Is consumer tech stuck in an ecosystem war?

With Microsoft showing a sudden and recent willingness to work with former competitors like Steam and Amazon, it's worth taking a moment to appreciate why this is happening. Because it's not happening out of altruism, that's for damn sure; if Microsoft's original, monopolistic, anti-consumer approach had worked, they wouldn't be making these pro-consumer moves now. No, the truth is that Microsoft is only willing to work with former competitors in areas where the competition is over... and where Microsoft has clearly lost.

Nick Douglas at Lifehacker has a pretty decent article up, examining the phenomenon:

The voice interfaces Cortana and Alexa will soon be able to activate each other for functions that one does better than the other, Amazon and Microsoft announced today. It’s the kind of cooperation that we don’t see enough between the Big Five, or really any company that’s grown out of its “desperately cobble together partnerships so we look relevant” phase and into its “abandon all cooperation that doesn’t lock customers into our shitty ecosystem” phase.

Cortana and Alexa’s competitors, Google Assistant and Siri, won’t be integrating any time soon. As Gizmodo notes, Google and Apple have far more users locked into their ecosystems, so they have far less incentive to cooperate with competing systems. By combining forces, Microsoft and Amazon are admitting they’ve lost the war for mobile, (the dominant user interface now), and holding onto their own core competencies: Microsoft for business communication, Amazon for consumption.

[...]

In the short term, all these companies have good reasons to lock up their platforms wherever they still think they can steal market share from the others, and wherever they would rather focus resources on improving their own service instead of handing millions of customers to their competitors through a partnership.

But in the long term, this lock-in keeps the Big Five from innovating, their products leaning on the crutch of the ecosystem, alienating customers who will then abandon the ecosystem for third-party services like Spotify, Dropbox, WhatsApp, 1Password, and Overcast.

Sounds about right to me.

Ecosystems are big right now, because of Apple. iTunes and the iOS App Store came into existence at a time when there were no smartphone competitors; Apple was able to lock customers into Apple's orbit, and then milk them for as much money as possible, one tiny transaction at a time, because they were the only game in town. Gamers may decry the new trend of AAA publishers adding microtransactions into full-priced games, but the trend didn't start with videogame publishers. For big, publicly-traded corporations, who are under pressure to increase revenue, year-over-year, every year, the siren song of the ecosystem is well-nigh impossible to ignore.

But if you're not already an ecosystem player, then ecosystems are not your lucrative friends; they're your enemies, the barriers preventing you from convincing consumers to try your product, and to judge your product on its merits. You may well have built a better mousetrap, but if consumers have to abandon the ecosystem they've already bought into, and then expensively buy into yet another ecosystem, just to try the damn thing... well, honestly, would you? Apart from a handful of early adopters with more money than sense, would anybody?

"Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years. How is that possible?"

That is the title of an excellent piece from The Washington Post:

Hurricane Harvey has brought “500-year” rainfall and flood conditions to the Houston area, according to officials at the Harris County Flood Control District.

By the time the storm finally leaves the Houston area the true magnitude may be even greater than that, surpassing 1,000-year thresholds -- potentially even more.

But 500-year floods, as it turns out, happen more frequently than you might expect. The Houston area alone has seen no fewer than three such events in the past three years, according to local officials: Memorial Day floods in 2015 and 2016, followed by Hurricane Harvey's torrential rains this year.

So is Houston just on a historically unlucky run of flooding, to be followed by a return to normal soon? Or was there some miscalculation of how frequently these massive flooding events occur? Or, most alarmingly, is something else happening that suggests these catastrophic weather events are becoming much more common?

Spoiler alert: It's that last one. The map of 500-year storms that have hit the U.S. since 2010 alone is mind-blowing:

The West Coast, incidentally, escaped this plague of floods only thanks to a record-setting drought and few thousand wildfires (Canada hasn't escaped this, either, BTW). Welcome to your new climate, fellow Earthlings! 

Seriously, though, the images coming out of Houston are almost beyond belief. The only thing I've ever seen that approaches scale of the destruction is the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, or New Orleans, post-Katrina (which feels like a long time ago, now, but was only in 2005).

Did I mention that Harvey is causing flooding in Louisiana, too? And that it's moved out to sea where is can build strength again, to make landfall again and cause more damage in the coming days? It's not quite forty days and forty nights, but the images sure do have a biblical sort of look to them, don't they?

This is the part where I'm supposed to wish everyone in Houston the best of luck, and hope that everyone comes out of this OK, but I'm afraid that ship has sailed. The damage is already catastrophic, the cost of rebuilding will beggar belief, most people in the affected area don't even have flood insurance, and Trump is threatening to shut down the U.S. government in the middle of all this if Congress doesn't fund his Mexican border wall. 

I'm not making that up, by the way. Trump is still talking about the damn wall, and about his 2016 election results in Missouri, and about how great a job his administration is doing in the handling of everything, even as Houston drowns and available resources, FEMA included, are stretched to the breaking point. Trump's even planning to visit the area for a photo op, while the disaster is still happening, diverting much-needed resources from the response and rescue efforts for the sake his own security and his "ratings." As if Harvey weren't enough for them to be dealing with...

Odds are excellent that Congress will just ignore his shutdown threats, but this Congress is also still controlled by the same Republicans who voted against disaster funding after superstorm Sandy, so... God only knows if the people of Texas will get the help they need to rebuild. The U.S. is the richest nation on earth, and yet the Red Cross is probably going to be crucial to the response, simply due to the fecklessness and hypocrisy of the U.S. Congress. What a mess.

The WaPo piece is well worth reading, by the way, so go give them some traffic. And spare a thought for the people of the Gulf coast, from Texas to Louisiana, who are living in hell this week, and will be rebuilding their lives for years to come... assuming that another 500-year flood doesn't wash them into the Gulf, five years from now.

Also, the Canadian Red Cross is accepting donations for their Hurricane Harvey response effort, so please help if you can afford to; helping out in times of need is what neighbours are supposed to do, after all.

Speaking of Microsoft's anti-consumer bullshit...

We're nearing the end of yet another month, and I guess Windows 10's adoption rate has not improved since the end of July, because Microsoft are scare-mongering again.

From NeoWin:

For the past few months, Microsoft has been touting the security features available to customers using Windows 10, especially with the increase in ransomware attacks. It even vowed to raise the bar for security with the upcoming Fall Creators Update.

Now, the company has published yet another blog post persuading customers to upgrade to the latest version of Windows 10, citing increasing security threats.

Microsoft's blog post apparently includes a handy flowchart of Windows 10's "constantly evolving threat mitigation," just in case you'd missed the point from the text. Apparently, Fear ≈ Windows 10, in Microsoft-logic. The problem for Microsoft is that they've been doing this for months already, without any noticeable result. They're the corporation that cried "wolf." It's all so transparently self-serving that nobody's really listening anymore.

We'll know for sure in another few days, but I'm going on record and predicting yet another month of essentially flat OS market share trendlines, with Windows 10 gaining no more than 1%, all of which will come at the expense of Windows XP and 8/8.1, rather than Windows 7. Place your bets!

A more open approach to Steam

In yesterday's blog post, I mentioned Microsoft's new and remarkably consumer-friendly approach to collaborations with VALVe (Steam) and Nintendo (Switch), especially when it comes to VR and crossplay. Well, it turns out they're really not kidding about that, according to VG24:

Mike Ybarra, vice president of Xbox, told VG247 that it’s happy to talk to the likes of Valve and Nintendo when it comes to getting multiplayer games working across multiple platforms, not just between Xbox One and Windows.

“It’s more about gamer choice, more about making an IP on our platform last longer. I don’t care about where they play, I just want people to have fun playing games because that’s just better for the industry,” said Ybarra.

“The demands of consumers and developers have changed,” he continued. “People are like, ‘we want all of our gamers in one multiplayer pool together, playing’.

“We totally agree with that. If any developer wants to have that conversation… Valve is right down the street from us, Nintendo is too – they’re like a block from us. We’re having these discussions as developers come up, and we’re completely open to that.”

It needs to be said that this openness is not sourced in altruism. Microsoft lost control of PC gaming years ago, ceding a virtual monopoly to VALVe for PC game distribution; and they lost this console generation to Sony's PS4, having been outpaced in consoles sold by two to one before they simply stopped humiliating themselves by reporting their XBOne sales numbers. Crossplay between XBO-S/XBO-X and any other platform does Microsoft nothing but good, here, which is why they're suddenly a lot more open to this sort of congenial collaboration... instead of, say, trying to seize control of PC gaming from Steam with Windows 8, or with UWP. With Windows 8 and UWP having both failed, it seems that Microsoft has finally been able to pry open their ears, and hear what gamers have been telling them for years.

It also needs to be said that Microsoft's consumer-friendly XBox division isn't exactly on the same page as the rest of the organization. Microsoft have been guilty of a lot of anti-consumer bullshit when you look at their corporate activities more broadly since Windows 10's launch, and the larger organization is still showing every holding out on almost every pro-consumer measure that's been suggested to them. The company that spent a year and a half foot-dragging and fighting in court, only to grudgingly give users control over their updates again, anyway, is a very different beast than their suddenly-consumer-friendly gaming division.

Still, it's progress, and the right tone and messaging from Microsoft at a time when big game publishers are mostly moving in a direction of more anti-consumer bullshit. I guess I'll take it. Hell, if Microsoft and VALVe can work together to make the Steam Client easily downloadable on an XBox, I might even consider picking one up for my living room.

Today in Virtual Reality...

Surprising absolutely nobody, Sony has finally announced that they'll follow Oculus and HTC in cutting the price of their VR headsets. As reported by Shawn Knight at TechSpot:

Sony’s virtual reality platform will soon be a bit more affordable thanks to a competitor-spurred price cut.

The gaming giant on Monday announced that its existing PlayStation VR Worlds bundle consisting of the VR headset, a PlayStation Camera, two PlayStation Move motion controllers and PlayStation VR Worlds game will be available for just $449 starting September 1 (down from the current asking price of $499).

The core PlayStation VR bundle, meanwhile, will (as of next month) come with a PlayStation Camera – a required piece of hardware that isn’t included with the existing kit. The bundle will retain its existing $399 price point meaning you’re essentially getting the camera for free.

OK, so it's not much of a price cut, suggesting that Sony may not have much room to cut; if so, then PSVR will be at a significant disadvantage when compared to Oculus' Rift and HTC's Vive, both of which provide superior tech, and both of which are suddenly a lot closer in price to PSVR. The reason that Sony, Oculus, and HTC are all cutting prices isn't surprising, either; they're trying to offload inventory in advance of more competition entering the market.

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

If you're starting to feel as if modern life is starting to look more and more like an episode of Black Mirror, then you're not alone. It seems like every other day that I'm now seeing stories like this one, from the CBC:

There was a time that oil companies ruled the globe, but "black gold" is no longer the world's most valuable resource — it's been surpassed by data.

The five most valuable companies in the world today — Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google's parent company Alphabet — have commodified data and taken over their respective sectors.

"Data is clearly the new oil," says Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.

But with that domination comes responsibility — and jurisdictions are struggling with how to contain, regulate and protect all those ones and zeros.

For instance, Google holds an 81 per cent share of search, according to data metrics site Net Market Share.

By comparison, even at its height, Standard Oil only had a 79 per cent share of the American market before antitrust regulators stepped in, Taplin says.

[...]

Traditionally, this is where the antitrust regulators would step in, but in the data economy it's not so easy. What we're seeing for the first time is a clash between the concept of the nation state and these global, borderless corporations. A handful of tech giants now surpass the size and power of many governments.

For comparison sake, Facebook has almost two billion users, while Canada has a population of just over 36 million. Based on the companies' sheer scale alone, it is increasingly difficult for countries to enforce any kind of regulation, especially as the tech giants start pushing for rules that free them from local restrictions, says Open Media's Meghan Sali.

Machine learning and automation technologies could render as much as 40% of the population in the developed world not merely unemployed, but unemployable. Huge technology companies now control more access to information, and more money, than most governments. There's a growing realization that everyone around you has an internet-enabled video camera in their pocket, and could be surveilling you with neither your knowledge nor your consent, all the time, and uploading the data to those same huge mega-corporations. It's not quite Neuromancer, but we're definitely living a world that very different than the world of even twenty years ago; a world that's still changing, since all of these technological trends are still in their early days.

And that doesn't even factor in the Earth's changing climate...

Welcome to the world of tomorrow, today; the Singularity, already underway.

There's a lot more to that CBC piece, by the way; it's definitely worth reading.

HTC looking to sell?

As I've said before, while Gabe Newell might be totally cool with VR being "a complete failure," other players in the VR game may not be so cool with the idea of losing money hand over fist, for years on end, with only vague promises of possible profits to keep their shareholders happy. There's a reason why Oculus is cutting prices so aggressively, only months after Mark Zuckerberg pleaded with Facebook's shareholders for more time to establish VR as a thing.

Well, now it's HTC's turn. Earlier this week, they cut the price on the Vive to compete with the now-much-cheaper rift, but it would seem that their VR adventure has left HTC over-extended enough that they're considering selling their Vive division, and maybe just merging entirely with another firm.

From Bloomberg:

HTC Corp., the beleaguered manufacturer that once ranked among the world’s top smartphone makers, is exploring options that could range from separating its virtual-reality business to a full sale of the company, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Taiwanese firm is working with an adviser as it considers bringing in a strategic investor, selling its Vive virtual reality headset business or spinning off the unit, the people said. HTC has held talks with companies including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.

A full sale of HTC, which has businesses ranging from VR to handset manufacturing, is less likely because it isn’t an obvious fit for a single acquirer, one of the people said.

[...]

No final decisions have been made, and HTC may choose not to proceed with any strategic changes, the people said. Representatives for HTC and Google declined to comment.

HTC bet heavily on VR, partnering with VALVe to product the Vive, in part because fierce competition in a mature smartphone market was slowing profits from that division of the company. With this week's price cut, and now this news, it sure looks to me like HTC have lost that bet. VR has not become a thing, the current generation of VR technology is not finding a place in the homes of consumers, and slowing smartphone sales are just not providing enough funds to feed the bottomless black hole of VR development. VALVe might have all the money, thanks to their near-monopoly on PC game distribution, and maybe GabeN can afford to keep throwing money into a bottomless black VR hole, but a publicly-traded company like HTC eventually needs to show results; non-GAAP press releases can only do so much to disguise a reality like this:

The damage may be permanent...

After the disastrous administration of George W. Bush, it took Barack Obama eight full years to almost restore the global standing and reputation of the United States. It has taken Trump only eight months to take the U.S. all the way back to this:

It will take the U.S. an entire generation to erase this stain and regain their place as leaders of the free world again, if they ever do. 20 years, at a minimum; that's my prediction for how long it takes the United States to undo this damage, original inflicted by Dubya, and currently being repeated and amplified by Trump.

Don't believe me? Don't take my word for it; take the Pew Research Centre's word for it:

Although he has only been in office a few months, Donald Trump’s presidency has had a major impact on how the world sees the United States. Trump and many of his key policies are broadly unpopular around the globe, and ratings for the U.S. have declined steeply in many nations. According to a new Pew Research Center survey spanning 37 nations, a median of just 22% has confidence in Trump to do the right thing when it comes to international affairs. This stands in contrast to the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when a median of 64% expressed confidence in Trump’s predecessor to direct America’s role in the world.

The sharp decline in how much global publics trust the U.S. president on the world stage is especially pronounced among some of America’s closest allies in Europe and Asia, as well as neighboring Mexico and Canada. Across the 37 nations polled, Trump gets higher marks than Obama in only two countries: Russia and Israel.

[...]

Since 2002, when Pew Research Center first asked about America’s image abroad, favorable opinion of the U.S. has frequently tracked with confidence in the country’s president. Prior to this spring, one of the biggest shifts in attitudes toward the U.S. occurred with the change from George W. Bush’s administration to Obama’s. At that time, positive views of the U.S. climbed in Europe and other regions, as did trust in how the new president would handle world affairs.

It's almost like the Obama years never happened. Which, in a way, was precisely the Republican Party's goal. Well... theirs and Vladimir Putin's.

This is where we live now; most of your high-tech gadgets are made in China now, not the U.S., and China is investing heavily in clean energy and cleaner air and water, all while Trump's EPA is basically being bureaucratically starved to death. The effects will echo forward from this moment for decades to come, too. The world of tomorrow will be one where China dominates in clean energy, high-tech manufacturing, automation, and AI, while the U.S. struggles to rebuild their crumbling New Deal infrastructure with coal power. Florida and Louisiana are literally vanishing beneath rising sea levels already, the polar ice caps and permafrost are melting already, and El Niño is now happening every other year (not that it matters much), but Trump is still trying to claim that coal is the fucking future.

Meanwhile, the world is looking to Germany and Canada to provide the leadership that Trump refuses to. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm Canadian, and I voted for Justin Trudeau, so I don't mind seeing both of them taking a more prominent place on the world stage. But, seriously, folks... when Canada is the country that the world is looking to for moral leadership, while the U.S. descends into neo-fascism? At that point, you just know that things have gone very, very pear-shaped.

I'm not writing anything new, or shocking, here, but I wanted record of my prognostications for posterity. You know, just in case I'm wrong about this, as futurists often are. And I really do hope I'm wrong about this, but I don't think that I am. The damage is done, and this time, Americans aren't going to be able to pretend that it's a one-off anomaly; this is the second time in three Presidents that they've gone down this baby-steps-to-fascism road, and I don't think another Obama is in the cards.

Microsoft pinkie-swears, promises never to repeat one of the worse excess of their GWX campaign

Remember when Microsoft started automatically downloading gigabytes of Windows 10 "upgrade" to the PCs of people who'd repeatedly declined their free upgrade offer, putting lives in danger in the process? Well, they've now finally promised not to do that again.

From MSPoweruser:

Back in 2015 when Microsoft has pushed out the Windows 10 upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows 8 users, part of the process was pre-downloading between 6-8 GB of installation files, which famously nearly bankrupted a nature conservation service in Africa and which was blamed for causing issues to the PCs of many Windows users.

It appears German Windows users were similarly unimpressed by the move and complained to their local consumer protection council (Verbraucherschutz). After 18 months and many legal manoeuvres by Microsoft, they finally agreed to a cease and desist and promised:

Microsoft will not download install files for new operating systems to a user system’s hard disk without a user’s consent.

While it may be a case of closing the barn door long after the horse has bolted Cornelia Tausch, CEO of the Consumer Center in Baden-Württemberg noted: “We assume that Microsoft and other software manufacturers will pay more attention to the procedure which is not negligible.”

While my hat is off to the Germans for not letting this simply die, I'm not convinced that they actually accomplished much of anything, here. After all, Microsoft haven't yet apologized for essentially forcing users to upgrade by removing all other options from their GWX app, and with those class action lawsuits still be working their way through the court system, admissions of wrongdoing from MS won't be forthcoming anytime soon.

Today's statement is still a long way from the blanket apology that Microsoft should be issuing, though, and doesn't begin to cover all their other shittiness of the past two years, so I'm not filing this under "better late than never," the way Baden-Württemberg seems to be willing to do. No, I'm filing this under "much too little, and far too late," because it really is both of those things. It took Microsoft eighteen months to agree that they should stop putting lives in danger with a GWX campaign that officially ended over eleven months ago, and they still haven't actually apologized for forcing those downloads through.

Placed in that context, today's token, belated, and grudging concession to reality looks every bit as meaningless as it is. Today's statement does represent the first time that Microsoft has officially admitted that what they did was actually wrong, specifically because it was done without users' consent, rather than merely making their PR department's job harder, but that's all it does.

Microsoft gutting Windows 10's Pro version to make their Advanced User version

Remember that "advanced user" version of Windows 10, that was first rumoured back in June and finally confirmed earlier this month? The one that people were calling a cynical cash grab, because it just didn't include enough extra functionality to justify its separate SKU, or its higher price point? Well, it would appear that Microsoft heard those criticisms, and took them to heart, because they're now cutting functionality from Windows 10's less-expensive Pro version in order to create a clearer distinction between Pro and Pro for Workstations.

It looks like Brad Sams at Petri.com was the first to report on this revoltin' development:

Tell me if you have heard this one before, Microsoft is cutting features from Windows 10 Pro to push you towards a higher-priced version of Windows 10. As of August 17th, Microsoft has quietly updated the list of features that are being removed or deprecated in the Fall Creators update and this will impact Pro users.

On August 17th, Microsoft added to its technical document that details what features will be removed or deprecated with the Fall Creators Update to include that the creation of ReFS drives is no longer supported in Windows 10 Pro. To get this feature, you must be on Enterprise or Windows 10 Pro Advanced Workstations; both SKUs are more expensive than Pro.

[...]

Using this type of feature is for advanced users and likely won’t impact too many users of Pro but it’s the fact that Microsoft has no problems cutting features from this SKU that is more alarming. Microsoft has already trimmed down Pro to force more users to Enterprise in the past and with this removal, they are once again trying to force users into higher priced iterations of the OS.

[...]

The question becomes how much further is Microsoft going to cut back on Pro to force users to the Enterprise SKU? It is well-known that Microsoft wants every business to be running Enterprise iteration of Windows 10 but that some have managed to use Windows 10 Pro to save a few dollars. With cuts like this and the few that were made last year, Microsoft is slowly tightening down on premium grade business features in its lower priced OS.

This, my friends, truly is some bullshit. Not that Darth Microsoft altering the deal is anything new, but even for them, this is a whole new level.

Remember, Microsoft has been pushing Windows 10 Pro from the very beginning, and many fairly advanced users have already paid for the older, now-lesser, "semi-Pro" version, in some cases because it included ReFS. While I'm sure those users' existing installations and and already-formatted volumes will be unaffected, the fact that Microsoft is now demanding extra from them in order to continue using a feature that they already fucking paid for is beyond the pale... and yet, it's also totally Microsoft.

(Oh, about those existing installations? How would you rate the odds of an advanced user wanting to do a clean install of the OS every once in a while? My guess is those are some damned good odds. ♫Bye-bye♫, existing installation...)

Cutting features from a product service package that people have been buying since 2015 in order to sell those same people another, more expensive package containing exactly the same shit, is just.... well, shit, and every customer that Microsoft is screwing over this way should receive a full refund, from Microsoft, no questions asked. In fact, Microsoft should do away with the low-rent "semi-Pro" (and yes, I'm going to call it that for the rest of time, now) licence entirely, and just upgrade Home users to the (now reduced) Pro functionality for free... especially since they're doing exactly that free version upgrade for people who actually buy systems with Windows 10 S installed.

Expect yet another cluster of class action to emerge from the market in response to Microsoft's latest anti-consumer fuckery. Seriously, who in Redmond thought that this was good idea?

HTC drops the Vive's MSRP by US$200

Well, it's happened; HTC had finally done the obvious and predictable thing, and matched Oculus' price cut, apparently in the hope that making the headsets less expensive will stimulate some level of consumer interest. That's not just me snarking about VR, either; while they did their very best to spin this, even HTC admitted today that VR needs a bigger install base.

From Charlie Fink at Forbes:

HTC today announced a $200 price cut on its flagship VR system, The HTC Vive. The announcement follows a similar reduction in the price of Facebook's Oculus Rift last month. Both companies touted the price cut as an effort to grow their community, which HTC President Rikard Steiber said coincides with the arrival of flagship titles like "Doom" and "Ready Player One", based on the upcoming Speilberg VR movie. "I am so proud of the wide array of experiences now available for the Vive. Our developers deserve a bigger audience. The Vive is not just for first adopters anymore."

[...]

The guys did a great job putting on a game face on a dog of an announcement. The reason companies drop their price is because they're not selling enough product. Of course, if you happen to be one of those people on the edge, maybe this, with the product announcements, will tip you over, but I'm skeptical that is a significant number of consumers.

This is still a first adopter market. The need for a high-end gaming PC to run the high-end headsets limits the consumer base to gamers and hobbyists. VR is not easy to use. Ironically this is generally not the fault of HTC or Oculus. High-end gaming PCs are temperamental and difficult to configure. Downloads take a long time and are easily corrupted in the process. This is about as far from plug and play as you can possibly get.

Second, the competitors are coming, including stand-alone (wireless) headsets from HTC itself for Google Daydream. [...] Lenovo is also developing a stand-alone headset. [...] These headsets feature outside facing cameras, eliminating the need for tracking stations. Outside facing cameras can also bring in the real world to create Mixed Reality experiences. [...] In other words, the new stand-alone is superior technologically, wireless and cheaper.

Third, the Windows 10 MR release is weeks away. Firefox just released its VR browser. Sansar just opened its continuous VR world generator to the public. Acer is bringing a $300 dual-use - VR/MR - headset to the new Windows 10 MR platform. No gaming computer required.

Those are just the facts, to which I'll add a few whispers from insiders under very serious NDAs: there will be new, advanced high-end headsets from Vive and Oculus next year. They will compatible with Macs and PCs. They will feature advanced Bluetooth (BLE - Bluetooth Low Energy), better optics, advanced microphones, and hand tracking. The high-end is going to get a lot higher and pull away from the stand-alone models. When these models are announced, the prices for current the Vive and Oculus 1.0 models are going to face more price pressure. There will be substantial resale of these models when the new ones come out. HTC and Oculus need to move these off the shelves this Christmas, at whatever price.

In other words, don't bother with this generation of the tech, because it's already obsolete; Oculus and HTC are just hoping to move their unwanted inventory before the next-gen VR headsets arrive. Those next-gen VR headsets still won't have solved the problem of virtual locomotion, BTW, or the problem of VR sickness, or the fundamental problem of VR being basically useless, which means that they aren't going to sell, either. Let's face it: current-gen VR headsets aren't gathering dust on store shelves because they lack Bluetooth features.

Early in the smartphone era, handsets like the iPhone were expensive, but they were also obviously useful, resulting in plenty of consumers who wanted them, but who couldn't afford them. So when Google's Android brought the price of smartphones down, it stimulated the development of the smartphone market by putting products economically within reach of more of those same consumers.

VR is not in the same position; the problem isn't that consumers want VR, but can't afford it. Consumers are simply not interested in VR. When Oculus closed their BestBuy demo stations, it wasn't because they couldn't convince consumers to buy the Rift; they couldn't convince consumers to try the Rift, with some locations going days on end without doing a single demo (during the busy holiday shopping season, no less).

VR headset makers are still trying to convince people to buy into VR by showing them experiences that VR enhances; until they figure out some activity that VR actually enables (i.e. something that's made possible by VR, rather than just being made better by VR), the tech will continue to be a very tough sell, at any price.

About those Windows 10 migrations

I said that I'd be coming back to this topic, and I'm a man of my word.

One of the many reasons that I'm skeptical of claims about Windows 10's allegedly accelerating pace of corporate migrations is Windows As A Service's messy maintenance problem, something which is nicely illustrated by this piece from Redmond Mag:

In theory, Microsoft's agile Windows 10 release process should work without a hitch, but theory may fall short in the real world of organizations. Microsoft admits that it only tests 250 critical business applications before its Windows 10 updates get released. While Microsoft is seeing 100 percent pass rates with this testing process, it's apparent that experience in the field has been different. Organizations see problems even with Microsoft applications after upgrades.

One reader of the article by das Neves commented that the use of servicing plans with SCCM isn't possible because it's not easy to use with multiple-language Windows 10 deployments.

Another reader expressed dismay in the rapid changes to the update process with Windows 10, including the "nonsensical word salad Semi Annual Channel Pilot and Broad," referring to Microsoft's older terminology.

An objection was raised about Microsoft's testing-rings recommendation. End users just want a computer to do their work and have no idea about Windows 10's various deployment phases. And the IT department is just too busy to test every Windows 10 release, it was argued.

Some organizations are stumbling over bandwidth issues associated with Windows 10 upgrades because of their network architectures. They're also getting Group Policy Object settings broken by Windows 10 upgrades.

Another reader, "TwittApic," noted that Windows 10 installations are slow, taking about two hours, which is downtime that users won't tolerate. In addition, users typically see value in application improvements, not in operating system feature additions, so the Windows 10 upgrades are of little value to them. Software applications sometimes become incompatible with Windows 10 upgrades, such as antivirus software, it was noted. (Kaspersky Lab recently dropped legal complaints over not having sufficient time to review Windows 10 upgrades, so possibly that situation will improve.)

In response, das Neves suggested that organizations seeing such software incompatibilities with Windows 10 upgrades could "involve your PFE/TAM" (Premier Field Engineer/Technical Account Manager). However, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Susan Bradley, whose expertise is with small businesses, noted that not every organization has such access. 

With even Microsoft's own software not always working with new Windows 10 builds, problems with multiple-language Windows 10 deployments (unavoidable for any multi-national company, or for companies that source products from a globalized supply chain), problems with finicky builds that end users are apparently required to continue testing after deployment, bandwidth issues and downtime caused by frequent updates, update management tools that are broken by Windows updates, security issues caused by Microsoft's monopolistic bullshit approach to antivirus software, and the added cost of needing extra IT people to wrangle it all (something which simply isn't in the cards for any small business).... with all those issues, we're meant to believe that everyone's Windows 10 migrations are well underway, and picking up steam? Really?

I don't buy it. Microsoft's move to the Windows-As-A-Service distribution model has been, at the very least, messy; it hasn't proved itself to be sustainable, or really even possible (Paul Thurrott dubbed it Windows as a Disservice), and any company that migrates their whole organization to Windows 10 will be managing the mess for years to come. With Microsoft recently revealing that migration will also come with extra hardware costs, I can't imagine that any organization that hasn't already migrated will be chomping at the bit to replace perfectly good hardware and software with this messy work-in-progress product; it's a lot easier to imagine poll respondents failing to be completely accurate or honest with Adaptiva's pollsters about their Windows 10 migration plans and progress.

(Adaptiva, BTW, are the company that actually did the survey that IT Pro was reporting on earlier. You'll never guess what they do. Go ahead, guess. And then give yourself a no-prize for guessing that they do Windows 10 migrations, along with "fast and reliable content distribution for companies using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager.")

We'll see when the month-end usage numbers come out, but I'm still not expecting to see any significant or accelerated movement towards Windows 10 by the market as a whole.

Another bad sign for VR?

One of the earliest high-profile VR games to see release was EVE: Valkyrie.

A dogfighting shooter set in CCP's EVE Online universe, it seemed to be generally regarded as a decent example of something that VR did well, while also being an excellent demonstration of VR's limitations. PC Powerplay described it as "easily one of the prettiest VR launch titles," and "arguably the best VR experience currently available for the [Oculus Rift] platform," in the same review where they described the same game as "a prime example of how we’re still at the very first generation of VR games - take away the VR headset, and there’s actually a remarkably shallow experience here."

Regardless of the game's excellence and/or limitations, though, there's no denying that it was one of the most highly-hyped early titles for VR, with CCP planning simultaneous Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR releases. Now, however, CCP have apparently decided that they'd like to make some money back from EVE: Valkyrie, which is why they're planning to release a non-VR version of the game on Steam. Because of course they are.

From Kotaku:

This week, CCP Games announced a massive shakeup to its immersive VR shooter EVE: Valkyrie. A free expansion coming in September called “Warzone” will, among other things, remove the need for a virtual reality headset. By decoupling Valkyrie from its VR roots, a much wider player base will be able to log in and play CCP’s unique and beautiful shooter.

[...]

In addition to removing the VR headset requirement, Warzone will add a new mode called “Extraction,” which will work as a sort of Capture-The-Flag-in-space, forcing players to navigate their way out of intricate complexes while trying to return the enemy’s “flag” to their base. Extraction is the fourth competitive game mode in Valkyrie, and the second to be added as part of a free content patch for all owners of the game.

I am surprised only that anybody is surprised.

Meanwhile, CBC News is reporting that VR developers are doubling down on long-form content, like virtual concerts, even while "VR at any length has struggled to go mainstream — weighed down by technology, cost, motion sickness fears and headset accessibility —  with some analysts even speculating its demise." The biggest technology problem that VR content makers will have to overcome may simply be the weight of the headsets, which make them too heavy to wear comfortably for extended periods, according to Occulus themselves:

While the tech will doubtless improve with time and further development, unless VR headset makers shrink the size and weight of the gear down to the point where wearing them is more like wearing ski goggles than welder's goggles, I don't see longer form content as being the solution to VR's issues. And there's still the simple fact that it's expensive; even Samsung's GearVR and Google's Daydream require thousand-dollar, high-end smartphones for VR to really work well, and if it's not working well, then what's the point?

With VR adoption stagnant, makers of VR gambling on content that their few users physically can't endure, and VR launch titles decamping for the larger user bases of Steam's non-VR marketplace... I have to say, I really don't see how this current generation of VR headsets can ever become a thing.

In other words, he’s an asshole.

In a previous blog post, I mentioned Julian Assange, and his well-established propensity for getting down into the muck with whoever gives him an opportunity to take a shot at someone he's holding a grudge against. I didn't elaborate, but if you were wanting an example of what I was talking about, Sploid had a pretty good one today:

According to a newly released Foreign Policy report, leaked communications show Wikileaks declined to release a cache of hacked Russian documents in the summer of 2016, dismissing the only partially published records as “already public.” While there will be plenty of talk about this being proof of founder Julian Assange’s loyalties to Russia, it most prominently displays his general hypocrisy and self-interest.

Ever since Wikileaks published Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and John Podesta’s email archives, the organization has been on the outs with many liberals and leftists in the US. It was hard to deny that Assange has held a grudge against Hillary Clinton for many years and, by all appearances, he was willing to take that grudge so far that he’d help get a maniac like Donald Trump elected. When the extent of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election became more clear, many people began wondering if Assange was a secret ally of Putin. Foreign Policy’s report from Thursday will not help the Wikileaks founder gain much credibility in his denials.

According to the report, Wikileaks was offered at least 68 gigabytes of data from the Russian Interior Ministry by an anonymous source. But Assange didn’t feel that dropping the documents was a high priority. Foreign Policy was able to view partial chat logs from the time and was given details by a source that provided the internal communications.

[...]

Foreign Policy’s source said that several leaks were offered that would have exposed corruption and they were shocked to be turned down. “Many Wikileaks staff and volunteers or their families suffered at the hands of Russian corruption and cruelty, we were sure Wikileaks would release it,” the source said, “Assange gave excuse after excuse.” Foreign Policy only says that “the Russian cache was eventually quietly published online elsewhere, to almost no attention or scrutiny.”

[...]

Assange has maintained from the beginning that Wikileaks doesn’t “have targets,” and he’s insisted for a long time that he’d like to expose more material from Russia and China. But he seems to be admitting that if it doesn’t put the biggest spotlight on Wikileaks at the time, he’ll take a pass.

[...]

Assange is a journalist, a unique kind of journalist for sure, but a journalist nonetheless. He makes editorial decisions, and he can be wrong. But these days, his self-aggrandizement and personal mythmaking border on megalomania. He’s the kind of guy who will make up a story about his cat being a gift from his kids just to give himself an extra level of humanity that seems so clearly to be missing. In other words, he’s an asshole.

In that same previous blog post, I also talked about how I tried not to indulge in too many "+1" posts, with just a long section of excerpts from another article followed by, "What he said," but there are times when I really do want to draw more attention to something, and don't have all that much to add, so.... What he said.

As I've said before, any respect or trust that I had for Wikileaks as an organization is now entirely gone, and will not recover unless and until they find a way to distance themselves from their founder... by which point I expect them to have become entirely irrelevant to the public discourse. I have no idea what Wilileaks' mission statement says, but I'm willing to bet that "settling Julian Assange's every petty personal grudge" won't be on there, but it really should be; they seem to exist now only to settle scores for Assange.

Rhett Jones piece on Sploid is a pretty good read, by the way; I urge you to go read it for yourself.

Trump's CEO councils disbanded

Just yesterday, Trump was talking big about being able replace all of the CEOs who were fleeing his American Manufacturing Council, claiming that he had lots of CEOs that he could call up to replace them. Like so much of what Trump says, however, that was a bald-faced lie, and today he basically admitted as much.

From HuffPost:

The White House’s two advisory councils of top business executives disbanded on Wednesday amid intense public blowback against President Donald Trump’s response to the deadly attack by an accused white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The move came two days after executives began resigning from the dwindling American Manufacturing Council and hours after the billionaire financier who headed the separate Strategic and Policy Forum hosted a call with the 15 members of that panel.

Trump took credit on Twitter for dissolving the councils in order to alleviate pressure on the executives. 

Time will tell if Trump succeeded in "alleviating the pressure" on the likes of Michael Dell; personally, I think that Dell will still burn in hell, having chosen to stand with the neo-Nazi, domestic-terrorism-supporting Trump rather than taking a stand against the resurgence of actual Nazism in the U.S.

Trump and his supporters had a clear and simple choice to make, between the side with the neo-Nazi domestic terrorists on it, and the side with everyone else on it. When it mattered, though, they chose the neo-Nazi domestic terrorists, and nothing they ever do will erase the stain of that choice from their reputations, or from their souls. I'm serious about hoping that a special hell exists, just for them to burn in... and I'm an atheist.

Bringing this back to tech blogging for a second... I urge everyone reading this to boycott Dell Technologies, unless and until the oust Michael Dell as their CEO. Dell stood with the Nazis and the terrorists, and you should refuse to support the company that he leads. Anyone who works at Dell... I'm sorry, but if you're staying on there, then you're standing with Dell and Trump, and I have no sympathy for you at all. This is the moment when you must decide what you stand for, and take a stand, even if it costs you. You cannot opt out of this; to stay silent is to aid the neo-Nazis.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

There is no such thing as an "alt-left" movement.

The terms "alt-right" and "alternative right" first came into widespread use during last year's U.S. Presidential campaign, and most people know very little about where they came from, but it you remember nothing else about these terms, remember that they are not generic; "alt-right" is neither a media invention, nor an academic label. "Alt-right" is not some label that people outside the movement have coined to describe them; it is a term that white supremacists invented themselves, to describe themselves, as a safely euphemistic alternative to being called white supremacists. 

From Wikipedia:

White supremacist^[6] Richard Spencer coined the term in 2010 in reference to a movement centred on white nationalism, and has been accused by some media publications of doing so to excuse overt racism, white supremacism, and neo-Nazism.

Excusing overt racism is exactly what Spencer was doing, by the way. "Alt-right" pure branding, a PR exercise by white supremacists to hide the worst of their ugliness from public view, allowing Republican politicians to pander to them in stump speeches, and at campaign rallies, and in their legislative agenda. It is a convenient fiction, a fig leaf that has no left-leaning or progressive equivalent. There is no moral equivalent to neo-Nazism on the left. There is no practical equivalent to the "alt-right" on the centre/left of the political spectrum.

So when Donald Trump spoke today about how the "alt-left" was (somehow) also to blame for last week-end's lethal violence in C'Ville, he was talking right out of his asshole, and spewing nothing but shit.

From CBC News:

A combative U.S. President Donald Trump insisted Tuesday "there is blame on both sides" for the deadly violence last weekend in Charlottesville, Va., appearing to once again equate the actions of white nationalist groups and those protesting them.

The president's comments effectively wiped away the more conventional statement he delivered at the White House one day earlier when he branded members of the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists who take part in violence as "criminals and thugs."

Trump's advisers had hoped those remarks might quell a crush of criticism from both Republicans and Democrats. But the president's retorts Tuesday suggested he had been a reluctant participant in that cleanup effort. 

Donald Trump is a morally bankrupt, intellectually impoverished, egomaniacal, pathological liar. If nothing he ever did before now served to convince you that he does not deserve to occupy the Oval Office, this should. Last November, when America's racists all supported Trump's presidential campaign at the polls, it could still be said that not everyone who voted for Trump was a racist. That is no longer true. Anyone still supporting Trump today, after this performance, is a racist. Period.

Continuing to support Trump is a racist act. The same applies for his presidency, or his businesses, or his reality TV career, or his family, or anything else that he touches. To stand with Trump is to stand with America's neo-Nazis. There is no morally equivalent opposing movement that you can point to and say, "they're just as bad." We're talking about literal Nazis; nobody else is as bad.

Stick a pin in this one...

... we'll be coming back to it September 1st.

From Jim Souders at Windows IT Pro:

Why Are Windows 10 Migrations Picking Up Speed?

Last year, few IT professionals believed they would be close to completing their migration to Windows 10 by this time. Some even estimated that they wouldn’t be at the halfway mark. Given the scale of this mission—migrating thousands of systems without business interruption—this conservative outlook is perhaps understandable.

Yet IT experts across major industries and enterprises have found that, while their planning cycles have taken more time than expected, actual system deployments are moving swiftly. In fact, our recent annual 2017 Windows 10 Enterprise Impact Survey of nearly 500 enterprises with upwards of more than 10,000 systems unveiled a tipping point in which nearly 10 percent had already completed their migrations. Many more believe that they will complete the migration within twelve months at the latest.

What changed? What sparked this sudden acceleration of Windows 10 upgrades?

There's been an acceleration of Windows 10 upgrades? Really? Well, then I guess the end-of-July usage stats from NetMarketShare and others should reflect this dramatic shift to Windows 10... right? But they won't, will they? Because those usage stats have remained stubbornly flat all year, in spite of apologists like Souders claiming all the while that the rollout was picking up speed, and I'll bet a five spot on this month's stats coming in at pretty much exactly the same place that last month's did.

Remember when we were discussing selection bias, just last week? I'm going to go out on a limb, here, and say that cherry-picking fewer than 500 businesses has not yielded a representative sample of the overall OS market.

IT Pro (and others) seem to be invested in the Windows 10 vision of the future, giving them a material interest in the outcome of those polls. They keep getting the answers they go looking for... only to have the behaviour of the actual market contradict them entirely, month after month after month. I'm not expecting August to be significantly different, or September, or October... and let's face it, if the shift isn't already well underway, a month into the year's 4th quarter, then it won't be happening this calendar year.

We've got just over two weeks to wait, to see if I'm right about that. Stay tuned...

There is no substitute for the right word

In polite discourse, one should generally try to avoid unnecessarily incendiary language. Dropping f-bombs, for example, can be very effective when done sparingly, but loses its impact if you do it all the time, so cluster and carpet f-bombing should be avoided... except where circumstances warrant it. Because sometimes, the only word of sufficient plosiveness, power, and pungency, the right word to express what you think and feel... sometimes that word really is fuck.

And sometimes, even in online fora, it really is OK to call someone a Nazi. Like, for example, when that someone is actually a swaztika-waving, Sig Heil-ing, Hitler-idolizing neo-Nazi. And it's not just me saying that; it's Mike Godwin himself. Yes, that Mike Godwin.

From Gizmodo:

We’ve all been there. Maybe you were discussing Naruto, or Vince the Slap Chop guy, or comparing saxophone brands on a message board. But then an argument broke out and both sides dug their heels in, and someone got called a Nazi. Then someone else mentioned Godwin’s law, and the conversation was over.

In this case, however, the discussion concerns “alt righters” marching in Charlottesville who were, well, flying swastikas, Sieg Heil-ing, and wearing shirts with Hitler quotes. And Godwin himself took to Facebook to let everyone know that if it walks like a Nazi and talks like a Nazi, you better let people know what it really is.

Godwin said in a comment that the post didn’t come from nowhere, and was in response to a Facebook message from a concerned follower. As you may have personally experienced, people often invoke Godwin’s law to derail conversations where the opponent draws a Nazi comparison. We have reached out for comment.

Take it from Godwin himself: when the subject of discussion is a group who clearly idolize the Nazis, you can safely compare them to Nazis. Doing so is not needless, or incendiary; it is merely accurate.