PC.

Oy vey. Just to refresh your memory here, Windows 10 is a brand new operating system, that most people only installed on their PCs a few months ago. In spite of its newness, and the fact that it's supposed to be the best version of Windows ever, made even better by Microsoft's next-level Update process, we're already seeing articles on the virtues of a clean install. 

Do you know how long it's been since I last felt compelled to do a clean install of Windows 7, because my PC was running like crap and a clean slate felt like a good idea? Neither do I. It's been years. In fact, I don't think I've done a clean install this PC's OS since I bought this PC, now over three years ago, but apparently, if I'd switched to Windows 10, I'd already be itching to do a clean install of my brand-new OS because it runs like shit. 

Did I mention today, how glad I am, that I didn't get conned into "upgrading" to this mess?

Fuck you, Microsoft!

Apparently, the process of doing a clean install is easier than ever, so you can go read Gizmodo's article for the details. Or, you can backup your files, wipe your hard drive, and reintall Windows 7, or Windows 8, both of which should work just fine until at least 2020 without the need for another clean install in the interim. Just saying.

Windows 10 can auto-remove software without asking you first.

This one is totally obvious, really, if you've thought about it.

Logically, if Windows Update can re-add bloatware apps that you'd deliberately removed, then it has to be able to remove apps that you'd deliberately added, too; it's exactly the same problem that Amazon's Kindles have run into before, with users losing access to books that they'd already paid for, if Amazon decides to de-list the book from their available ebook catalogue.

Makes sense, right? A horrible sort of sense, in which the things you "buy" aren't so much bought as rented, and can be denied to you at any time,  but sense nonetheless. This is the entire point of Software as a Service (SaaS). The idea is that you'll never buy software again; instead, you'll pay for licences to use the software, for so long as the company that you paid for that licence deign to continue allowing you the access for which you've paid.

Remember when Microsoft had "side-loading" disabled by default in Windows 10? Remember how virulent the reaction was to that, and how quickly Microsoft backtracked, even though they've mostly ignored user feedback about every other aspect of Windows 10? This was why that happened.

SaaS is not without advantages, and Steam has proven pretty conclusively that consumers will happily embrace SaaS if it's presented and managed properly, but SaaS also comes with a lot of downside, and Windows users insisted so loudly on retaining alternatives to SaaS (aka the Windows Store) that Microsoft ended up giving it to them.

So, given all of that, why exactly is Jack Lloyd of The American Genius so gobsmacked to discover that your Win10/UWP apps can be removed from your system without your prior consent by Microsoft's fiat?

Given the widespread nature of Windows 10, it’s easy to see why so many consumers have it installed across their devices. If, however, you are one of the six or seven people who haven’t yet downloaded Windows 10, perhaps you should hold off—a recent development has shown that the pesky OS will remove and reconfigure your programs and files without authorization.

[...]

Common issues so far have ranged anywhere from resetting quick actions to defaults, to changing the actual location of custom files. Windows 10 has also been accused of removing various programs and drivers—none of which are essential, of course, but most of which are user-installed and thereby user-preferred.

Although the aforementioned resets and migrations are admittedly no more than a mild irritant in the long run, some Windows 10 alterations are more detrimental. If you use AVG—also known as the “I swear I’ll buy the full program next time” simulator — Windows 10 is liable to decide that the popular antivirus program’s services aren’t good enough for you.

Obviously, having your antivirus program deleted without warning comes with a bounty of potentially harmful side effects, and while Windows 10 does replace AVG with its own preferred suite, the resulting compatibility shift may still create holes in your defense.

[...]

As a computer owner, you should be able to depend on your PC performing basic maintenance and updates autonomously without having to worry about extraneous or unauthorized system overhauls. When operating systems take too much initiative, it can feel like an invasion; as such, Windows 10 makes for an uneasy partner in the PC world.

I can agree with Jack Lloyd that Windows' betrayal of user trust is easily its worst offense, and worse than any of its myriad technical issues, but none of this is news. Critics of Windows 10 have been pointing out all of these issues for well over a year now.

Welcome to the party, Jack! I guess it's better you arrive late than never, but a lot of people who switched to Windows 10 on the strength of breathless hype from tech bloggers just like you are probably thinking that they'd have loved for your "come to Jesus" moment to have happened a long time ago.

(By the way, some of those resets and migrations were a lot more than a mild irritant. Just saying.)

Yes, users should be able to depend on their OS to peform basic maintenance and updated without having to worry about it rolling back their privacy settings to the factory defaults, or installing and uninstalling software on their systems without their knowledge or consent, or gathering a ton of their metadata and transmitting it somewhere in the cloud, with no ability for those users to opt out. 

Hell, users should have been given a meaningful choice about whether or not to install the damn OS in the first place, but that didn't happen, either; the fact that so many users are still using Windows 7 and 8 speaks strongly to how many users went to a lot of trouble to avoid "upgrading."

Yes, the betrayal of their customers' trust is the worst sin that Microsoft committed during their heavy-handed GWX campaign, and one they still haven't repented of, confessed to, or atoned for; its stench will be lingering on everything that Microsoft do for a long, long time. It takes a long time to build a relationship of trust, and very little time to undermine it completely; rebuilding such a relationship, though, is a lot harder than building it in the first place.

Microsoft have recently announced that a future update will turn off their ability to reinstalled removed bloatware via Windows Update; perhaps that same update will address the issue of Update removing software from your system that you'd chosen to install. Of course, the problem with turning it off via Update is that they can always decide to turn it back on later, when the heat is off and they feel they can get away with it, because the functionality is built into the OS.

Microsoft's crisis of confusion

While writing my previous blog post, I found my way to another op/ed by John Brandon at Computer World, which is also well worth a read:

Microsoft is a gargantuan company.

They have 114,000 employees. They make a popular gaming console, the only viable operating system used by more people than anyone by far, and have their toes dipped in every conceivable market segment, from consumer chatbots to social media for business. There’s no question the company competes easily with Apple and Google for the top crown of all technology, assuming you can forgive them for Windows 8.

Yet, they have a major problem in the age of immediate access from anywhere. Bowing out of the smartphone market is not as troubling as a much more serious issue related to usability: Microsoft has a crisis of confusion.

Here’s a good example. Let’s say you want to play the game Gears of War 4 on your PC. Anyone who pre-ordered the game for Xbox One can play starting today, and Play Anywhere means you can download the game on Windows for free. But where do you find it? You can search using the Xbox app, but that doesn’t work. You can try going to Microsoft.com or Xbox.com and checking there, but that doesn’t work, either. In fact, the only way to find the game is through a rat’s nest. You have to go to the Windows store app, login with your Xbox account (not your Windows account), and then click a tiny avatar icon. (By the way, this icon is for Windows, not for Xbox.) There’s an option called My Library in that menu, but it’s not a tab on the main screen. Then, you have to select all apps, because only a few are listed. Finally, you find the game.

[...]

This maze of confusion is just as startling if you try to figure out how to use a new app like Microsoft MyAnalytics, which is designed for personal productivity data. Hashtag irony. It doesn’t help at all that the name used to be Delve Analytics. How do you get the app? Don’t ask me, I have no idea. It’s included for free in something called the Office 365 E5 plan and in the Office 365 enterprise suite. I’m pretty sure Office 365 is an estimate on the number of days you need to allocate to figuring this all out.

[...]

It makes me wonder if anyone at Microsoft ever thinks about making the ecosystem work better. In other words, more like the one for Apple and Google. If I own Gears of War 4, and if the price includes dual platform support on Windows and Xbox, I shouldn’t have to figure out which icons to click. For a massive, iconic company like Microsoft to stay massive and iconic in the coming age of immediate mobile access, they will have to figure out how to make this work smoother. On a desktop, you click around until you find the right option. On a mobile device while you’re waiting for an Uber to show up, you don’t have time. Things either work right away or you move on.

Microsoft, are you listening?

No, John Brandon, I don't think they are. In fact, I think that all of Microsoft's problems in the last year can be explained up by Microsoft not listening: not to users' privacy concerns about Windows 10; nor to users' clearly and often-expressed wishes to not upgrade to Windows 10 in the first place; nor to users' desires to control their PCs' privacy settings and update cycle; nor to users' desire to install updates individually, rather than in a single, monthly, inadequately-tested and bug-ridden lump.

Microsoft is a gargantuan company, and they clearly think that being that large means that they can do whatever the fuck they want, regardless of what their customers want or need. Only time will tell whether or not they're right about that; whether or not they really are too big to actually fail. As someone who's been actively rooting for them to fail for months, now, I'm hoping that Microsoft are wrong about this; I'm hoping that their cavalier attitude towards what their customers are clearly telling them results in more lost market share for their flagship product. Either way, we'll know in a few weeks.

I do need to correct Mr. Brandon on one point: Microsoft may make the most viable desktop (and laptop) OS, but they don't make the OS "used by more people than anyone by far." Since 2015, Google's Android has had the largest installed base of all operating systems (OS) of any kind; it's been the best selling OS on tablets since 2013, and it's dominant by every metric on smartphones. As Brandon himself notes, the mobile market counts, and Microsoft isn't even a player there, let alone the dominant player.

Brandon's entire piece is still well worth reading, though, so go give the man some clicks.

Windows 10 runs again — but for how long?

Interesting op/ed by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ComputerWorld:

Almost a week after some Windows 10 PCs got trapped in reboot hell, Microsoft finally issued a patch — make that “a kludge of a script” — to finally enable affected Windows 10 users to get their machines working again.

The fix, “Windows 10 1607 Script fix to unblock update for Windows Insiders,” doesn’t explain what’s going on. It does work, however.

That’s nice. I’m glad that my Windows 10 PC is up and running again. Thanks.

I’d still like to know what the heck happened. The note that accompanied news of the fix wasn’t exactly informative. It reads:

We became aware of an issue with the recent Windows 10 cumulative update that impacted a small number of customers in the Windows Insider Program that were running a previous build of the OS. We have created a solution to resolve this issue.

Small? One thread on the Microsoft forums currently has 383 replies. On most online groups I’ve known and run over the years, only one in a hundred people actively comment. If that ratio holds true, that’s 38,000-plus users.

That’s not many out of tens of millions of users, perhaps, but it’s still too many for a showstopping bug.

The issue, apparently, was a scheduled task that Windows Update added to users' PCs, meant to save XBox Live games. The problem is that it runs in the background even if (like Mr. Vaughan-Nichols) you don't have any XBox Live games to save, and haven't played an XBox Live game in years. Microsoft enabled a total system failure by way of an obscure registry entry for a program that most users will never have used, and don't intend to use, all in the name of integrating XBox Live with Windows 10.

Even worse, the workaround wasn't actually developed by Microsoft (credit apparently belongs to a Windows 10 Insider by the name of Dr. Peter Farquhasson), and it can't be installed via Windows Update -- users must revert to an older, still-working version of the OS, and then execute the script. This, in Microsoft's brave new Windows 10 world, is what progress looks like.

Have I mentioned today, how very glad I am, that I didn't "upgrade" to this mess?

Vaughan-Nichols has a couple of ideas about how Microsoft could have avoided this problem, beginning with better quality assurance. "Even as Microsoft has gotten much better with its server and cloud offerings," he writes, "Windows seems to be taking second place and becoming second rate," issues which apparently still extend to the Windows 10 Store.

Also, he writes,

It might also have been helpful if Microsoft still let you install only those patches you need rather than one large blob of updates. It’s bad enough that Microsoft has made this the default update system for Windows 10, but it is also bringing the rollup patch model to Windows 7, 8.1, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012 and Server 2012 R2, starting on Oct. 11.

This is going to be so much fun!

Yeah. I'm thrilled. Can you tell how thrilled I am?

As Vaughan-Nichols concludes, "Windows has been fixed — sort of — now. But, it’s only a matter of time before it breaks again." Given how terribly Microsoft has handled absolutely everything about Windows 10's maintenance so far, starting with the Anniversary Update itself and continuing through every patch since, I have a strong feeling that he's right about that. And it isn't just Windows 10 users who will be affected by their incompetence; with this same broken update regimen coming to Windows 7 and 8, too, this is going to affect every Windows user.

GG, Microsoft. That's some next-level end game.

Linux is looking like a better idea with each passing day. Did I mention that I've bought a 2nd hard drive, specifically for use as a Linux partition? Now I just have to get off my lazy ass and install the damn thing... and then install Linux on the damn thing. I don't think I'm the only one, either, who's contemplating making that shift.

PC industry is now 2 years into its longest sales decline in history

From The Verge:

The state of the PC industry is not looking great. According to analyst firm Gartner, worldwide PC shipments fell 5.7 percent in the third quarter of 2016 to 68.9 million units. That marks the "the eighth consecutive quarter of PC shipment decline, the longest duration of decline in the history of the PC industry," Gartner writes in a press release issued today. The firm cites poor back-to-school sales and lowered demand in emerging markets. But the larger issue, as it has been for quite some time, is more existential than that.

"The PC is not a high priority device for the majority of consumers, so they do not feel the need to upgrade their PCs as often as they used to," writes Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa. "Some may never decide to upgrade to a PC again." The threat, of course, comes from smartphones, which have more aggressive upgrade cycles than PCs and have over time grown powerful enough to compete with desktop and laptop computers at performing less intensive tasks. Tablets too have become more capable, with Apple pushing its iPad Pro line as a viable laptop replacement.

Declining PC sales are not news -- I'd blogged about this back in June, and again in July -- but it appears that the trends that we were seeing months ago are continuing to trend, rather than reversing. CPUs just aren't increasing in power at the same rate that they used to, and the widespread adoption of mobile devices (which have less processing power and storage space than a desktop or or laptop rig) has inspired software developers to learn all over again how to write efficient code. Even Oculus has figured out a way to reduce the Rift's required PC specs from $1500 systems to $600 systems.

Added to that, nearly a quarter of Windows users just upgraded their operating systems, something which used to entail buying a new PC; the rest won't need a new OS, or a new PC, for years. Hell, I'm a PC gamer, part of a group that has spent years in a continuous upgrade cycle, and I'm not planning to replace my 3-year-old PC for another 3 years. I'm upgrading the graphics card to something that's Vulkan-ready, but beyond that, I just don't need any more PC; my current rig is still doing everything I need it to just fine, and that doesn't look like it's going to change any time soon.

Previous industry projections didn't show PC sales increasing again until 2018, at the earliest, and even smartphone and tablet sales are levelling off now that everyone owns a phone that's "good enough." Since the projected billions in VR sales aren't going to emerge, either, any more than 3DTV sales did, I expect consumer electronics companies will have a tough time continuing to grow revenue year-over-year, not just this year but for years to come. I'm not expecting 4K TVs to make up their shortfalls, either. 

It's probably only matter of time before PC makers start laying off employees to cut costs and convince shareholders of their determination to return to profitability, but their problem isn't inefficiency, or a lack of productivity in their worforce; their problem is market forces which are largely beyond their control. I have a feeling that we're about to see a culling of the weak in consumer electronics and PC manufacture; the question isn't if any of these giants will fall, but how many of them fall, and how long it takes them to do so.