Reaping what they've sown

Well, that sure didn't take long.

Just hours after news broke that Microsoft's would stop providing Windows 10 updates to users of older hardware, pieces railing against Microsoft have started popping up like a bad rash.Like this one, from Tech Republic: "Windows 10: Five reasons to avoid Microsoft's flagship OS."

In many ways, Windows has never been less important.

As Windows 10 approaches its second anniversary, PC users are spoilt for choice when it comes to the operating systems and software they can use.

With Microsoft's sometimes capricious and occasionally obnoxious treatment of Windows users, perhaps it's time to skip its flagship OS.

Here are five reasons you might want to drop Windows 10 or give it a miss.

Top of the list? "Uncertainty over support for older PCs."

In 2015, Microsoft pledged that Windows 10 PCs would "evolve and get even better over time".

That evolution recently skidded to a halt for millions of PCs, after owners of Intel Atom Clover Trail-based laptops discovered their PCs would no longer be updated with new features.

The decision to cast these PCs adrift from future feature updates stemmed from the chipset no longer being supported by Intel.

However, the decision throws a cloud of uncertainty over people using Windows 10 on older PCs. How long before other laptops that use unsupported hardware find themselves similarly stranded, without access to the latest features?

As highlighted by ZDNet's Steve Ranger, Microsoft's decision introduces a level of uncertainty that wasn't present with earlier versions of Windows, with their fixed deadlines for the end of mainstream and extended support.

This anti-Windows 10 argument did not exist two weeks ago. It's an absolutely unforced error; Microsoft have brought this on themselves.

"Removal of your favorite features" (Paint, anyone?), is next on the list, followed by "Windows 10 tries to railroad you" (Microsoft's bullshit with Edge, Bing, Cortana, and OneDrive have not gone unnoticed, either, it would seem), "There's no need to use Windows" (Linux, anybody?), and finally "Better to stick with what you know."

More people still use Windows 7 than any other version of Windows.

Despite repeated messages from Microsoft about the dangers of sticking with Windows 7, the OS will continue to be patched against the latest hacks until January 2020.
Those who just want a solid Windows desktop, have no need for the integrated cloud services and regard features like Paint 3D as frivolous, will likely be just as happy with Windows 7.

They'll also bypass the additional hassle that comes with Windows 10, the badgering to sign into a Microsoft account and the major updates that in the past have broken swathes of systems.

Interestingly, while intrusive adverts get a mention, there's no mention of privacy issues or data collection in this piece; apparently there are now plenty of other cons for Windows 10 without continuing to beat those particular drums. But with members of the tech media now (finally) recommending Linux as not only a viable alternative to Microsoft's bullshit, but maybe a better one, and openly advocating staying on Windows 7 rather than switching to a "new" OS that might not be supported on your system for any length of time at all...

Well, let's just say that there are reasons why I'm not expecting Windows 10 to suddenly take flight this year, especially after Microsoft's latest blunder.

Windows 10 will now require up-to-date hardware

Just in case you thought Microsoft's "Clover Trail" Atom debacle was some kind of aberration, Microsoft have now made it official: if they don't feel your hardware, you won't get any more Windows 10 updates. Period.

From Gordon Kelly at Forbes:

Right now Windows 10 is undergoing a massive upgrade to the so-called ‘Creators Update’. But suddenly Microsoft has confirmed millions of Windows 10 users will never get it…

Speaking to PC World, Microsoft said that despite pledging Windows 10 feature updates until October 13th 2020, this will now depend on users running relatively modern hardware. In short: if a manufacturer stops supporting your hardware at any point then Microsoft may not longer upgrade your version of Windows 10.

“Recognizing that a combination of hardware, driver and firmware support is required to have a good Windows 10 experience, we updated our support lifecycle policy to align with the hardware support period for a given device,” Microsoft said in a statement.

“If a hardware partner stops supporting a given device or one of its key components and stops providing driver updates, firmware updates, or fixes, it may mean that device will not be able to properly run a future Windows 10 feature update.”

And the result of a device or component no longer being supported is severe. When updating users will simply receive the message: “Windows 10 is no longer supported on this PC”.

And to make matters worse, at present Windows 10 will not tell users which piece of hardware is responsible for the cancellation. A user will have to check every part of their PC, from the processor and RAM to the hard drive, graphics and network card.

This brutal (and frankly over generalised) decision follows in the wake of Microsoft blocking Windows 10 Creators Update upgrades for computers using older Intel Atom ‘Clover Trail’ processors without warning or explanation. Conversely it also said new Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Ryzen silicon will also be made incompatible with older versions of Windows to force them onto Windows 10.

Brutal snobbery: confirmed.

Once again, Darth Microsoft is altering the deal, making Windows 10 look like an ever-less-attractive option for organizations (and individuals) who may not want to be forced to upgrade all of their hardware in order to switch to an operating system that they're not what wild about, to start with. Still, even with the banality-of-evil tone of this new announcement, something feels slightly different about this latest broken promise by the Redmond crew. Given how horrible the optics of this are, and how self-destructive this move should be to Microsoft's attempts to woo enterprise customers over to Windows 10, I have to think that this is almost entirely a cost-cutting measure.

After laying off unknown thousands of their staff, Microsoft are clearly not done cutting costs in their stagnant Windows 10 operations, as they shift focus to the Azure and other cloud services. Supporting the entire range of Windows-capable hardware wasn't luring users over to the new OS, so it makes a brutal sort of sense to stop doing that, awful PR be damned. It's possible that this was always the plan, that Microsoft never planned to continue supporting older hardware in spite of promising to do so, but it doesn't feel like that to me; it feels like Microsoft's ongoing failure to lure customers to Windows 10 is starting to stress their organization and operations, more broadly. The cracks have been slow to show, but this might be the cracks starting to show, no matter what their share price is doing on any given day.

Q: How unpopular is Windows 8?

A: So unpopular that AMD won't support it with Radeon driver updates anymore.

From The Guru of 3D:

Yesterday AMD released their Radeon Crimson ReLive Edition Driver v17.7.2 (download), and some of you have asked me if I know where the Windows 8.1 drivers are. That indeed is a fair question, as they are missing.

Earlier on Windows 8.1 32-bit support was already halted, and we as well noticed that there has not been a 8.1 64-bit driver available ever since yesterday either. I just asked AMD to see what is going on there, and it is confirmed that there will no longer be any new Windows 8.1 drivers for Radeon graphics cards. The install base is just too small, and yes you should be moving onwards to Windows 10. Obviously previous driver releases are still available (we have them mirrored here). Here is what we got back from AMD:

"We no longer support Windows 8.1 officially with consumer postings. If users want to use the Windows 7 driver on Windows 8.1 then that is their choice."

That's right: Windows 7 (released in 2009) still has a sufficiently healthy install base, and will keep getting Radeon driver updates for the foreseeable future, but Windows 8.1 (released in 2013) will not. And Windows 8.1 was the "popular" version of Windows 8. That, ladies and germs, is a flop.

On the plus side, AMD's Radeon GPUs were not nearly as popular with gamers during the Windows 8.1 years and NVidia's GeForce series, so there probably aren't too many people affected by this. Whether those users move "onwards" to Windows 10, or roll back to Windows 7 (still supported by AMD, because still popular), will be interesting to see.

Adobe's Flash is mostly dead, and its remaining days are numbered.

The terminal prognosis comes from Adobe themselves.

From ZDNet:

Adobe finally has drawn a line in the sand, noting that Flash will no longer be supported after 2020.

Microsoft officials said they'd do their part to wind down Flash support in the company's Internet and Edge browsers, so that Flash support will be entirely removed from Windows by the end of 2020, as well. [...] Google, Mozilla and Apple also are committing to dropping Flash support by 2020 in their respective browsers. 

Adobe Flash was once the way that video played on the internet, including sites like YouTube, but HTML5 has been displacing it for a while now - most of the sites that I visit on the regular don't use Flash for anything except ads, which I mostly block. Still, after so many years of ubiquity, I'll admit that it's a little strange to see Adobe themselves finally pulling the plug on Flash.

Fare thee well, Adobe Flash! I won't exactly miss you, but it's going to be a little strange not having you around anymore.

Microsoft "caves," puts Classic Paint on the Windows Store for free.

Behold! A ridiculous story reaches its inevitable conclusion.

From CNBC:

Microsoft is not killing off its Paint app in the next update of Windows 10, the company said late on Monday, after fears that the iconic software could be ditched.

[...]

Fans on social media decried the potential death of Paint, which has been in existence for 32 years.

But Microsoft released a blog post shortly after to clarify that Paint would not be completely removed, but instead made available via the Windows Store for free.

"Today, we've seen an incredible outpouring of support and nostalgia around MS Paint. If there's anything we learned, it's that after 32 years, MS Paint has a lot of fans. It's been amazing to see so much love for our trusty old app," Megan Saunders, a general manager at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post on Monday.

"Amidst today's commentary around MS Paint we wanted to take this opportunity to set the record straight, clear up some confusion and share some good news: MS Paint is here to stay, it will just have a new home soon, in the Windows Store where it will be available for free."

I still say that the outcry over Paint not actually being removed from Windows 10 in the Fall Creators Update was ridiculous, but Microsoft putting the classic app in the Windows Store, right alongside Paint 3D, and also for free, was probably inevitable. Microsoft have suffered a lot of well-earned bad PR recently; "caving" (without really caving) to fans of Paint was an easy win, and I'm not surprised they took it.

Now can we get back to holding Microsoft's feet to the fire over shit that actually matters?

Today in Windows 10...

We're definitely into the summer doldrums, with very little of anything happening, but here are two tidbits that caught my eye today.

First up, from Mike Wheatley at siliconANGLE:

Although Microsoft Corp. probably deserves a ten out of ten for the efforts its made to make Windows 10 more enterprise friendly, it turns out the operating system is only slightly more popular than the aging Windows XP among business users.

That’s the main takeaway from a new survey on Windows 10 adoption by information technology network Spiceworks Inc. The survey found that Windows XP, which is by now most likely riddled with security holes as it no longer receives regular updates, is still being run on 11 percent of business PCs, down from 14 percent in March. That compares to just 13 percent of business PCs running Windows 10.

“Despite the gains in Windows 10 penetration, the absolute share of computers running the OS remains relatively low,” said Peter Tsai, senior technology analyst at Spiceworks.

Both operating systems remain a long way behind Microsoft’s legendary Windows 7 operating system, which is running on 68 percent of all enterprise PCs, Spiceworks found. However, Windows 10 does at least come second with its 13 percent adoption rate, and its overall share has improved markedly in recent months – back in March, it was only running on nine percent of business computers, Spiceworks said.

Ouch.

Bear in mind that Windows 10 is the future of Microsoft, on which they've basically bet the farm at this point; with general usage languishing at or below the 26% mark for months, Microsoft was counting on business adoption to make their Windows 10 strategy work. If these numbers are to be believe, then that isn't happening yet, at least not in any big way; the fact that Windows 10 is only finally outperforming the nearly sixteen year old Windows XP, after everything that Microsoft has done, must surely speak to some significant underlying issues. I doubt that the recent revelation that older hardware may not be supported by future Windows 10 builds will help, either.

I'll admit, I am looking forward to the end-of-July NetMarketShare stats, but I'm not expecting Microsoft to make any changes to their approach this year. Thousands of annual layoffs and stagnant market growth for their flagship product notwithstanding, the markets seem generally bullish on MSFT these days, which gives Satya Nadella all the cover he needs to keep right on failing.

That's all for tidbit one, though. Tidbit two is getting a lot more coverage, like this piece in The Reg:

We now return you to the Singularity, already in progress...

When it comes to truly autonomous self-driving vehicles, or capital-"a" Autos, it's helpful to remember that this cost- and life-saving technology doesn't need to be perfect in order to see widespread adoption; as CGP Grey put it, they just need to be better than us. And here's the thing; they already are better than us. Waymo's Auto has been in only 14 crashes during testing, of which 13 were caused by the human drivers that the AI had to share the road with; only one was caused by the Auto's software.

With a safety record like that, there was never any question that Autos would find their way onto our roads. The only question was, "When?" How long would it take the general public to accept the presence of self-driving vehicles on our roads? How long would public unease with these new AI drivers prompt risk-averse politicians to drag their feet on giving approval for automakers to bring these autonomous autos to market?

Well, we now know some of the answers to those questions. The general public may still be working their way around to a general acceptance of this new tech, but it seems that the politicians are all done with the foot-dragging, as of last Wednesday.

From Reuters:

A U.S. House panel on Wednesday approved a sweeping proposal by voice vote to allow automakers to deploy up to 100,000 self-driving vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards and bar states from imposing driverless car rules.

Representative Robert Latta, a Republican who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee overseeing consumer protection, said he would continue to consider changes before the full committee votes on the measure, expected next week. The full U.S. House of Representatives will not take up the bill until it reconvenes in September after the summer recess.

[...]

Democrats praised the bipartisan proposal but said they want more changes before the full committee takes it up, including potentially adding other auto safety measures.

[...]

Separately, Republican Senator John Thune, who is working with Democrats, said Wednesday he hopes to release a draft self-driving car reform bill before the end of July. 

AI does not need to be super-intelligent to completely reshape the way we do everything; automation technologies are already good enough to replace forty to fifty percent of the work force, and the impact that will have on society is incalculable. Self-driving Autos alone can replace cab drivers (Uber and Lyft are both working on this) and truck drivers (long-haul transportation, in particular, would benefit) long before consumers get around to replacing all of their personal transports with a shiny, new, auto. The economic impact of that can't be understated; it's not just the drivers' jobs that would be replaced, but also the related businesses, like truck stops, that would suddenly find themselves obsolete, and their employees looking for increasingly rare employment.

If you were thinking that this change was decades away, then think again. The benefits of Autos, in increased safety and productivity, are simply too compelling to ignore, and the only voices that might be inclined to fight against it (i.e. labour unions) just aren't influential enough, anymore, to be able to turn the tide. This is happening. Self-driving cabs and long-haul trucks will be playing city streets and highways across the continental U.S. in a matter of just a few years, with other countries doubtless following close behind, and industrialized society will never be the same again.

This is the Singularity, happening in slow motion. AI may still be well short of the super-intelligent mark, or even human-equivalent general intelligence, but it turns out that those things are not necessary for the Singularity to occur. There's a reason why governments across the industrialized world are already looking into things like Universal Basic Income as a way of caring for the basic needs of a populace who will find themselves not merely unemployed, but unemployable, within our lifetimes, through absolutely no fault of their own.

What will society look like when 40% of the population having nothing but time on their hands? What happens when simply having a job becomes a weird sort of status symbol, instead of being simply the baseline assumption that drives our perceptions of ourselves, and of each other? I don't know; I don't think anybody knows. But the U.S. congress, in a rare display of bipartisan agreement, have just decided that everybody, both within the U.S. and without, are about to find out.

We now return you to the Singularity, already in progress.

Windows as a (dis)service

Credit for the pithy title goes to Paul Thurrott, who has penned an article of the same title:

Microsoft's support matrix for Windows 10 was already, I think, unsustainable. But now they've added the first of what will clearly be a never-ending series of one-off exceptions that will require them to develop security fixes for older, otherwise unsupported versions of Windows 10 on an arbitrarily-extended timeline. And to do so only for very specific PC configurations.

Let me put this simply: Windows as a Service is not just unsustainable, it's impossible.

The plan, supposedly, was that Microsoft would support just two versions of Windows 10 at any given time. With the new schedule, in which Microsoft releases two major Windows 10 version upgrades---"feature updates"---each year, that means that no individuals should ever be running a version of Windows 10 that is more than one year old. You know, in theory.

But in this context, "support" doesn't just mean "you get new feature updates." Here, the word is used more broadly: Users running a non-supported version of Windows 10 will no longer receive the "quality updates" that Microsoft hammers us with every single month, not to mention the other cumulative updates that seem to come flying through Windows Update at least once a month as well. If you're using a Windows 10 version that is over a year old, your PC is literally unsupported.

Except, of course, that Microsoft has a really hard time breaking with the past. And it has shown again and again that it will bend the rules to be inclusive to anyone who complains loud enough. As it is doing here. And will do again. And again, and again.

But individuals are small fry in this equation: The biggest exceptions to the Windows as a Service plan arrive via Microsoft's business customers. This group, notoriously uninterested in keeping their PCs up-to-date, is given a series of exceptions that basically get bigger and bigger the more they pay.

Having just finished updating an earlier blog post with my musings on how this latest fiasco would affect Windows 10 enterprise adoption rates, this last point seems particularly relevant to me. In fact, I'm not even sure that anyone would need to pay, in order to get the exceptions made; after all, Atom PC users certainly didn't.

Microsoft desperately needs to increase Windows 10's adoption rate, which means that they desperately need enterprise and institutional customers to switch. Those users are not going to want to replace all of their PCs in the process, so Microsoft is going to have to carve out an endless number of these exceptions, while still trying to pump out two content-rich feature updates annually -- something they haven't yet managed to do, even once, without serious issues. Which means that Windows-as-a-Service is basically dead, in the same way that UWP is basically dead; both of them went terminal the moment that Microsoft made it clear that they themselves aren't embracing their own new paradigm.

Thurrott sums up the situation thusly:

My issue isn't the chips, or the PCs, or the people, it's that Windows as a Service is unsustainable, and will not work. It's that Windows is itself too complex, too full of legacy baloney, to ever be maintained like service. And as I've argued previously, Android and iOS---both of which are more modern than Windows 10 and not burdened by legacy hardware or software---only receive one major feature update per year. Why on earth does Windows 10 receive two? It just doesn't make any sense.

And by the way, I just noted yesterday that the Creators Update is being deployed far more slowly than its predecessor. Which means that when the next version of Windows 10 is released in September, we're going to have fewer PCs than ever, as a percentage, on the latest version when that happens. More to the point, Microsoft's slowing of feature updates pretty much says implicitly what I'm saying explicitly: If this system worked, the Creators Update would be (reasonably) fully deployed already.

Windows as a Service will collapse under its own weight. In fact, I believe it already has.

What can I say? I agree entirely. In fact, the situation is even worse than this, for Microsoft.

Windows' backwards compatibility, and the huge library of legacy applications to which Windows users have access, is its single biggest advantage, compared to other operating systems. People do not use Windows because they love Windows, or Microsoft, per se; people use Windows because everybody runs Windows. To undermine this central feature of Windows is to destroy its value, but the Windows-as-a-Service model is fundamentally incompatible with this value proposition.

That's Microsoft's dilemma. Their entire corporate strategy relies on altering the paradigm of Windows, on changing the way people think of, and relate to, the PCs that they use for work and play on a daily basis. But to change the paradigm of Windows is to make it into something completely different, and inferior, to what Windows has been for decades. Change the paradigm, and what you have isn't really Windows anymore; change the paradigm, and people may as well switch to Linux, or Android.

Thurrott's article covers a lot more ground, and in a lot more detail, than the few bits that I've excerpted; it's one of that site's "premium" offering, but a basic sign-up (covering three premium articles a month) is free, and Thurrott is one of the more insightful writers covering Microsoft's doings; I heartily recommend signing up, and giving the whole thing a read.

UPDATE:

More solid coverage of this issue from Mark Hachman at PC World:

No Windows 10 Creators Update for you, Microsoft says—at least, not if you happen to be the unlucky owner of certain older Atom-based Windows devices, and other aging models in the future. After stories arose of failed attempts to upgrade such hardware to the Creators Update, Microsoft confirmed late Wednesday that any hardware device that falls out of the manufacturer’s support cycle may be ineligible for future Windows 10 updates.

In the case of the four “Clover Trail” processors (part of the Cloverview platform) that have fallen into Intel's End of Interactive Support phase, they will be ineligible for the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft confirmed. Instead, they’ll simply be offered the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, plus security updates through January, 2023, the end of the original Windows 8.1 support period.

The problem, however, is that Microsoft’s language opens up the possibility that any unsupported hardware device could be excluded from future Windows 10 updates. “Recognizing that a combination of hardware, driver and firmware support is required to have a good Windows 10 experience, we updated our support lifecycle policy to align with the hardware support period for a given device,” Microsoft said in a statement. “If a hardware partner stops supporting a given device or one of its key components and stops providing driver updates, firmware updates, or fixes, it may mean that device will not be able to properly run a future Windows 10 feature update.”

Why this matters: For years, the rule of thumb was that you could run virtually any operating system on top of any Intel, AMD (or even Cyrix) hardware. Chances are that it would run, if slowly. Over time, though, things changed. As malware became more potent, running a supported Windows operating system became more important. Now, there’s Windows as a Service: If Windows 10 never really goes away, what limits PC builders is supported hardware, apparently. Now we have to worry about how long all of our PC hardware components are supported, lest we lose access to upcoming versions of Windows 10.

A couple of days ago, I figured that this would blow over relatively quickly for Microsoft. Boy, oh boy, was I ever mistaken about that. Even after the day's earlier bit of damage control, the negative PR over this move not only keeps coming, it seems to be intensifying. Maybe Darth Microsoft altered the deal one time too many?

News of Oculus' coming $200 headset met with lukewarm reception.

To say that the Oculus Rift got off to something of a rocky start would be understating things. Once the darling of the tech sector for having single-handedly revived interest in VR, Palmer Luckey's overrated startup first promised a headset that would launch at a price of a couple hundred bucks, with the capacity to run on a budget laptop... only to launch at $599, with the requirement that you drive it with a $1500+ high-performance PC. Oculus then struggled to fill pre-orders for the headset, eventually telling customers to buy their Rifts at Best Buy instead.

The Oculus team have gone on to watch impotently from the sidelines ever since. They tried to force developers and consumers into a walled-garden Rift-exclusive ecosystem, only to find themselves excluded from the bulk of VR development instead. They've fought a protracted legal battle with Zenimax, earning a split decision on that front, while being outsold by HTC's Vive, Sony's PS4 VR, and Samsung's Gear VR (that last carries a touch of irony, since Samsung produced the Gear VR in partership with Oculus). They've cut $200 from the Rift's asking price, only to see sales remain flat, and their share of the VR market remain stubbornly small.

So, I wasn't at all surprised when Oculus went on to slash the price of the Rift by half during their "Summer of Rift" promotion, or when they announced that the new regular price would be only $100 more than that. They did manage to surprise with one move, however: announcing that they had a new, $200, entry-level standalone VR device in development, and were planning to go head-to-head with Samsung's Gear VR, now that they'd lost the high-end market to HTC & Valve's Vive.

Honestly, I wasn't sure what to make of this new move. Yes, a truly standalone headset is something the VR industry needs to move towards, as are lower price points, but could Oculus actually deliver both of those things at once, having failed (so far) to deliver either? And, even if they can, will anyone care? I think my my feelings on this move could have best been described as deep ambivalence, and it would seem that I wasn't the only one to feel that way.

From Katharine Byrne at MCV:

Hot off the heels of Oculus' temporary price cut to its Rift headset last week, a report surfaced on Friday that the company might also be preparing an even cheaper model of the Rift as a kind of budget successor.

Currently code-named 'Pacific', the headset will allegedly bridge the gap between mobile-based virtual reality and higher-end headsets like the Rift. It will also be wireless, according to the report, and operate as a standalone device without the need for additional hardware, such as a PC or phone – much like HTC's new rumoured standalone headset.

Analysts, however, are undecided on whether it will turn Oculus' fortunes around, whose Rift headset has been struggling to match the shipping numbers of both the HTC Vive and Sony's PlayStation VR.

"Oculus is losing the high-end PC race to HTC Vive, but the company has seen the massive potential from Gear VR’s strong market lead," Stephanie Llamas, vice president of research and strategy at SuperData Research told MCV.

"Facebook is not a company for the niche consumer – their selling point is how accessible their services are to anyone, anywhere. So finding something with the potential for mass penetration is a priority, especially with Rift’s bumpy past.

"However, an untethered, self-contained device for $200 seems like either a loss-leader or a highly simplified VR experience (for instance, Google and HTC’s new Daydream device will boast the same conveniences for a much higher price). Pacific may be a combination of both so that Facebook can finally have a long-term stake in the mass consumer market, but it's too soon to tell."

Oculus have gone from being the darlings of VR, the crown princes of virtuality waiting only to be crowned, to the court fools of the industry. Almost every move they've made thus far has been the wrong one, including being bought by Facebook for over three billion US dollars in what could fairly be described as possibly the sloppiest, most rushed buyout of that size in US corporate history. Oculus desperately need to do something to revive their flagging fortunes, and they need to do it soon, before restive shareholders (and the corporate board members who represent their interests) lose patience entirely. But is this Hail Mary play really going to be the thing that saves them?

I don't know; I don't think anybody knows. But Oculus have gone from being the leaders of the VR movement to being its also-rans, chasing already-announced products from other hardware makers rather than setting the next VR standards, and they don't seem to have any real idea what to do next, except to try doing what their competitors are succeeding with already. In a robust industry, there might be money to be made that way, if margins and price point can be kept low enough, but you don't get to be an industry leader by following, and the VR industry as a whole doesn't seem to have a lot of room for budget bit players. And the longer Oculus remain at the back of the pack, the harder it will be to make significant gains. 

Facebook's deep pockets notwithstanding, the team at Oculus are running out of time.

Another unforced error

Back during the dark days of GWX, when Microsoft were upgrading people to Windows 10 whether they wanted to switch or not, the fig leaves that they tried cover themselves with, were (a) that Windows 10 would run on basically any PC that could run any version of Windows from XP onward, and (b) that consumers, having switched, would never have to worry about their operating system ever again, because Windows 10 would be supported by Microsoft until the end of time. That was the "deal" -- switch once, and never worry about it again, ever.

You'll never guess what's happened now. Go ahead, try to guess. And if you guessed that Darth Microsoft has altered the deal, again, then give yourself a no-prize, because that's exactly what they've just done for some of those customers.

From The Independent:

A number of PCs have unexpectedly been blocked from receiving future Windows 10 updates.

Unless Microsoft addresses the incompatibility issue, the computers will be obsolete in early 2018.

That would be hugely disappointing for users, who would be forced to purchase new devices.

The issue affects computers built around Intel's Atom Clover Trail processors, reports ZDNet.

The chips feature in entry-level PCs that came out in 2012 or later.

These computers shipped with Windows 8 or Windows 8.1, and Microsoft made Windows 10 available to them as a free update.

Windows 10 is both newer and much easier to use than Windows 8 and 8.1, so upgrading would have been a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, these computers have now been found to be unable to install the Windows 10 Creators Update. 

Psych! Not only did these folks upgrade to Windows 10 only to have the rug pulled out from under them, but now they need all new PCs! Or, maybe, just to wipe their hard drives and reinstall the earlier version of Windows that their "Atom" PCs originally came with. Either way, though, it's a significant loss of time and/or money.

But don't worry -- it gets worse!

To make matters worse, if the owners of these machines had opted to stick with Windows 8 or 8.1 instead of upgrading to Windows 10, they’d continue to receive support through to 1 October 2023, according to Ars Technica.

Oops!

When I first saw this story being reported this morning, I was thinking that it might not get a lot of traction; after all, how many Atom Z2760, Z2520, Z2560 and/or Z2580 PCs were ever sold? Apparently, though, I was wrong, and the fact that there are Windows 10 users whose OS version will stop receiving security updates a full five years before they would have, if they'd just stuck to Windows 8, is grabbing the attention that it deserves.

Por ejemplo, WCCFTech:

Microsoft Brutally Ends Windows 10 Support Early for Some Intel Systems

The biggest selling point of Windows 10, apart from the fact that it was offered for free, was the promise of regular and free future updates. Under the new Windows as a Service (WaaS) model, Microsoft said users will continue to receive security and feature updates for their devices. There will no longer be those annoying notifications telling you that your Windows version is outdated because you will be able to upgrade to the newer versions as soon as they are made available.

What many Windows 10 adopters missed was a small note that this promise of continued support is only valid for the “supported lifetime of the device.” ZDNet now reports that the end of support for some Windows 10 devices has already arrived, just two years after the release of Windows 10.

It cannot be stressed enough, at this point, that this latest black eye for Microsoft did not have to happen. It was only their own greed that saw them pressuring Intel Atom PC owners to adopt Windows 10 when their systems really weren't compatible; and the only reason that Microsoft are cutting support for those same users now is that keeping Windows up-to-date on such underpowered systems has clearly been judged to cost more than it's worth.

Expecting consumers who bought budget PCs five years ago to be willing to buy new PCs now, just to run Windows 10, is just hubris. Microsoft richly deserves the PR black eye that they're taking over this latest unforced error.

UPDATE:

As reported in The Verge, Microsoft have confirmed that Windows 10 builds from Creators Update onwards will not be available for "Clover Trail" Atom systems, but that proud owners of those systems will be able to get security updates for the Anniversary Update until 2023:

“They require additional hardware support to provide the best possible experience when updating to the latest Windows 10 feature update, the Windows 10 Creators Update,” explains a Microsoft spokesperson. “However, these systems are no longer supported by Intel (End of Interactive Support), and without the necessary driver support, they may be incapable of moving to the Windows 10 Creators Update without a potential performance impact.”

Microsoft says it will be offering the older Windows 10 Anniversary Update to Intel Clover Trail devices instead, and the company “will provide security updates to these specific devices running the Windows 10 Anniversary Update until January of 2023.” This date aligns with the original Windows 8.1 extended support period, which means that these older devices will still be supported with security updates but no new Windows 10 features.

Well, at least those affected aren't being told to buy new PCs anymore.

To be clear, this was the absolute minimum that Microsoft owed to Atom PC owners, after fucking them over. I don't expect that this will be the end of the matter, though, given that Microsoft are already fighting multiple class-action lawsuits over their overly-aggressive Get Windows 10 campaign, and now have to admit that the "optional" offer that users couldn't refuse also included promises that MS not only haven't kept, but had no intention of keeping. If nothing else, businesses that were looking at switching to Windows 10 will now have to reassess their hardware, and ask how much of it will still be supported with the latest Windows 10 builds in five years' time; if the cost of switching to Windows 10 has to include the cost of replacing all their PCs sooner than previously planned, you can expect more businesses to delay switching for as long as possible.

Microsoft is doing what they can to control the damage, but make no mistake: the damage is already done.

"Windows 10 is failing us"

From Brian Fagioli at betanews:

While Windows 10 is arguably successful from a market share perspective, it is still failing in one big way -- the user experience. Windows 8.x was an absolute disaster, and Microsoft's latest is certainly better than that, but it is still not an enjoyable experience. Quite frankly, the people clutching to Windows 7 aren't so crazy.

The most glaring issue is the privacy aspect, or lack thereof. Look, telemetry is a good thing for the development of the operating system, but users shouldn't be forced to participate. Hell, I don't even totally mind if it is opt out rather than opt in. But if a user wants to remove their computer entirely, that should be their right.

Even the third-party solutions that aim to turn this spying off aren't 100-percent successful. Unless you unplug from the internet entirely, you can't stop Windows from phoning home to Microsoft. This is a shame, as some consumers are being made to feel violated when using their own computer.

[N.B.: Preach, Brother Brian! Any software that behaves exactly like malware, is malware. Microsoft should not get a pass on this.]

While the Windows Insiders program is optional, it has long outstayed its welcome. By having a large segment of Windows 10 users on pre-release versions, it is causing a fragmented user experience. You have many users in the wild with features that aren't found on the machines of others. Even the twice-annual stable releases are one too many.

Let's be honest, these Insiders are being used for free beta testing and kept in an infinite state of instability. At some point, Microsoft needs to retire the Windows Insiders program entirely or at the very least, restrict the numbers of members allowed to participate. It is starting to feel like Windows 10 is becoming a perpetual beta release, much like Google's offerings.

[N.B.: It's actually worse than this; the "release" version that Home users receive is still chock full of bugs. It's not until the "Current Branch for Business" version is released, often months later, that this basically-beta process is truly over. Windows 10 is not free.]

Windows 10 is certainly not a lost cause -- the foundation is solid, and Microsoft has a lot of smart people working for it that can turn it around. Before the company tries to add new features (and misses deadlines) like Timeline and Cloud Clipboard, it should focus more on improving the existing user experience. Right now it is failing us and things are not getting better.

Come on, Microsoft -- make Windows great again.

What can I say? I agree with basically all of this. It's always refreshing to see another tech writer who's willing to admit that (a) Windows 10 has real problems, not merely PR ones, and (b) people who are refusing to switch from 7 to 10 have valid, rational reasons for doing so. We're not just paranoid, and we're not being unreasonable; we're simply not willing to exchange a solid and well-tested user experience for the "privilege" of participating in an endless beta program, with Microsoft monitoring our every action whether we consent or not. The fact that they've scaled back their unnecessary data collection by half, while welcome, still leaves them collecting a tonne of our private data and metadata that they don't really need, and they haven't done nearly enough to win back consumers' trust and good will.

There's more to Brian Fagioli's article than the bits that I've excerpted, including his thoughts on Edge, Bing, Cortana, and Windows 10 S, and it's all good stuff, so go give the man some clicks.

Is the Switch losing momentum already?

In spite of its decent launch, Nintendo's Switch is far from being out of the woods. Persistent manufacturing and supply problems, a dearth of good games, and an abundance of caution on the part of third-party game developers, all seemed to be conspiring to turn the initial rush of excitement into frustration. Which is a problem, because prolonged frustration can easily turn into boredom, and then apathy. Nintendo needed to solve the Switch's problems quickly, before that could happen.

So, how soon is soon enough? Have Nintendo already taken too long to fix their supply problems, if they really wanted to capitalize on that initial positive buzz? Those are the questions, and other people are starting to ask them.

From Dion Dassanayake at Express:

For the second week in a row, the battle between the Switch v PS4 has been won by Sony’s console in Japan.

The PS4 has been the top selling console in Japan for the past two weeks in a row, edging ahead of the Nintendo Switch, according to GamingBolt.

The most recent figures show the PS4 selling 29,771 units compared to the Switch’s 26,256.

The news comes after in May the Switch lost out to the PS4 in the latest chart wars from America.

In one sense, this isn't really news; PS4 has been outselling Switch for a while now. Also, it needs to be said that week-by-week sales numbers in July aren't normally something that retailers lose a lot of sleep over. Don't get me wrong, sluggish sales are sluggish, and retailers hate that, but fall is the big retail season, with the October-to-December period often accounting for as much as 70% of a retailer's annual sales (and, yes, I do work in retail, although thankfully not in gaming retail). There's still lots of year left for Nintendo to sell consoles, including the busiest months of the retail calendar, and they'll have more games on the shelf by the fall, too.

The Nintendo Switch's situation isn't your normal retail scenario, however. Nintendo are trying to jump-start their console and handheld sales (both of which have declined steadily since 2009) with one device, and right now, what they need more than anything else is momentum. Nintendo were forecasting 10 million units of Switch sales for this year, a number that they've since increased to 15 million, but Sony were forecasting that PS4 sales would decline slightly this year, to 18 million.... and that's on top of the 60+ million PS4's they've already sold. The Switch doesn't necessarily need to outsell the PS4 every single week, but if the ongoing sales trend ends up putting them further behind the PS4, rather than gaining ground, then skittish third-party game devs may decide to stay on the sidelines, rather than spend extra time and money downsizing their games to fit into the Switch's profoundly limited resources.

And that could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with fewer third party games coming out for the Switch because there aren't enough third-party games on the Switch to lure in increasingly frustrated, bored, or even apathetic consumers.

Nintendo really have bet the farm on the Switch succeeding. There are already signs that the Switch is eating into 2DS and 3DS sales (which, again, have been declining for years anyway), and their last console, the WiiU, flopped hard. If Nintendo's hardware business is to survive, then the Switch must succeed; Nintendo aren't a small company, but they're not Microsoft-sized, and able to write off a second hardware platform in a row, especially when it's rapidly becoming the entirety of their hardware business. Two weeks of bad sales could just be a coincidence, but a third straight week of sub-par sales numbers could be the start of a trend that Nintendo will have a heck of a time reversing.

I'm not sure how much time Nintendo's Switch will get, here, but one thing's for sure: they're running out of time a lot faster than many people expected.

When the thing that happens is the opposite of what you predict.

Failure is pretty common for people trying to predict the future, but even by the standards of most futurists, this is something of a high water mark (or low point, depending on your perspective) in forecasting for the technology industry.

It was just a week ago that Gartner, Inc., a technology research firm that, among other things, advises companies about the whens and hows of transitioning to new operating systems, was talking about how the PC sales decline was slowing. PC sales, according to Gartner, would only decline by 0.3% in 2017, mainly because everybody was transitioning from Windows 7 and 8.1 to Windows 10. I was, naturally, skeptical, and it looks like I was right about that, because Gartner themselves are now saying that PC shipments are at their lowest levels since 2007.

From CNBC:

Gartner said this week that the PC market declined 4.3 percent during the second quarter. The research company said that shipments were at the "lowest quarter volume since 2007," noting the market dropped for the 11th quarter in a row.

The report is in stark contrast to another from IDC in April which said that the PC market grew for the first time in five years.

Gartner's most recent report isn't just a stark contrast to IDC's April report; it's a stark contrast to their own report of a week ago, which predicted a decline in PC sales for this year of only 0.3%. According to Garner's own numbers, PC sales have already declined by 4.3%, which is 4.0% more than they themselves were forecasting, and the year's only half over. Gee, I wonder if their own vested material interests in seeing big companies upgrading their PCs had any bearing on Gartner's forecasts?

The news is worse for some PC makers, too; Apple's sales are down 9.6% compared to last year, at least if Gartner's most recent figures are to be believed. It should be said that I have serious suspicions about the quality of work that Gartner are doing here, and whether their process is impartial in any sense at all, although Apple was late in refreshing its product lineup, so it's possible that the 9.6% is in the right ballpark. Still, there's no doubt that PC sales are still in a steep decline, and the unicorn of Windows 10's imminent widespread adoption at the enterprise level, which has consistently failed to materialize, with only one PC maker seeing any growth at all.

Of note: Dell seems to be the only company finding growth in the PC business. "Dell achieved five consecutive quarters of year-on-year global shipment growth, as shipments increased 1.4 percent in 2Q17," Gartner said. "Dell has put a high priority on PCs as a strategic business. Among the top three vendors, Dell is the only vendor which can supply the integrated IT needs to businesses under the Dell Technologies umbrella of companies."

So, Dell is doing better than most, although it should be noted that year-over-year growth of only 1.4% is far from fantastic (there's a reason why Dell went private, after all) - Dell's current rate of growth is only noteworthy because it is growth, in an industry that's been declining for years.

This is what the end of Moore's Law looks like. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you last bought a PC during the Obama administration, and you're still happy with how it's performing, then there's no need to upgrade. Today's newest chipsets are slightly better than those of eight years ago, but the difference is only a slight one; at the height of Moore's Law, the number of transistors on our CPUs would have doubled four times in a decade, but as the rate of PC processing power continues to plateau, there's just no reason to upgrade unless your old PC has packed it in. And people seem to have figured that out, whether they're individual consumers or CIOs.

VR's "Hail Mary" play.

From DigiTimes:

The establishment of VR arcades will enable VR content and hardware developers to provide facilities for consumers to try out immersive VR experiences and thereby to accelerate development of the VR industry, according to Jack Tong, founder and CEO of JPW International Technology.

The space, services and related equipment provided by arcade shops will serve as the growth drivers of the VR industry, Tong added. [...]

VR arcades will also serve as platforms for continued optimization of related hardware devices and software upgrades, as well as venues for cross-border tournaments of VR games, a business model which is suitable for long-term operations, Tong stressed.

OK, first things first. Yes, if enough VR arcades are opened, and if enough quality VR experiences are available in them, and if enough people can be convinced to frequent them, then VR arcades could provide all of the benefits that Mr. Tong claims. But those are necessary conditions, not merely sufficient ones; in order for the benefits to be realized, all three conditions must be met.

Which bring us to the first problem: outside of Japan, videogame arcades are not a thing. There are still coin-op videogames to be seen, mostly off to the side, in other businesses (e.g. movie theatres, which seem to be the places where I mainly see videogame cabinets these days), but the specialized "destination" arcades which boomed during the 80's all slowly went out of business during the 90's. Basically, outside of Japan, the only other market where people routinely leave home to get their game on is South Korea, where the PC bang reigns supreme.

So, Japan and S. Korea both boast a robust arcade-like gaming culture, and have existing businesses which could expand their operations to include VR. Everywhere else, though, VR arcades will be starting from scratch, having not only to start new businesses catering to VR enthusiasts, but also having to revive an arcade-going culture that died out decades ago. And, to be sure, some intrepid entrepreneurs are already doing exactly that, drawn in by VR hype, but the necessary condition isn't for some "VRcades" to be opened, but for enough VRcades to be opened. 

How many is enough? Nobody knows, but I'd say that it's probably more than one per million residents; e.g. Calgary (pop. 1,235,171) boasts exactly one VR Arcade, one VR consultancy business, and one VR game rental service, and that one "VRcade" is run by the local "escape room" business, and needs to be booked in advance. With VR sales lagging, and no sign that consumers are interested in VR at all, those numbers are unlikely to increase much in the near future... which is exactly what's needed, if VR is to develop the way Mr. Tong is predicting.

And that brings us to the 2nd problem with this scenario: even if enough VRcades are built, consumer interest in VR is essentially nil right now. There's no guarantee that they will come, if you built it; in fact, the opposite case (you build it, and nobody comes) is looking to be much more likely. That will make it very hard for VRcades to succeed, even if they are established, and if VRcades show a tendency to struggle (or fail) then there's even less incentive to open them in the first place.

The fact that VR currently lacks any compelling content to draw in customers doesn't help, either. This is the biggest problem with VR, generally: it simply doesn't enable any experiences that are unique to VR. Existing experiences can be enhanced with VR, yes, but while something like Superhot VR may well be a more immersive experience than its "vanilla" version, it's still the basically same game, and playing it at home (on Steam, XBox, PS4, Linux, and Mac) will only cost you US$27.99 for unlimited playing time, with the added convenience of being available any time you feel like playing. Calgary's sole VRcade has to be booked in advance, remember; I'm not sure what their rates are, but if it's less than CAD$25.00 per hour, I'll be very surprised. After all, they have employess to pay, and rent to pay, and bills to pay, and obviously would like to realize some kind of profit on top of that.

So, outside of Japan and S.Korea, we're unlikely to see enough VRcades established to make any difference; consumer interest in VR is virtually nonexistent, so even those VRcades that do exist will struggle to attract customers; and if any VRcades do manage to lure customers into their buildings, they'll lack for compelling VR experiences to off them. Which brings us to the next question: what about Japan and S.Korea? With existing videogame arcades and PC bangs that can simply expand by adding VR, can Japenese and S. Korean VRcades convince enough skeptical consumers to try VR, and offer them enough high-quality, unique-to-VR experiences, to drive not only VR interest and adoption, but also VR technological development?

Because that's what Mr. Tong's scenario boils down to. With the EU and NA markets having essentially turned into VR wastelands, Mr. Tong is hoping that Japan and S. Korea can, by themselves, provide enough momentum to drive the development of VR technology and content to fuel a VR revolution that is stubbornly failing to materiallize. And it does seem more like wishful thinking than rational analysis. It smells like desperation, expecting that VRcades will spontaneously emerge, for no apparent reason, and propel us to a glorious VR future that's looking less and less likely all the time. 

This is VR's Hail Mary pass. If it works, then the results could be amazing, but it will be a miracle if it works.

Top 50 Nintendo Switch games list hilariously starts at #49, with a terrible game.

From App Trigger's list of "All the Best Nintendo Switch Games Out Right Now," I present to you the bottom of the barrel:

Best Nintendo Switch Games #49 – Vroom in the Night Sky

Developer: Poisoft

Synopsis: This is a developer-described “Magical Bike Action Game,” with features such as “Fantastic feeling” “Speedy feeling” and “Realistic feeling.”
A better way to explain it is just to tell you that you fly around a town as a Magical Girl on a motorcycle, collecting stardust and conversing with your talking pet Sailor Moon rip-off cat, Luna.

Why it’s one of the best Nintendo Switch games: It’s not.

No, really. The nature of this list in its early stages is naturally going to be that the games at the bottom half of the list are going to drop off very, very quickly. In Vroom in the Night Sky’s case, we’re ready to dump it as soon as the total entry numbers push 51. This game is just awful! It’s boring, for starters–you just fly around and pick up stardust with clumsy controls for awhile and then you’re done. Then there are the god-awful translation errors that permeate every last piece of dialogue you’re forced to endure as you zoom around the blocky town you’re stuck in. Don’t get this game. Watch it vroom its way right off this list.

Excelsior! Seriously, folks, embarrassing shit like this is why Kotaku limited their best-of list to 12 entries.

App Trigger's approach does have one advantage, though; since their list includes every single game currently available on the platform, including such bottom-feeders as Vroom in the Night Sky, it is now possible to say, for certain, that a) there are less than 50 games available for the Nintendo Switch, and also that b) some of those games are shovelware-grade crap.

Things don't really improve at #48, either:

Best Nintendo Switch Games #48 – Vaccine

Developer: RNC

Synopsis: Your friend has a deadly illness, and is running out of time. You can find the vaccine in a mysterious house, but you’ll have to hurry before they perish. Of course, it being a roguelike, they’ll just relapse every time and you’ll have to try again to survive in a new, randomly generated house.

Why it’s one of the best Nintendo Switch games: If there is a trope that the horror game genre has done away with, Vaccine probably embraced it at some point. It also does away with any semblance of good design, refusing to offer such staples as a map, or balanced combat, or sound effects for enemies or the ability to do anything reasonable with the camera. Some of these seem to be hearkening back to old Resident Evil, but without the proper combination of elements, Vaccine falls apart. Its roguelike nature means you’ll quickly be frustrated and give up, defeating the addictive point of such a game. There’s “difficult roguelike” and then there’s shoddy, awkward, and unfair.

Game #47 on the list is Othello (yes, that Othello), and #46 is currently another port titled, and I swear to God this is verbatim, New Frontier Days ~Founding Pioneers~ (yes, all those tildes are actually in the game's title), which boasts a MetaCritic score of 52%. Only four games in, three of them are shovelware, and one looks like a port from mobile (and is also available on Steam); the only halfway decent game to this point is Othello, which you can currently play for free in a browser window. If you were hoping that Kotaku's list, and the problems that it serves to illustrate, were maybe the result of some sort of sampling bias, then abandon all hope, ye that enter here, because it looks like the problem only gets worse as you work your way further down the list of available Nintendo Switch offerings.

Decent launch aside, if Nintendo don't find a way to turn this situation around, and fast, then the Switch really isn't going to make it.

Oculus blinks, slashes Rift package's price to match PS4 VR.

From the International Business Times:

Oculus is temporarily cutting down the price of Oculus Rift virtual reality headset to match cheaper rivals like the PlayStation VR. Oculus, the company acquired by Facebook Inc. in 2014 for US$3 billion, is taking steps to discover if the price has been the bottleneck for the device to become the bestseller in the bunch.

The Oculus Rift starting Monday is priced at US$399, including the Touch controllers. The price reduction will run for six weeks as Facebook targets to determine whether price had been the major roadblock why its immersive gaming and stories did not take off, Oculus vice president for content Jason Rubin said in a statement.

Selling a device at, or even below, cost has been a fairly standard practice for videogame console manufacturers for decades. The idea is that you take a loss on the hardware, and make your profit with licensing fees and the like on the back end, once your platform is established. Normally, though, a firm that's planning to pursue this strategy does so right out the gate; Facebook initially priced the Rift at US$600, though, a price that didn't even include the Touch controllers, which weren't even available when the headset launched.

At the time, Oculus seemed confident that the buzz surrounding VR as a whole would see the Rift selling like hotcakes even at that premium price, but the Rift is now well behind HTC's Vive in total sales, and even the two of them combined can't come close to matching Sony's PS VR sales numbers, which is why Oculus slashed US$200 off the price earlier this year. Agressively matching Sony's price is the obvious next move, but with Oculus' identity as a premium-priced product already well and truly established, and the general public showing very little interest even in Sony's budget-priced offering, I have serious doubts about whether this move will prompt consumers to suddenly start buying Rift sets in large numbers.

Look, if you've been eying the Oculus Rift with envy, and only waiting for the price to drop before buying, than go ahead and buy one. It's your money; you do you. VR does not currently enable any new experiences; it can only be used to buff a limited set of familiar experiences. Someone first needs to identify a VR activity that can only be achieved with VR, and that I'll actually want to do; on that glorious day, if and when it comes, I will start comparison shopping for VR headsets. But until then, even at US$399, and even with the Touch controllers included for that price, the Oculus Rift is simply not useful enough to be worth that kind of money.

VR started the year by posting terrible sales numbers across the board; I've seen nothing since then to suggest that VR sales have improved significantly. Against that backdrop, for distant fourth place Oculus to be slashing their price point by half looks more like desperation than strategy.

Quantum computing's ENIAC

One of the earliest electronic general-purpose computers ever made, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (or, ENIAC) was a monster of a machine. Brought online in 1946, ENIAC eventually grew to include 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It weighed over 27 tonnes, consumed 150 kW of electricity, ran programs from punch cards (a huge leap forward from earlier models of computer), cost 6.1 million inflation-adjusted US dollars, and had roughly the computational power of a scientific calculator.

It's now 71 years later, and today's personal computing technology bears very little resemblance to ENIAC. A modern smartphone can weigh as little as 155 g (5.47 oz, or 0.00000574% of ENIAC), yet packs 1300 times ENIAC's computing power into that tiny package. Compared to today's computing technology, ENIAC is a dinosaur, and it would be virtually useless for any modern computing application, but ENIAC is also the start of the modern computer era; something like ENIAC must first exist, in order for our modern information age to be possible.

Knowing this, I have to admit that it gave me something of a frisson to see what the current state of quantum computing looks like, courtesy of Linus Tech Tips:

Voilà! The ENIAC of our age.

Nintendo's 3rd party developer problems might run deeper than anybody knew.

From Destructoid:

Speaking to Kinda Funny, [Oddworld creator Lorne] Lanning states that he has "no faith," in the Switch, due to "experience," and having seen how the Wii and Wii U played out. To clarify the condemnation of the former he explains that both consoles weren't successful for third parties, and that Nintendo ended up making all the money at the end of their runs. He experienced this with what he claims is lackluster promotion for New 'n' Tasty on the Wii U.

While praises that it's mobile he doesn't think people are going to go through the effort to work on an "under-powered console" (a sentiment THQ Nordic shares), and that in conjunction with their alleged efforts to ignore third parties to better themselves, it'll end up hurting studios.

It's something a lot of developers are struggling with right now -- whether or not to call out Nintendo after the Wii U situation. The Switch is doing great so you don't want to burn that bridge, but some studios have claimed that even after they've tried to make games for it Nintendo hasn't reciprocated. If more developers aren't willing to speak out like this and share their opinions we'll continue to be in the dark.

Nintendo alone simply weren't able to release enough games to save the WiiU, so the general consensus is that Nintendo's Switch will either live or die depending on the amount of support it receives from third party developers. The fact that previously-burned developers are hesitant to invest heavily in developing for the new platform is basically the opposite of what Nintendo need to happen, in order for the Switch to succeed where the WiiU failed.

It doesn't help that the Switch is simply underpowered compared to competing consoles, either. In a world where the Nintendo's competition consists of Sony's PS4 Pro, Microsoft's XBO-X, and even more powerful gaming PCs, the Switch can't even keep pace with a vanilla PS4 or XBox One. Most of the Switch's 3rd-party games are ports of old PC titles, but even that well could run try quickly as developers continue to wrestle with the limitations of the Switch's underpowered hardware.

The Switch managed a decent launch, but Nintendo still have a lot of problems still to overcome in order for their new device into have the kind of legs that they desperately need it to.

No, Windows 10 S doesn't "deserve a chance."

Oy, vey.

From Napier Lopez at TNW:

Windows 10 S gets a bad rap, in part, because of Windows RT. That OS could only run touch-friendly ‘Metro’ apps – which further had to be compatible with ARM processors.

There’s nothing wrong with that in principle, but it meant developers had to write completely new apps for an OS they weren’t sure would have any legs. It was a kind of self fulfilling prophecy: Developers didn’t make Windows RT apps because nobody would use Windows RT. Which of course became true, because nobody would make apps for it.

Windows 10 S, on the other hand, has the crucial difference that it can run most of the old-school apps – known as Win32 programs – you’re already using. At a basic level, all developers have to do is repackage the apps to make them available on the Windows Store.

Wow, that sounds really great! Just one little problem... it's mostly bullshit.

Windows 10 S only runs programs that have been installed from the Windows Store, and the Win32 programs that you're already using cannot be installed from the Windows Store. The developers of those programs might choose to use the Project Centennial Desktop App Bridge (PCDAB) to port those programs over to the Windows Store, so that you can purchase them again through Microsoft, with Microsoft taking a cut of the proceeds, but it is developers who must do this; consumers cannot PCDAB their own apps. Unless and until that happens, the software "you're already using" simply will not work with Microsoft's gimped OS.

This is the defining quality of Windows 10 S. It is the thing which sets it apart from vanilla Windows 10, and from every other iteration of Windows.... except for Windows RT, of course. Which means that Win10 S's bad rap is entirely deserved, for the simple reason that it really is Windows RT Redux. The only difference is that Microsoft is using security-based scare tactics to sell 10 S, instead of relying on the short-lived "touch" fad that was the driving force behind Windows RT... and Windows 8, which was its fuller-featured cousin.

Yet again, I find myself unsure whether this is a falsehood (i.e. the result of simple ignorance or incompetence), or a lie (i.e. the result of intentional deception). Either way, though, Mr. Lopez should be ashamed of himself. This is not hair-splitting; it is quite literally the most important thing that a consumer will want to consider, when weighing the decision to buy (or not to buy) a machine with Windows 10 S installed, and TNW couldn't be bothered to get it right. Excelsior!

I can hardly wait to see how many other lazy, ignorant hacks pick up this piece of apologist tripe, and run it verbatim, without bothering to check any of its facts.

Massive layoffs are really not normal. Really.

A couple of days ago, I blogged about Microsoft's imminent wave of layoffs. I was particularly nonplussed with the way that a lot of the coverage was unfolding; everyone seemed anxious to portray Redmond's fourth massive restructuring effort in four years as somehow normal, the sort of thing that successful companies do all the time. But I couldn't recall a single instance of a successful company laying off thousands of employees as part of a massive restructuring effort, let alone a company that had laid off thousands of employees in the each of the preceding three years, and was looking set to add significantly to that total in year four.

And make no mistake, although it may not be the worst of them, this is the fourth year of massive layoffs at Microsoft. They cut 18,000 jobs in 2014, an event which CNN Money described as "by far the largest round of layoffs in the company's history." They followed that by cutting 7,800 more jobs in 2015, a year in which they also took a US$7.6 billion “impairment charge” related to their acquisition of Nokia, and restructuring charges of over US$750M. 2,800 more jobs were cut in 2016, as they continued to wind down their Nokia business.

As companies tend to do, when delivering bad news, Microsoft softened the blow on many of these announcements by touting some kind of success; their cloud services division saw 3% growth in 2016, for example. They've carefully avoided talking about the overall health of the company, and their share price hasn't suffered too much, at least so far. But there's no way around the steadily mounting numbers, here, as Microsoft's massive structuring becomes an annual event.

That 2014 CNN Money article gives some context for this:

Though Microsoft is laying off a massive number of employees, it doesn't come close to the biggest job cuts in corporate history. IBM (IBM, Tech30) cut 60,000 jobs in 1993 as part of a massive restructuring of the tech giant. During the Great Recession, Citigroup (C) slashed 75,000 jobs between 2008 and early 2009. And Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Tech30) laid off 27,000 employees in 2012.

At 28,600, the cumulative layoff total Microsoft's annual restructuring has has now surpassed Hewlett-Packard's 27,000 layoffs from 2012. But, while the numbers are slowly mounting, there is one clear difference between Microsoft's layoffs and the other examples cited by CNN Money: all of the other examples were one-time events. Only Microsoft seems to have turned this kind of restructuring into the way they start every fiscal year.

Don't believe me? Check for yourself. Google "massive layoffs -Microsoft," and see what you get.

Yes, the PC sales decline is slowing. No, that doesn't mean Windows 10 is about to explode.

The good folks at Gartner are at it again, confidently predicting that Windows 10 will start to see widespread adoption in enterprises of all kinds. Really. Any time now.

From windowslatest:

Gartner has released their prediction report for Worldwide device shipments where they are expecting a overall drop of 0.3% in devices sold in 2017 worldwide. They have mentioned in their report that device buyers are nowadays prioritizing Quality and Functionality and are not looking at price alone. Consumers are more keen on buying premium quality products which may be more costly as compared to other cheaper alternatives which are compromising in quality.

Gartner have reiterated the the fact that PC shipments are on pace to drop and will be 3 percent in 2017. But they have also said that decline in shipments is slowing since the rate of decline is slower this year when compared to past few years. One or the reason for this is the fact that Windows 10 new devices are being considered by the enterprises.

Okay, a couple of things here:

1. PC sales are still declining. They are not increasing, or rebounding, they're dropping again, for yet another consecutive year. 
2. There is no obvious link that I can see between declining PC sales, and increasing Windows 10 adoption rates. Since Gartner aren't providing actual data to back up this ridiculous assertion, I have to wonder if it's not more a matter of wishful thinking than of thoughtful analysis.
3. The rate of decline in PC sales has slowed because the sales of gaming PCs is up by 25% year-over-year. Workstation sales are even worse than the overall rates would indicate.

Gartner have been doing this for a while now, confidently predicting an imminent explosion in Windows 10's adoption, even as actual adoption rates, and all other related indicators, remain stagnant. The perennial message seems to be, "wait for next year." Sure, given enough years, eventually Windows 10 will catch, and even surpass, Windows 7's usage share, but there's nothing yet to indicate that next year will be that year as opposed to, say, 2020.

Part of that is ongoing concerns with Microsoft's respect for the data and privacy of users, but the cost of new PCs isn't the only cost involved in migrating to a new OS. There's also every other piece of software that a business might be using to do business, and it might not all play well with a new environment.

From TechTarget:

Two years since its release, Windows 10 still isn't close to catching up to Windows 7 in terms of enterprise adoption.

The most common reason many organizations are holding off on Windows 10 enterprise adoption is because they rely on legacy applications that still don't support the operating system. Other organizations resist migration because what they currently have still works.

[...]

"Investment in legacy applications is typically a roadblock, and we are certainly seeing a lot of that," said Doug Grosfield, president and CEO of Five Nines IT Solutions, a consultancy in Kitchener, Ont.

This is part of the problem faced by any new version of Windows; there are always device driver issues, and other software incompatibility issues, and it always takes a while for workarounds to be found for them. This is partly why savvy users never switch in the first year of a new Windows version, and part of why most would wait for a Service Pack before taking the plunge. But Microsoft seems to be going out of their way to break the chain with the huge library of older Windows software, preferring instead that every Windows 10 user buy all their software again through Microsoft's storefront, and it shows in these persistent software compatibility problems.

Microsoft is deliberately undermining the single greatest feature of Windows, namely that everybody has run Windows for decades, and has a huge library of software that they can use as a result. But that's not necessarily true anymore for Windows 10, and slow Win10 adoption is a predictable result.

The fact that Microsoft has also gone out of their way to undermine the trust and goodwill that their customers used to have for them probably isn't helping, either.

Windows 10 will, eventually, take over from Windows 7 as the default version of the OS that everybody uses. But that shift is not going to happen anytime soon - definitely not this year, and probably not next year. The reality is that Windows 7 still works, and will continue receiving security updates until 2020, which means that even businesses don't actually need to start migrating until 2019; they only need to be finished by 2020. Gartner's desire to make it happen earlier, as they're obviously advising their clients to do, isn't actually going to make the shift happen sooner than that.

Revisionist history

For some reason, the announcement by Microsoft that they won't be adding iOS/OS X's Continuity feature to Windows 10 has become the story of the Windows week. Arstechnica called the delayed Timeline feature "the most exciting promised feature" slated for the coming Fall Creators Update, and Microsoft's decision to push the feature back to Redstone 3 (i.e. next Spring's major feature update) has some people questioning Microsoft's entire update strategy.

From betanews:

Over on Ghacks, Martin Brinkmann posted his thoughts on Microsoft’s Windows 10 feature updates schedule. The software giant is committed to rolling out two major updates to Windows 10 every year. In April we had the Creators Update, and in a few months' time the Fall Creators Update will begin to roll out.

Martin asks if this rapid release schedule is such a wise idea, and he has a good point.

[...]

Microsoft announces cool new features for future versions of Windows 10, but then doesn’t have the time to implement them because it’s committed to producing two major updates each year.

[...]

But that’s only half the problem. The Creators Update roll out has been going on for nearly three months now, yet only a third of Windows 10 users are running it -- either because they haven’t yet been offered it, or because they’ve chosen not to install it.

It’s possible the roll out pace will accelerate from this month -- which will be in keeping with how the Anniversary Update roll out was managed -- but even so there will be people who won’t have the Creators Update, or will have only just received it, by the time the Fall Creators Update is made available.

This lingering stink of repeated failure, with My People failing to make the Creators Update and Continuity/Timeline and Cloud Clipboard failing to make the Fall Creators Update (seriously, Microsoft, please hire someone who knows something about naming things) is looking more and more like the sort of issue that Paul Thurrott was predicting we'd see, as far back as October of last year, well before Microsoft announced their overly-aggressive updating schedule:

Microsoft’s goal with Windows as a Service was pure and well-intentioned. But it may never work. And after the tough past year or so, I’m not sure how Windows will absorb this hit. The only thing worse would be continuing down the current path and pretending that it’s working.

Naturally, the "only thing worse" is exactly what Microsoft is doing, because of course it is. And part of this pretense is to also pretend that Timeline was never actually promised for Fall 2017. And that has not escaped Paul Thurrott's notice, either:

In the wake of Microsoft’s revelation that it will not ship Timeline in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, some are attempting to rewrite history, claiming that Microsoft was vague about when this feature might appear. But Timeline, along with other cross-device features, was explicitly promised for the Fall Creators Update. 

"In our Fall Creators Update, for the first time, Windows PCs will love all your devices,” Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore said during the Build 2017 keynote at which he announced this functionality. (You can find this quote at the 48:44 mark if you’d like to hear it for yourself.) “Fluent design, Files on Demand, Timeline, Cloud-powered Clipboard, these are all ways that we’re going to make our users lives better.” 

This statement seems pretty clear to me. And it stands in sharp contrast to the backpedaling that Belfiore and some Microsoft fanboys are doing now on Twitter.

“From my [point of view,] we described [a] set of features that would come starting with [the Fall Creators Update],” he tweeted. “And I thought we’d communicated uncertainty.” 

[...] 

Is it possible that there is some equivocating or hedging on these features elsewhere in the Build 2017 keynote? Sure. I haven’t rewatched the full presentation. But I’ll just raise two issues here, one that should be obvious to all, and one that will be obvious in retrospect. 

First, that statement above is pretty definitive. If Joe or others on the Windows team were more ambiguous elsewhere, that doesn’t undercut that the fact that he summarized his talk about those new features with the above statement.

Second, a few hundred members of the press and blogosphere were pre-briefed on the Build 2017 day 2 keynote contents the day before the presentation. And looking at my extensive notes from that day, I see that it is broadly about the new world view for Windows, the new strategy that I wrote about at the time. And more specifically, it focused on features that are coming in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Which I also wrote about at the time. No one ever said anything about these features rolling out over time.

[...]

I’m not just being pedantic here. Communication is important, not just the words one uses, but the way in which those words are delivered. I feel it is disingenuous to make promises on a stage to your customers and then backpedal silently, using the limited audience on Twitter to spin a different story. Being honest isn’t always easy, but it’s almost always the right thing to do.

[...]

It’s time for some clarity, Microsoft. What’s really going to be in the Fall Creators Update? Will any other features be dropped?

In other words, is Microsoft's Windows-As-A-Service strategy actually working? Is it actually possible for Redmond to deliver two feature updates each year, on a regular schedule? Or were Microsoft biting off more than they could chew, when they promised they would?

The issues here are broader and more fundamental than the contents of the FCU. It goes to basic issues of reliability, of whether Microsoft is honestly telling us what they can actually deliver, or just hyping their product with a lot of empty promises on which they will continually fail to deliver. In an environment where the success of Windows 10 relies heavily on Microsoft winning over Windows 7 customers who mostly don't trust them anymore, their attempts to retcon the timeline of Timeline couldn't be any more ironic, but one can't help but feel that the irony is lost on Microsoft themselves.

Microsoft seem to be lost in their own hype cycle, arrogantly confident that customers will buy regardless of what they actually deliver. There's a reason why so many are refusing to join the brave new Windows 10 world; until Microsoft dedicate themselves to honesty, and to earning back their customers' trust, I don't expect that to change much.

UPDATE:
Although the furor had died down somewhat by the week-end, coverage continues on the Timeline story,  including this very well-written piece by Michael Allison at mspoweruser:

The first problem I can see here is that Microsoft promised a feature, and it didn’t deliver it. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal, no one’s really going to use that people bar for more than five minutes anyway. On the other hand, this is a puzzling pattern over promising and under delivering. Microsoft has consistently shown off concepts of beautiful apps, features and updates that are frequently underwhelming when delivered, or delayed until no one cares anymore As normal users really aren’t reading the tech sites to learn what’s new with Windows, the only users who would be affected by those are the techies who spread word of mouth and do pay attention to this stuff. The next time Microsoft announces something, we can’t trust them for multiple reasons. We can’t trust that the images we’re being shown are representative images of what we’ll be seeing. We can’t trust that they’ll arrive in the promised timeline. And now, we can’t trust Microsoft to not pretend that they didn’t announce any timeline of any sort.

[...]

What I hypothesise is that many times, Microsoft is padding its press events with features to make each release more attractive from a marketing perspective. Windows 10 is Microsoft’s only consumer-facing OS at the moment, and so the firm needs all the headlines it can get from sites willing to wring out every bit of news coverage they can from said press event (Yes. I know there’s room for self-reflection there.), hence we get briefings on Pick Up Where You Left off, Timeline, My People etcetera and prepare articles on how Microsoft’s new features will change the way we use your computer. The problem is, half of these features aren’t ready for prime-time by the time Microsoft announces them, so months later, the firm is left with a new problem. It can’t deliver what it’s promised and has to delay it to the next update. Of course, it can’t announce the same features it announced for the previous updates, so it’ll announce a few more features that won’t make the cut, but don’t worry, the next update will get it. And so on.

This is a problem that doesn’t need to exist as far as I can see. There is no legal force that is compelling Microsoft to push out two updates a year, this is an entirely self-imposed deadline. In addition, while these updates often feature packed, many of the features are irrelevant to the vast majority of users.

There's a lot more to it, and the entire thing is well worth a read, and Allison does a very good job of highlighting the problem (i.e. increasing distrust of Microsoft), and proposing a very simple behaviour change that Microsoft could implement which might start to address it (i.e. honesty), but the part I liked best is actually the very last paragraph, which speaks more to the media's failings than to Microsoft's:

In a few months, Microsoft will announce a new version of Windows with the usual fanfare. There’ll be features galore, and they’ll aim to change the way you think about your PC – or so the marketing goes. Despite the critical pieces saturating the web at the moment, the firm need not worry, we’ll still have learned nothing by then.

Clearly, some members of the tech media are aware of how their distractibility is contributing to the problem. Such signs of self-reflection are about as common as hens' teeth; in the spirit of rewarding good behaviour when it happens, please go and give the man some clicks, already.