Checking in with Nintendo Switch

In spite of Nintendo Switch's really good sales last year, I'm on record as being skeptical about the system's "legs." Sure, the system surged ahead in the holiday quarter of 2017, but they still didn't manage to out-sell the console sales leading PS4, and 2018 was off to a slow start. A lacklustre showing at E3 seemed unlikely to help, either, taking the wind out of the Switch's sales at a time when Nintendo should have been doubling down on their 2017 success.

Which is why I'm not particularly surprised to learn that the Switch's last-quarter sales are down compared to the same period of last year, as reported by GameSpot:

Nintendo has shared its financial earnings for the first quarter of the current fiscal year, and the Nintendo Switch continues to perform well. The company reports it has sold another 1.88 million Switch consoles worldwide during the period from April through June, bringing the system's total sales up to 19.6 million.

While that represents a slight decrease in Switch hardware sales from the same period last year (down 4.4% year-on-year), software sales grew by more than 120% year-on-year, with 17.96 million units sold during the quarter. Digital sales of packaged Switch games and DLC also grew by 68% from the same period last year.

This is noteworthy for a couple of reasons.

More of what consumers don't want...

Oh, Microsoft. What are we supposed to do with you, when you do shit like this:

For over 30 years, we’ve thought of PCs primarily as Windows machines, which we owned and controlled. That’s about to change forever [...] Microsoft is getting ready to replace Windows 10 with the Microsoft Managed Desktop. This will be a “desktop-as-a-service” (DaaS) offering. Instead of owning Windows, you’ll “rent” it by the month.

DaaS for Windows isn’t new [but] Microsoft Managed Desktop is a new take. It avoids the latency problem of the older Windows DaaS offerings by keeping the bulk of the operating system on your PC [b]ut you’ll no longer be in charge of your Windows PC. Instead, it will be automatically provisioned and patched for you by Microsoft.

[...]

Windows patching was always chancy, but with Windows 10 you’re more likely to have trouble when you patch than you are to avoid problems. [...] So, with this track record, do you want to pay good money to let Microsoft maintain your desktops for you? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Nonetheless, DaaS Windows is coming. Microsoft has been getting away from the old-style desktop model for years now. Just look at Office. Microsoft would much rather have you rent Office via Office 365 than buy Microsoft Office and use it for years.

Do you remember the last time Microsoft tried to take users' desktops away, and how well badly that went? Or maybe you remember last week, when Microsoft said that they wanted to win back consumers?

Guess what consumers emphatically don't want? If you guessed that consumers really, really, really don't want to lease Windows from Microsoft in perpetuity, while Redmond remotely control everything about their desktops, then give yourself a no-prize, because you're exactly right.

Windows 8 flopped hard because Microsoft tried to take users' desktops away, and now, here they are, only 7 years later, plotting to do exactly the same thing all over again, all while lamenting that they can't figure out what consumers really want.

I tell you, Linux is looking better and better all the time...

Speaking of what consumers want...

Check out this new Chromebook ad:

Shots fired! That's some deep shade...

Mehedi Hassan at Thurrott.com broke it down like this:

The ad pretty much highlights why Chromebooks can be better than most Windows and Mac devices for some users. Especially now that Chromebooks support Android apps, they are much more of a compelling alternative to Windows laptops for people who don’t need to do a lot of power and professional features. If I was a regular customer looking for a new laptop, this ad would most certainly make me want to get a Chromebook, or at least consider looking into one. It’s honestly pretty good.

So... comparing Chromebook, which a consumer-centric product that's available now, to "Modern Life Services," Microsoft's currently-vaporware which nobody wanted or asked for, which one do you think shows a better understanding of consumer wants and needs? Which one is better evidence of a consumer-centric corporate culture?

Of course, Google's new ad actually shows older versions of Windows, and not Windows 10 per se, but to consumers that are turned off Microsoft and more trusting of "don't be evil" Google to start with, that probably won't matter much.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is hiking the price of Windows 10.

This round goes to Google. Your move, Microsoft.

Updating your OS: Windows 10 VS Ubuntu Or, what consumers really want.

Last week, when Microsoft announced that they were upgrading Windows 10 Update with AI to make it suck less, I wasn't sure what to think about it. I mean, it is an instance of Microsoft at least trying to fix something that Windows 10 users have been complaining about for two and a half years, but the actual announcement was somehow... underwhelming. I felt nothing; no joy, no satisfaction, no anger, no disappointment, just... nothing. And I didn't know why.

I experienced the same lack of feeling when Microsoft announced that they planned to win back consumers, having done so much over the last decade to lose those consumers in the first place. This should also have been good news, right? I mean, it seemed to indicate some awareness on Microsoft's part that it was their fault that consumers didn't care about Microsoft anymore. And yet... I felt nothing.

Maybe it was the name? As a PC gamer who'd spent the last year watching AAA gaming companies' attempts to turn everything they made into a "live service," Modern Life Services just sounded like so many horribly empty PR buzzwords. But I couldn't feel outraged about it. Once again, I was utterly unmoved, and couldn't put my finger on exactly why I was so unmoved.

And then I came across an interesting article by Jason Evangelho at Forbes which brought it all into focus for me. He was writing about OS updates, as it turns out, but not Windows 10 updates, though; no, sir, Señor Evangelho doesn't suffer through those anymore. He's decamped to the Ubuntu Linux camp, you see:

Updates on both Windows and Ubuntu come in many forms. You have security updates, feature updates and software updates among others. If you’re someone who’s ever entertained the idea of ditching Windows for Linux, chances are Windows’ aggressive update behavior is a primary reason.

Microsoft’s system update policy has reached a point where its implementing artificial intelligence to guess when a user is away from their PC so that Windows can reboot and apply the latest updates. When I wrote about that so many people said “hey, what about just letting the human in front of the PC make that choice?”

And just like that, it all made sense. Yeah, I said to my self, fuck yeah. That was my reaction, too.

Because that had been my reaction; I remember thinking almost exactly that, in passing, and I'm not even on Windows 10. If Microsoft are so big on winning back consumers, I asked myself, why don't they make Windows 10, their flagship product, the one Microsoft product that almost everyone uses, more user-friendly? Not by experimenting with over-complicated AI, which they'd be doing anyway because AI and "intelligent edge" are the focus of their post-Windows corporate strategy, but through the simple, pro-consumer expedient of giving control of their PCs back to Windows' users?

And the more I read of Evangelho's description of the Ubuntu updating experience, the clearer it became:

This week in Facebook

One of the more perplexing things about Facebook's ongoing privacy fiasco was its lack of impact on FB's share price. No matter how bad things looked on the PR front, no matter how many class action lawsuits were working their way through courts in various jurisdictions, no matter how many different jurisdictions announced new or intensified investigations (or fines), FB's stock price just kept on rising, and Mark Zuckerberg's personal net worth along with it. It was Bizarro World's version of the Invisible Hand, in which markets simply didn't care about the obviously looming costs of FB's mounting woes.

Well, today, that finally came to an end, mainly because Facebook themselves finally decided that SEC rules required them to throw some cold water on it all. As reported by Reuters, via EWN:

Facebook Inc’s shares lost as much as a quarter of their value on Wednesday after executives said that profit margins would plummet for several years due to the costs of improving privacy safeguards and slowing usage in the biggest advertising markets.

The second-quarter results were the first sign that a new European privacy law and a succession of privacy scandals involving Cambridge Analytica and other app developers have bit into Facebook’s business. The company further warned that the toll would not be offset by revenue growth from emerging markets and Facebook’s Instagram app, which has been more immune from privacy concerns.

Facebook's fortunes shifted in under two hours as the company first reported revenue and user growth that missed expectations and then issued warnings about future growth and expenses.

[...]

The plummeting stock price wiped out as much as $150 billion in market capitalisation and erased the stock’s gains since April when Facebook announced a surprisingly strong 63 percent rise in profit and an increase in users.

It's. About. Damn. Time.

I do feel some sympathy for people whose pension plan managers have been buying Facebook stock over the last year, apparently oblivious to the gathering storm.  They're taking a bath on FB stock right now, due entirely to decisions they had no hand in making, which sucks. For the greedy speculators, though, who have been watching all of FB's floundering for months and still managed to give zero fucks about FB's issues as long as they could convince themselves that profits (and dividends) would continue to flow? They can fuck themselves.

Facebook are gigantic, with enormous cash reserves; they can afford to lose money for a while yet, before it really starts to hurt them. But with their share price finally dropping, raising the possibility of maybe some pressure, finally, from shareholders, we may be about to see Facebook start tackling the root causes of their problems, i.e. their corporate culture, rather than just paying PR lip service to the idea of reforming themselves (but no regulations, please).

Here's hoping, anyway.

Numbers don't lie: VR is in trouble

Remember back in June, when IDC were predicting that VR headset sales were just about to rebound after plunging by thirty-five percent? Well, here's the thing about that... funny story... it's not happening. At all.

As reported by CinemaBlend:

Virtual Reality gaming is in a unique place. The hardware seems to be doing well, but is that well enough to keep developers interested? According to a recent study, the answer to that question might be no. Over the past six months, it appears VR hardware sales have been on the decline.

The folks over at Thinknum recently conducted a study involving the sale of VR hardware on Amazon. It wasn't a super exhaustive study and pretty much stuck straight to the figures, but you can't really argue that those figures aren't on the decline.

The decline is happening across the board, too: sales of PSVR, GearVR, and HTC Vive were all down. Even Oculus Go, which many VR industry advocates were hoping would be a panacea for VR's troubles, a magic-bullet combination of standalone functionality and low price point, is struggling.

Finally, they took a look at the Oculus Go sales rankings, which have been on a decline since May. As one of the folks in the comments points out, there's no mention of the cheaper core Oculus system, which seems like another odd choice. The Go was a top-item on Amazon in May but, two months later, it's barely in the top 100 items. You can make of that what you will, but the study takes it as a clear sign interest in VR gaming is on the decline.

The declines are not subtle, either, as shown by Thinknum's graphs.

Microsoft plans to win back consumers but doesn't want to admit what lost them in the first place

I've seen a couple of different versions of this story, but PC World's coverage was just about the best:

Consumers, rejoice: Microsoft cares about you again. Maybe. It depends on whether the head of Microsoft's new Modern Life & Devices group has substantive plans behind his statements.

For the past few years, Microsoft’s attention has been fixated upon the enterprise. While the company has built products like Azure and related services into thriving businesses, consumer-focused products like the Groove Music service, Microsoft Band, and Windows Phone have fallen by the wayside. 

Microsoft essentially acknowledged its neglect of the consumer market at the company's Inspire partner conference this week. Yusuf Mehdi, now the corporate vice president in charge of the Modern Life & Devices group within Microsoft, led a closed session on "Modern Life Services," according to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. A tweet that Mehdi posted from the event includes the words, "we begin the journey to win back consumers with our vision," presumably this year.

That "vision" seems to revolve heavily around enterprise customers, basically convincing people who use Microsoft products at work to also use them on the week-end. "Xbox aside [...] most of Microsoft’s “consumer business” relies heavily on the blurring line between the business professional and the consumer, and the ease with which individuals can move between both worlds."

Here's the thing about Microsoft's relationship to consumers: they don't have one anymore, thanks to GWX. The problem goes much deeper than a couple of cancelled product lines, especially when those products' killing were more like euthanasia than murder.

Another baby step for VR

VR still has a long, long way to go, but developments like this might help. From WCCFTech:

An industry consortium lead by Nvidia, Oculus, Valve, AMD, and Microsoft have today introduced the VirtualLink specification which is an open standard for next-generation VR headsets to connect to PCs and other similar devices with a single high bandwidth USB Type-C connector, forgoing the mess of cables that have traditionally plagued VR gaming.

The Connection is an alternate mode of USB-C should simplify and speed up the setup time for your VR gear avoiding one of the major inconveniences of having and using a VR headset in a room where it isn’t always connected. It should also make VR experiences much easier with smaller devices like laptops and notebooks.

[...]

This may also help in the long term with the need to provide higher display resolutions and high bandwidth cameras for tracking. VirtualLink connects with VR headsets to simultaneously deliver four high-speed HBR3 DisplayPort lanes, which are scalable for future needs; a USB3.1 data channel for supporting high-resolution cameras and sensors; and up to 27 watts of power.

One of the nicer things about VirtualLink is that it has been purpose built for VR with optimizing latency and keying in on bandwidth demands to make the next generation of VR experiences a much better one.

Several of the major VR players are part of this initiative, though, which gives it a better chance to succeed than it would have otherwise, but it will be years before VirtualLink stars appearing on the market in actual VR devices, and years more before it can become the VR industry standard. Notably absent from the VirtualLink consortium, too, are Sony and Samsung, who currently have the two best-selling VR devices on the market in PSVR and GearVR, which could mean trouble for this newborn VR device standard.

Still... progress is progress, and this is a baby step in a direction that many analysts say VR needs to go. A lack of hardware standards isn't VR's biggest problem, obviously, but it is a problem, and VirtualLink could help bring some much-needed standardization to the VR industry.

Today in Facebook

It's been pretty quiet on the Facebook front lately, with FB's shareholders even driving their share price up, apparently in the belief that the worst was over. Today, however, it's looking like that burst of optimism might have been premature.

As reported by the Globe and Mail:

Britain’s privacy commissioner plans to fine Facebook for violating data protection laws and bar Canada’s AggregateIQ from handling data belonging to British citizens as part of a sweeping investigation into how personal data have been used during election campaigns.

The country’s Information Commission Office has spent months investigating how political consultants at Cambridge Analytica obtained personal data from 87 million Facebook users and then used that information to target voters during elections in the United States and Britain. In a report on its findings to be released Wednesday, the agency said it is targeting Facebook with a £500,000 ($871,000) fine for failing to properly handle personal data and for failing to respond in a robust way when the company found out about the scale of the data harvesting.

The ICO’s findings represent the first action by a national regulator against Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The fine is the largest allowed by UK law, although The Reg describes it as "18 mins of profit" for Facebook, which is actually more than I expected considering how gigantic FB have become. One thing that's been pretty clear for some time, though, is that FB appear to have violated laws in any number of jurisdictions worldwide, including the U.S., the EU, Canada, and China, just for openers. This fine from the U.K. is likely only the first of many.

The fact that the largest penalty available to UK regulators amounts to chump change for the global tech giants they're ostensibly regulating provides a very clear demonstration of just how far behind the times our legal framework is. The world needs better tools for controlling these emerging mega-corps, and quickly.

Facebook’s disclosures under scrutiny by the FBI, SEC, FTC, and DOJ

When the extent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal was first breaking back in March, I wrote this:

There are people at Facebook who signed off on a business plan that involved collecting legally protected information about people with neither their knowledge nor their consent, and selling that data to third parties; people who then decided not to notify users when it was crystal clear that the whole shady business had gone very, very wrong. Those people will not just be facing lawsuits; those people will be facing jail time... in addition to the lawsuits.

Some readers (all two of you 😃) may have thought that I was being somewhat hyperbolic with that  statement. And, in fairness, apart from a few relatively uneventful appearances before lawmakers in the U.S. and EU, Facebook was looking like they might have escaped the worst of the possible outcomes that they could have been facing. But appearances can deceive, and Facebook themselves are now confirming that they've been under investigation, by multiple U.S. federal agencies, since at least May.

As reported by the Washington Post:

A federal investigation into Facebook’s sharing of data with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica has broadened to focus on the actions and statements of the tech giant and now involves three agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to people familiar with the official inquiries.

Representatives for the FBI, the SEC and the Federal Trade Commission have joined the Department of Justice in its inquiries about the two companies and the sharing of personal information of 71 million Americans, suggesting the wide-ranging nature of the investigation, said five people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a probe that remains incomplete.

[...]

The questioning from federal investigators centers on what Facebook knew three years ago and why the company didn’t reveal it at the time to its users or investors, as well as any discrepancies in more recent accounts, among other issues, according to these people.The Capitol Hill testimony of Facebook officials, including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, also is being scrutinized as part of the probe, said people familiar with the federal inquiries.

Facebook confirmed that it had received questions from the federal agencies and said it was sharing information and cooperating in other ways. “We are cooperating with officials in the US, UK and beyond," said Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld.

This puts yesterday's revelations (from last Friday's midnight document dump) in a different light. Who wants to bet that Facebook's 747-page infodump will be mostly information that investigators already know? Who else thinks that they were trying to get out ahead of the narrative on investigative heat that's about to get way hotter, in addition to burying as many juicy details as possible in the Friday night news graveyard?

Who else thinks that they might not get away with either of those things, this time around?

About-Face(book)

I'm just going to jump straight to the lede, from CNBC:

Facebook has admitted that it gave dozens of companies access to its users’ data after saying it had restricted access to such data back in 2015, the latest wrinkle in a firestorm over how the social network manages user information.

In news first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook handed a 747-page document to U.S. lawmakers released late Friday. In that cache of information, Facebook said it granted 61 companies like AOL, Nike, UPS and dating app Hinge a "one-time" six-month extension to comply with its policy changes on user data. In addition, there are at least five other firms that may have accessed limited data, due to access they were granted as part of a Facebook experiment, the company added.

In 2015, Facebook said it had cut off developer access to its users’ data and their friends.

What's that you say? Facebook said one thing about its treatment of users' data in 2015, only to be forced to admit in 2018 that their previous claims were actually bullshit? Quelle surprise!

Unlike their 450-page written response to Congressional questioning, Facebook dropped their latest coma-inducing door-stopper late on Friday, which is what you do if you're trying to bury a story; the idea is that most newsrooms have closed for the weekend, leaving only cable news channels who mostly rely on print media outlets to do their actual reporting, anyway. The Wall Street Journal, however, apparently had other ideas, and posted an extensive write-up:

Facebook provided the document to the Energy and Commerce Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in response to hundreds of questions from the committee, which quizzed Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg during testimony in April. The committee said on its website that it received the responses shortly before midnight on Friday; the deadline for the responses was the close of business Friday.

It is Facebook’s second attempt at answering Congress’s queries [...] lawmakers asked Mr. Zuckerberg whether Facebook was in violation of a settlement the company made in 2012 with the Federal Trade Commission, under which the company is required to give its users clear and prominent notice and obtain their express consent before sharing their information beyond their privacy settings. Facebook said in the document that it has not violated the FTC act.

Facebook indicated it has struggled to fully reconstruct what happened to its users’ information. “It is possible we have not been able to identify some extensions,” Facebook said about companies that had access to users’ friends’ information past the 2015 cutoff.

Q:  Did you, Facebook, violate your 2012 settlement with the FTC?

A: No, because we changed our policies three years after that, which is clearly good enough to keep us out of trouble.

Q: Are you sure?

A: OK, it's possible that we issued extensions to some of our favourite corporate customers after 2015. So, maybe. But probably not. [Three weeks later.] OK, yes. Yes, we did. Can we please bury this in a Friday night news dump?

[And... scene!]

Seriously, somebody needs to hold Facebook accountable for this shit.