EPIC'S ROLL OF THE DICE COMES UP SNAKE EYES: Judge Gonzalez Rogers rules against the Fortnite publisher on almost every part of their lawsuit with Apple

The verdict is in: The iOS App Store is not a monopoly under the Sherman Act, Epic owes rent for having kept Fortnite on the App Store for months without paying for access to Apple's customers, and the amount owed is 30% of all revenues collected outside Apple's In-App payment system. Also, Apple don't have to put Fortnite back on the App Store, and can go ahead with cancelling Epic's developer accounts, which could push Unreal Engine games out of the App Store, permanently.

On the plus side, developers other than Epic can use other payment collection services now, and can tell customers about those other options in their apps (and link to them from the apps), but Apple has not been ordered to give away access to the App Store for free. Apple is still owed; not only can they continue to charge for access, they can charge whatever fee they wish for that access, specifically including the 30% that Epic was calling excessive and unfair. Epic, of course, are not going to benefit from this point of the ruling because Fortnite is not on the App Store, and the ruling did not enjoin Apple to restore Fortnite to the App Store.

That's the substance of the ruling which just came down from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Apple cannot put themselves between developers and their customers; the 30% App Store fee, however, is still legal, and very much in force, as evidenced by the fact that Epic are being ordered to pay 30% of all monies earned by their iOS app during the months when the app was still available in spite of Epic being in breach of the App Store's Terms of Service.

Be very clear on this point: If Apple is hosting your app on their App Store, thus giving you access to the ecosystem which they built, and which they constantly maintain and improve at considerable cost, then Apple can legally charge you a 30% fee for that access. They just can't intercept all of your revenue in order to deduct that fee, something which they'd largely already stipulated in the other lawsuit which was settled a couple of weeks ago.

So yes, Apple is correct in claiming that this ruling definitively exonerates the app store/walled garden ecosystem business model. The iOS App Store is not, in fact, a monopoly under the Sherman Act, and not a target for antitrust action under that Act.

Apple could appeal the injunction which orders to them to allow developers to use other payment methods, but I don't expect them to; they had already agreed to do basically all of this already, in that other case which was settled in front of this same judge. Apple are not losing anything here which they hadn't already decided to let go.

The same is not true of Epic. Apple do not have to do business with Epic, in any capacity; not only that, but they owe Apple money, since they're in breach of their contract and spent months refusing to "pay their rent." Tim Sweeney has clearly bet the farm on this dice roll, and clearly does not have a viable business with a loss this complete on the book, so I am not at all surprised to see that he is losing his shit over how badly this ruling went against him.

Epic will definitely appeal this ruling; they've already said as much in statements. I don't expect that appeal to go any better than the initial lawsuit did, though, since Apple is not in violation of the Sherman Act, and can't be forced to do business with a company that apparently is not above signing agreements in order to breach them, so that they can use that breach as a pretext to sue.

IGN has a reasonable take on the ruling:

A judge has finally ruled in the Epic vs. Apple lawsuit, most notably issuing an injunction in Epic's favor that forces Apple to permit developers on its platform to link to outside payment options within their apps.

[...]

However, this was the only point on which Epic won its case. The court's final order [...] declared it "cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws."

[...]

Apple did counter-sue Epic for breach of contract, and the judge ruled in favor of Apple on this point. The court has ordered Epic to pay out 30% of the $12,167,719 in revenue Epic collected from users in the Fortnite app on iOS through Direct Payment between August and October 2020, plus further damages. In total, Epic will pay Apple at least $3.6 million.

Hoeg Law has another, better take on the ruling, from the point of someone who actually practices law, for anyone who's willing to stare at the text of this ruling for two-and-a-half hours while Phil Hoeg reads and explains it.

Prognostication time

I guess it's time to grade my earlier prognostication on this one, in which I predicted that Epic would lose, and badly; that Epic would end up paying damages to Apple afterwards; that Apple would not be forced to give developers free use of their App Store; and that Apple would not be arbitrarily forced to reduce the App Store's 30% fee. I don't know that Epic will end up paying Apple's legal fees, though; otherwise, I was correct across the board.

I'm calling that an A.

And yes, I'm still expecting Epic to also lose Epic Games v Google, in a similarly resounding fashion. I'm not expecting any court, anywhere, to force Google, or Valve, or any of the Epic Game Store other competitors to basically cease being viable businesses simply because Epic haven't yet figured out how to make a viable digital distribution channel of their own.

Update:

I finally made it all the way through Hoeg Law's two-and-a-half hour video, and can confirm (a) that I'm very glad to have not pursued law as a career, because OMFG, do I ever not want to read 185 pages of mostly padding in legalese, and (b) that Epic will not be paying Apple's legal bills. I've therefore knocked a point off my prognostication grade, from A+ to A. Better you than me, Phil Hoeg; I can only imagine how much work it was to read through all 185 pages of this fucking rock to find the nuggets of gold, and I do appreciate it.

Another point of clarification: while Judge Gonzalez Rogers' ruling didn't specifically disallow the 30% fee that Apple charges for access to the App Store, while specifically ordering Epic to pay for the revenues collected from the iOS Fortnite customers at that same 30% rate, she wasn't particularly convinced by the Apple's attempts to justify the 30% rate. Hoeg Law's video notes several places where Gonzales Rogers calls out Apple for not really having any clear justification for the 30% number; she just declined to mandate a change to some other rate, since she didn't have enough information to decide what that rate should be.

Another thing which becomes clear on hearing two-and-a-half hours of the decision's text is the extent to which Gonzalez Rogers really didn't like Apple or their business practices, and really wanted to rule against them... and might have, had the plaintiff been anyone other than Epic Games, who were bringing the suit only after having deliberately, and needlessly, breached their contract with Apple. There is a lot of the text of this decision which is basically giving other potential litigants, e.g. NVidia, or Microsoft, hints about the lawsuits that they could bring, and the sorts of arguments that might have been made which she'd have ruled in favour of, if Epic had thought to make them.

There was a lot of shade thrown at Epic's "expert witness," too; if that guy's career as a paid expert witness isn't ended by this ruling, then I can only conclude that all of his clients are stupid, and deserve to loose any lawsuits that he's contributing to.

Phil did disagree with me on one point. He assumes that both Epic and Apple will appeal the parts of this ruling that went against them, with Apple appealing the injunction that Gonzalez Rogers based on California law, but declared must apply nation-wide, and Epic appealing basically everything else. Epic have already announced that they will, indeed, appeal the nine points of ten that went against them, declaring that they will fight on, and also hilariously that they will be bringing Fortnite back to the App Store, at least in South Korea, as if Apple don't have a say in that, for some reason.

Apple, for their part, have not decided yet whether they will appeal or not. I still don't think it would be worth their while to appeal an injunction that gives them the rest of the year to do, nation-wide, things that they've already agreed to do elsewhere, or been mandated to do in other jurisdictions (like the aforementioned South Korea). I think Apple might just let this point go; Phil Hoeg, who is a corporate lawyer, thinks otherwise. I stand by my prediction, though, so we can add this to the prognostication list for when Apple do decide what they want to do here.

Confirmed: Epic's big gamble is actually a loss

Or, as Kotaku put it, "Epic CEO Tim Sweeney Is Very Excited About The Epic Games Store Losing A Ton Of Money." This revelation apparently comes to us by way of Epic's own court filings in their ongoing war of legal attrition against Apple, which the eagle-eyed and awesomely-named Tyler Wilde spotted, and wrote about for PC Gamer.

Epic Games has spent the past two years shoveling Fortnite money into the Epic Games Store, making over 100 exclusivity deals and giving away free games every week. We knew Epic was spending a lot of cash to get customers onto its store, but didn't have many specifics until [...] we learned this week that Epic committed around $444 million to Epic Game Store exclusivity deals in 2020 alone.

[...] A "minimum guarantee" is just another way to refer to an advance: It means that Epic guarantees the publisher a certain amount of money whether or not their game actually sells enough to cover it. For example, Epic put down $10.45 million for Control.

[...] Some of those deals must be for exclusives releasing in the future, but according to Apple's learnings, Epic is going to eat "at least $330 million in unrecouped costs from minimum guarantees alone" if you also consider 2019's deals.

I'd posted about Epic's big gamble back in 2018, and have opined before about how Tim Sweeney's arrogant approach was likely doomed to fail; for more, check out "Metro:Exodus proves several of my points about Epic's new marketplace," "PR Communications 101: Sarcasm = Mockery," or "Why platforms aren't your friends" (although that last one was basically an excuse to embed Folding Ideas excellent video on essentially the same subject).

Suffice it to say that I am not at all surprised to learn that Epic are losing money on the EGS; given how much money they were spending to basically bribe both developers and consumers into adopting it, I would have been far more surprised to learn that they were turning a profit. Interestingly, Epic's exclusivity agreements appear to work exactly the way I always thought they did: like the royalty advances of book publishing and other, similar industries, but even I did not predict losses on this scale; apparently even Fortnite's huge haul isn't enough to keep pace. 

I'm also a little surprised that we're learning about these losses at all; I was expecting this information to remain well-buried for a long, long time. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, though, given the broad extent of Apple's document pulls from all and sundry in the matter of their legal battle with Epic Games; the California judge overseeing the proceedings described it as Apple having "salted the Earth with subpoenas" from a variety of industry players, including Valve Software. This likely means that Friday's bombshell is likely only the first of many; there are a lot of previously confidential, behind-the-scenes dealings which are about to become part of the public record. That's very exciting. Consumers could be on the verge of learning a lot about the workings of an industry that we previously could only guess at.

For now, though, we can only shake our heads in mock disbelief at the extent to which Epic's Game Store has flopped. Given that the service launched in 2018, and is still hemorrhaging money with no end in sight, I have doubts as to whether Epic can actually turn this around. The brand damage here may just be too deep, and the stench of flop sweat and failure is unlikely to attract new business partners eager to associate their valuable brands with Epic's radioactive one. 

Even worse for Epic: the Fortnite revenue which has been funding the EGS to this point is also down, from $1.8 billion in 2019 to less than $500 million in 2020:

[...] Epic said that players spent $700 million on the Epic Store in 2020, but third-party game sales only accounted for $265 million of that spending.

No wonder Sweeney has resorted to litigation! At this point, the EGS's only hope may be to find a sympathetic judge who'd be willing to "flip the board," disruptive the game of the entire video games business on their behalf. Given how much room to run Judge Hixon is affording to Apple, though, I would recommend that Sweeney not count too heavily on the tree of that particular lawsuit bearing the sort of lucrative fruit that the EGS needs in order to stave of death by starvation, especially since their entire legal argument is that the 30% cut is unnecessary. Apple can now counter that argument by simply pointing out that Epic's 12% cut is losing them money hand over first, and clearly not a sustainable business model. Look for that lawsuit to badly for Epic.

Will Epic's epic-scale Game Store losses cause the company to course-correct?

Probably not, alas. Sweeney is still Epic's majority shareholder, which means that he's basically able to do whatever he wants with the company. Epic's next-largest shareholder, Tencent Holdings, who own 40% of Epic, do have the sort of resources required to put pressure on Sweeney, but they can't simply vote him out as CEO, or off Epic's board of governors, which will limit their options... assuming they're even inclines to intervene here, which is far from certain. For all the suspicion that surrounds any Tencent acquisition, their management style has so far been pretty hands-off, at least with their interests outside of China.

Of course, even Epic Games can't sustain this kind of burn rate forever; eventually, they're going to have to make changes in order the stop the bleeding, and put in place some sort of plan to "return to profitability" (corporate code of mass layoffs). Given that their legal battle with Apple has only served to make the industry-standard 30% cut to the platform look more essential than ever, and that Epic has done almost nothing to earn back the trust and good will of the Steam community (which, at this point, includes basically all of the PC gaming community), and also given that efforts to repair their brand and rebuild their business can't even start until the Apple lawsuit, at least, is either dropped or settled, I'm starting to have serious doubts about Epic's long-term prospects. I beginning to wonder if Epic will be able to survive at all, in the medium-to-long term.

In the near term, however, while Epic still have a fat war chest and a loyal Fortnite fan base, I expect that the PC gaming industry news is going to be very, very interesting. Watch this space...

Is this the beginning of the end of Big Tech?

After months of hinting, and alluding, and leaking, the US Department of Justice has finally decided to actually piss, rather than just sitting on the pot.

As reported by Reuters, via Huffpost.com:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department and 11 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc’s Google on Tuesday for allegedly breaking the law in using its market power to fend off rivals.

[...]

Coming just days before the U.S. presidential election, the filing’s timing could be seen as a political gesture since it fulfills a promise made by President Donald Trump to his supporters to hold certain companies to account for allegedly stifling conservative voices.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley, a vociferous Google critic, accused the company of keeping power through “illegal means” and called the lawsuit “the most important antitrust case in a generation.”

The federal lawsuit marks a rare moment of agreement between the Trump administration and progressive Democrats. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted on Sept. 10, using the hash tag #BreakUpBigTech, that she wanted “swift, aggressive action.”

The 11 states which joined the lawsuit all have Republican attorneys general.

Google, who have only just seen the lawsuit themselves, did not respond to Reuters, and will probably let their lawyers do the talking now that the matter is before the courts. I expect that the very pro-Microsoft/ant-Google crew at Thurrott will be gloating about this in a matter of minutes, although I seem to have spotted this one before they did, this time around.

So, the question of which Big Tech firm would be the first to face the US DOJ's antitrust ire has been answered, In spite of the destructive impact and overt evil of Facebook; the profoundly more anti-competitive activities of Amazon; the fact that Epic has been trying to preempt the DOJ and force an antitrust finding against Apple; and the fact that Microsoft are still abusing their position as Windows' gatekeepers to continue loading unwanted Microsoft-branded content, and ads for the same, onto the devices of Windows 10 users, it will be Google who will face official government antitrust action first.

The partisan nature of this action, coming just weeks before an election which Republicans look likely to lose badly, and backed by Republican senators and Republican governors, will likely form the backbone of Google's defense here; the fact that Elizabeth Warren has called for breaking up Big Tech firms like Google will likely not be as much of a factor. I think that's a solid defense; the prosecution case will rely mostly on the fact that Google actually is guilty of doing exactly what they've been accused of, and the matter won't be resolved for years, so for the time being it's business as usual.

Nonetheless, this is something of a watershed moment. The Big Tech firms (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) have mostly behaved as if laws do not apply to them for years; what the DOJ has announced today is an intention to apply the laws to them, and I don't expect that Google will be the only one to face a DOJ antitrust lawsuit in the coming months; Apple and Google are already facing multiple antitrust actions in the EU. 

The appearance of impropriety here, with the pre-election timing and largely partisan backing, are unlikely to alter the fact that these companies are behaving like the abusive monopolies that they mostly are, or to change the fact that they are now all faced with a new reality: that their ethos of disruptive innovation has run as far as society is willing to let it. They will now be required to stop disrupting society, and start helping to stabilize it, or at least pay for cleaning up the mess they've made.

Again, it will be years before this finishes playing out, and while Alphabet Inc. might end up looking rather different, I don't expect that Google itself will change very much. But with the conversation now officially underway, there is finally hope that these corporations (and, by extension, all similarly-sized corporations) might finally have reached the end of the era of limitless permissiveness for their largely lawless, corrupting, tax-evading ways. And that can only be a good thing.

Epic v. Apple, round one: A split decision, sort of

I guess that it's time to talk about Epic's war-of-choice against Apple.

For those who haven't been paying attention, here's the Coles Notes version. Epic Games, developers of Fortnite, deliberately breached the terms of the agreements with Apple and Google which allowed them to have Fortnite on both the iOS App Store and Google Play. Apple and Google both acted in accordance with the rules of said agreements, and removed Fortnite from both the App Store and Google Play.

This is when Epic, who very clearly wanted exactly this outcome, launched a well-prepared PR campaign against, primarily, Apple. They clearly intended to mobilize Apple-using Fortnite fans against the Cupertino company, intending to litigate their dissatisfaction with Apple's Apple Store payment terms in the court of public opinion, even as they also filed a lawsuit against Apple seeking an injunction to force their own desired payment terms on them "temporarily," clearly hoping that having those payment terms in place for the years it would take to resolve the lawsuit would essentially make it impossible for Apple to ever go back, whether Epic actually prevailed in court or not.

Apple, naturally, are having none of this. They make billions of US dollars every single year from their 30% cut of App Store transactions, and every incentive to "go to the mattresses" in defense of one of their main sources of revenue. And, as it turned out, banning Fortnite from the App Store was only one way they could express their displeasure with Epic's antics: they revoked Epic's developer license, effectively banning their Unreal Engine, and all games based on that engine, from the App Store as well.

Epic, clearly panicked by this drastic and rapid escalation of a fight that they'd clearly thought would be waged entirely on Epic's terms, filed for another injunction, asking the court to block Apple from killing the Unreal Engine dead. And at the end of yesterday, a federal court judge ruled on both injunctions. The result? Basically, it's a draw. The reasoning behind that draw, however, is quite interesting.

From the "what took you so long?" file...Seriously, The Verge, what took you so long?

Without further do, I give you this post from The Verge:

YouTube has been pissing me off for weeks. I’m starting to feel like I should pay $11.99 a month to subscribe to YouTube Premium just to get rid of the annoying pop-ups Google sends me almost daily. Google has decided to place pop-up ads in its own YouTube app for Premium subscriptions. This feels slightly acceptable at first, but Google has also decided these should spam you to death, sometimes full-screen, with no option to permanently dismiss them so you see them all the damn time.

It’s a classic growth hack designed to get more people to use YouTube Music or YouTube Premium because, honestly, who cares about either of those services? I already subscribe to Spotify, which is far superior to YouTube Music, and I’d never pay $11.99 just to have fewer YouTube ads and background playback of videos on my phone. It’s a pointless subscription that Google is trying to lazily ram down my throat instead of improving its offering, competing fairly with others, and, most importantly, focusing on its customer experience.

Google’s efforts here have made sure I, and I bet many others, will never touch YouTube Music or YouTube Premium. I absolutely loathe both of these services to the point where I’m left swearing at my phone like an idiot, simply because these stubborn ads keep appearing on top of the YouTube videos I’m trying to watch.

Where to start? How about with the fact that YouTube's mobile app hasn't been exhibiting this behaviour for mere weeks. YouTube has been pissing me off with this bullshit for months. Or with the fact that feeling like making users feel they "should pay $11.99 a month to subscribe to YouTube Premium just to get rid of the annoying pop-ups"is the entire fucking point of the pop-ups.

This is going to take a lot of work...Stadia's launch plagued with missing features, sparse game selection, and unplayable lag

When Google announced Stadia, their first-to-market (if you don't count Sony's PlayStation Now) video game streaming service, there were lots of questions. What would its subscription model look like? What would its game selection look like? What features would the service have? Could even Google get the thing to work? And would Google stick with Stadia for the long haul, even if it wasn't an instant hit at launch?

Well, we now have the answers to those questions, and they're... un-good. One might even call them double-plus un-good. Let's break it down.

So.... I guess that was CES?

Does anyone else find it weird that 2019's big Consumer Electronics Show wasted the entire week without showcasing anything for actual consumers?

I mean, sure, we got LG's rollup OLED TV, which looks sexy but costs US$8000, and which will need to be replaced in two years' time because of OLED's severe screen burn-in issues. Who can afford to spend $8K every two years on a roll-up gimmick TV? Who is this for?

We also got a plethora of 8K TVs, at a time when even 4K TVs aren't really a thing yet. I mean, it's great that the likes of LG are making 4K sets that are comparable in price to 1080p sets; if you're needing to replace your TV, and don't need a refresh rate higher than 60 Hz for any reason, then you can certainly go 4K because it won't cost extra so why not? But you still don't need a 4K TV for which there's almost no content available, and you definitely don't need an expensive 8K set for which there's even less content on the menu. 8K is nothing but costly, boasting high price points while delivering zero value to the consumer... which was basically the prevailing trend of CES2019.

Oh, yes, and then there's 5G... which, again, boasts a premium price while being completely useless to consumers since there are no 5G networks. And, no, AT&T's 5G E nonsense is not a 5G network, and does not count. Which brings us to CES2019's other prevailing trend, which was straight-up lies told to consumers about expensive products which are being marketed at them, without being in any way designed for them.

Worse yet, the one big discussion about technology that consumers actually care about was never mentioned by any of the big exhibitors.

This week in Facebook

It's shaping up to be another bad week for Mark Zuckerberg.

The NY Times have published a blockbuster piece, reporting that Facebook were not only fighting the spread of fake news on their service, but actually spreading some fake news of their own: in particular, to paint their wave of post-Cambridge Analytica negative PR as some sort of George Soros-funded anti-Facebook conspiracy.

[As] evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

This means that Facebook funded anti-Semitic propaganda for no other reason that petty material self-interest. Which means that Facebook now have real blood on their hands, after a wave of anti-Semitic social media content on their own site helped inspire one of the worst incidents of anti-Semitic mass murder in U.S. history. And Jews weren't the only targets of Facebook's fake news campaign.

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.

This week in Facebook's fiasco

Now that E3 is over, we can return our attention where it belongs: Facebook, who still haven't really cleaned up their mess, and whose attempts to smooth it over with PR aren't going as well as they might have liked.

Let's start with two pieces from the Guardian:

Apple strikes blow to Facebook as it clamps down on data harvesting

Rules appear to target services like Onavo Protect, which claims to protect user data even as it feeds information to Facebook

Apple has updated its rules to restrict app developers’ ability to harvest data from mobile phones, which could be bad news for a Facebook-owned data security app called Onavo Protect.

Onavo ostensibly provides users with a free virtual private network (VPN) which, it claims, helps “keep you and your data safe when you browse and share information on the web”. What is not immediately obvious is that it feeds information to Facebook about what other apps you are using and how much you are using them back to the social networking giant.

“The problem with Onavo is that it talks about being a VPN that keeps your data private, but behind the scenes it’s harvesting your data for Facebook,” said Ryan Dochuk, CEO of the paid-for VPN TunnelBear. “It goes against what people generally expect when they use a VPN.”

Onavo has been a Trojan horse for Facebook (in the classical sense, not as malware), allowing it to gather intelligence on the apps people use on tens of millions of devices outside its empire. This real-time market research highlights which apps are becoming popular and which are struggling. Such competitive intelligence can inform acquisition targets and negotiations as well as identify popular features it could copy in rival apps.

Just in case you needed a reminder that Cambridge Analytica were just the canaries in Facebook's coal mine, and that the root of the problem is Facebook itself. Yes, Facebook literally went undercover on users' systems, pretending to be a privacy protection VPN tool, and then mined those users' systems for additional data which was fed back to the parent company. It might not count as a trojan, in the sense of not allowing Facebook to literally control users' systems, that's only because Facebook want the data that those users generate. Which means that Facebook isn't just a risk to your privacy anymore: they're a risk to your security, too.

Which could be why the Guardian also ran this opinion piece today, from Emma Brockes.

Is this the beginning of the end for patent trolling?

In non-Facebook news, this ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) will likely have far-reaching consequences, especially for the tech sector. As reported by Bloomberg:

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld an administrative review system that has helped Google Inc., Apple Inc. and other companies invalidate hundreds of issued patents.

The justices, voting 7-2, said Tuesday a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office review board that critics call a patent "death squad" wasn’t unconstitutionally wielding powers that belong to the courts.

Silicon Valley companies have used the system as a less-expensive way to ward off demands for royalties, particularly from patent owners derided as "trolls" because they don’t use their patents to make products. Drugmakers and independent inventors complain that it unfairly upends what they thought were established property rights.

“It came down to this: Is the patent office fixing its own mistakes or is the government taking property?” said Wayne Stacy, a patent lawyer with Baker Botts. “They came down on the side of the patent office fixing its own mistakes.”

The huge body of ridiculous patents on file in the U.S. has been a huge problem in recent years, with patent trolls essentially building a lucrative extortion business out of a combination the failures of the Patent Office and the cost of the litigation required to redress them -- it was often cheaper to just pay the "ransom" than it was to fight to invalidate the junk patent itself. Now that the U.S. Patent Office can void their own patents without a judicial review, though, that changes, suddenly making patent trolling into a much riskier activity with a much lower change of profit.

Wall Street has already noticed, too:

The ruling caused shares to drop in companies whose main source of revenue -- their patents -- are under threat from challenges. VirnetX Holding Corp., which is trying to protect almost $1 billion in damages it won against Apple, dropped as much as 12 percent and closed down 8.5 percent. The patent office has said its patents are invalid in a case currently before an appeals court.

It will be interesting to see just how much of an impact this ruling has, and how quickly. Patent and trademark law are byzantine enough at the best of times, especially in the U.S., and I can't help but feel that any ruling in favour of rational decision-making, which disadvantages deep-pocketed litigants in the process, can only be a good thing.

Reminder: IoT is not a transformative technology, either.

First a quick refresher on what qualities make a technology transformative:

#1: Immediately useful. In order to become transformative, a technology needs to become widely adopted, which doesn't happen if it's not useful for something, right out of the box, that users aren't already doing. This can't just be a qualitative enhancement of things we do already; it must be something we cannot currently do at all.

#2: Economically scaleable. A transformative technology must become cheaper to use as more users come online. A technology that doesn't scale can't become widely used, no matter how useful it might be, simply because its use will remain out of reach of almost everyone.

#3: Game-changing/Historical. A transformative technology make possible later technologies, or unlock new activities with later iterations of the tech, and those changes should extend beyond the merely technical.

#3 is the trickiest of the three to asses in a technology's early stages, but a good example would be the smartphone. Smartphones supercharged social media; when combined with the phones' cameras and large memories, smartphones made it possible to record, and even simultaneously upload, e.g. video of encounters between members of minority communities and the police. Consider how profoundly this has impacted the way we talk about law enforcement, or the way in which Mitt Romney's 47% video altered the outcome of that year's U.S. Presidential race, and you get an idea of the potential impact that we're talking about.

That's it; technologies that fulfill those three criteria can turn new tech into technological revolution. Given these three qualities, a new technology can alter the way our society does almost everything; without them, a new technology makes a brief splash and a small ripple, and then vanishes beneath the surface of history, never to be seen again.

Now, let's apply these criteria to an historical example: the telegraph. 

#1: The ability to communicate over long distances has historically been game-changing; many events in history have hinged on whether (or not) a message got where it needed to go in time. Telegraphy allows you to send messages in minutes, rather than weeks or months, with little to no loss of information, the utility of which is obvious. PASS.

#2: The telegraph required wires to be run over long distances, and a source of electricity to power it all, so it was a matter of good timing that it was invented at the same time that steam power was also becoming a thing. Steam-powered trains also required long rail lines to be laid, and telegraph lines could be (and were) run along poles alongside them for comparatively little extra cost; and most of the electricity that we use is still generated using steam-driven turbines, which provides juice. All of this scaled well, and kept scaling, to such an extent that we're still using it all. PASS.

#3: The telegraph made it possible to send information long distances over wires and cables using binary encoding (dots and dashes), an ability which not only didn't exist previous, but which was so powerful that we're still using it. Replace dots and dashes with 0's and 1's, and add microcircuit-controlled switches, and routers, and you end up with the Internet. PASS.

You can do the same exercise for radio, television, microcircuits, personal computers, the Internet, and the smartphone. You can't, however, successfully complete the same exercise for, say, 3DTVs - nobody needed or wanted them, there was little to no content for them, and they've already sunk without trace. VR is sinking now, for the same reasons.

Now, let's apply the three "transformative tech" criteria to the Internet of Things.

That's not the point, Zuck, and you damned well know it...

Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook weighed in on Facebook's fiasco by claiming that Apple had never, and would never have, done the things that Facebook did with and to their users. As reported by Brinkwire:

Apple CEO Tim Cook didn’t mince words when discussing the controversy that has engulfed fellow tech giant Mark Zuckerberg, stating unequivocally that the data leak scandal that affected an estimated 50 million Facebook users would never have happened to Apple because the company doesn’t treat its customers like “products.”

“I think it’s an invasion of privacy,” Cook said during a Wednesday interview snippet with Kara Swisher and Chris Hayes, hosts of an upcoming MSNBC and Recode special on Apple. “Privacy to us is a human right. It’s a civil liberty, and is something that is unique to America. This is like freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and privacy is right up there for us.”

When asked what he would do if he were in Zuckerberg’s position, the Apple CEO quickly answered: “What would I do? I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“We could make a ton of money if we monetized our customers, if our customers were our product,” Cook said. “We’ve elected not to do that.”

Yes, that's Apple, a profoundly whose most successful product is that profoundly anti-consumer iOS and its associated walled-garden app store, taking Facebook to task for being too evil, even for Apple's tastes. And, I might add, correctly: Apple might do everything it can to keep its users trapped inside the walls of its iOS garden, but they didn't try to turn MacOS into the same kind of walled garden user experience (the way Microsoft did, with Windows 8 & 10), and they haven't monetized their customer base in any other way that we're aware of. There are things that Apple simply won't do.

Of course, it helps that selling software and online services isn't actually Apple's core business. Apple make consumer devices; the iOS app store is meant to add value to the expensive device you've already bought, in addition to generating a extra revenue for Apple in the form of licensing fees. Facebook only has their service; in order to be a viable business, they do have to find some way of generating revenue from the service itself. But the problem isn't that Facebook are collecting a lot of information about their users, and then using that data as fuel for a targeted advertising service which they then sell to the advertisers who want to reach you. Google does that, too, and nobody much gives a shit.

No, the problem with Facebook is that they collect data about you that you're not aware that they have access to, with zero visibility or accountability, and (until five minutes ago) no real option for the user to opt out. Not only are they collecting information about you, but they're also doing the same for everybody on your contact list, and doing so without their knowledge or informed consent, either; instead, there are click-through legalese pop-ups in which you agree that Facebook can harvest information about the people you know, as you had power of attorney, or something, and thus the legal right to approve the harvest of the personal information of anyone other than yourself.

But wait... it gets worse! Because Facebook aren't just building these data profiles about their users; they're also building data profiles of contacts that you might have in apps and on sites other than Facebook, if you ever used Facebook to log into them. And, having built this Orwellian data mining system, they're not just using it to target you more effectively with advertising. Oh, no, precious.


Facebook were not just selling advertising space. They were selling access to the data itself, to interests outside Facebook.


Remember Cambridge Analytica? Yes, it does look like Cambridge Analytica harvested more data from Facebook than they strictly should have, but Facebook let them do it, and they let them do it for money. And so, when you read today that Mark Zuckerberg is dismissing Tim Cook's criticisms as "glib," and saying things like (from Vox):

“The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people can’t afford to pay,” Zuckerberg said. “And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people.”

take a moment to remember how we got here, and to appreciate just how glib Zuckerberg is being himself, in this moment.

This isn't why Facebook is in so much trouble right now, Zuck, and you damned well know it.

Again, I'm no huge fan of Tim Cook or Apple, but when Tim Cook tells you that there are business practices that Apple rejected as being simply too scummy, even for them, you can believe that; Apple's behaviour over the years bears him out. When Google, whose founding principle was, "Don't Be Evil," and who have provided more robust privacy management tools than Facebook, and better transparency about privacy issues, for years, tell you that your data is safe with them, you can believe it; their behaviour over the years bears it out.

On the other hand, Facebook are still lying to you about this shit. Mark Zuckerberg's leadership, and that of FB leadership team members like Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, make a mockery of everything that they're now claiming to stand for. In the meantime, Facebook is now saying that it will take a couple of years for them to actually clean up their act. As reported, again, by Vox:

“I wish I could solve all these issues in three months or six months, but I just think the reality is that solving some of these questions is just going to take a longer period of time,” he said in a podcast interview with media publication Vox.

The company started investing more in security at least a year ago, Zuckerberg said,“so if this is going to be a three-year process, then I think we’re about a year in already. Hopefully by the end of this year, we’ll have really started to turn the corner on some of these issues.”

Honestly, I'll be surprised if they're "turning the corner" on anything in a year's time, given that they're still not being honest, with anyone, apparently, about what their problems actually are. And even if they can, the one thing that's become painfully clear over the last few weeks is that Facebook, and everybody who works there, simply cannot be trusted to do the right thing for their users, let alone for society as a whole. Facebook must face penalties for what they've already done wrong, and strong regulations which will discourage them, or anyone else, from doing anything like this again.

That's not "glib," Zuck. It's just the truth. Something with which you might want to start acquainting yourself, while there's still time.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#DeleteFacebook

Microsoft's Edge-ey move garners predictable responses

I'd already written about this development last week, but it looks like the rest of the tech media world has also caught on to Microsoft's latest move to force Edge on Windows 10 users, and the results are about what you'd expect.

Por ejemplo, Mashable:

Sorry Microsoft, but this isn't the way to get people to use your Edge browser

or diGit:

Microsoft could soon force Mail users to use Edge for email links in Windows 10

In the latest Preview Build, Microsoft is testing opening all Windows Mail links in Edge, even if the user's default browser is set to Chrome or Firefox.

or Übergizmo:

Windows 10 Mail Users Will Be Forced To Use Edge For Email Links

The Reg:

Windows 10 to force you to use Edge, even if it isn’t default browser

Grab some popcorn: Redmond’s asked for feedback on the idea

The Inquirer:

Microsoft is trying to bolster Edge in Windows 10 by overriding browser defaults

Firm has learned nothing about anti-competitive strong-arming 

Express.co.uk:

Windows 10 could FORCE you to use Microsoft Edge, even if Chrome is your default browser

MICROSOFT could soon force Windows 10 users to open links in Edge, regardless of users’ default web browser.

These are just the headlines, of course, but the story that they'e reporting hasn't changed since Friday, and the headlines show pretty clearly how badly Microsoft have failed at pitching their terrible idea. Almost every headline uses the word "force" to describe what MS are doing; none of them are even potentially positive. The Inquirer talks about "anti-competitive strong-arming" in their headline; The Reg is grabbing their popcorn as they watch this fireworks show kicking into high gear. It's difficult to say what reaction Microsoft were hoping for, here, but none of these reactions are good news for Redmond.

None of them are particularly insightful or informative, though. For those things, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Paul Thurrott.

Reminder: Windows 10 is malware

Was it only two days ago that I was writing that WX still had quite a way to go, in spite of its brand-new Diagnostic Data Viewer? How nice of monopolist Microsoft to provide me with a timely demonstration of exactly what sort of issues WX still suffers from, as reported by WindowsReport:

Many Opera users recently complained on Reddit about Windows 10’s pushy behavior when it comes to using the Edge browser.

More specifically, users reported that the OS opens a new tab on Opera aimed at advertising Edge. Using the browser of choice of many Windows 10 users simply to promote Edge is indeed a bit strange.

After unlocking my Windows 10 computer, I discover that Windows has decided to open a tab in my Opera browser solely to advertise Edge browser to me.

This unexpected Edge ad made many users angry. They asked Microsoft to stop telling them what browser to use.

MSFT need to stop this nonsense, no one should be forced to use edge period.

Yep... that is some bullshit.

Microsoft's anti-consumer strategy... of self-destruction

I've spent plenty of time writing on this blog about Microsoft's anti-consumer bullshit; in fact, some may say that I've spent far too much time writing on the subject. But all of my writing on this topic has started from a single, straightforward, baseline assumption: that Microsoft want our money. 

If you assume that Microsoft want as much money as they can extract, and to extract money from as many of us as possible, then a lot of what they're doing seems at once obviously motivated, and bafflingly counter-productive. But what if that's not the goal? What if MS don't care about individual consumers at all?

That's the argument being put forward by Kareem Anderson at ONMSFT:

CEO Satya Nadella and by extension, software giant Microsoft doesn’t want you or me as customers.

Why might you ask?

Perhaps, because we’re fickle, fair-weather, shiny gadget chasing consumers whose financial investments are mostly spent perpetuating the status quo rather than helping to make the leaps necessary to shape a technology future envisioned in countless science fiction books and films.

Instead, Microsoft’s ideal customer is a 250,000 seat Office 365 licensee, or an aerospace facility using Azure as its backend cloud solution. Microsoft can no longer be bothered with our petty wants or needs as a Microsoft Health, Band, Windows Phone or Groove Music consumer.

Microsoft believes a future isn’t in the shackles of 5-inch plus rectangle piece of glass, the latest streaming media platform, or even the most powerful gaming console of the time. Instead, Microsoft is betting that the future is in an always-connected mesh network of interconnected devices, nodes, sensors and software that combine to anticipate, automate and regulate the lives of most people. And, quite frankly, it seems Microsoft is tired of walking consumers hand-in-hand through this process.

This is a perspective on Microsoft's anti-consumer approach to... well, everything, that honestly hadn't occurred to me, but it does make a horrible sort of sense. Customers are work. It seems a lot easier, at least on paper, to build the info-structure that other businesses will use to deal with all those demanding, unreasonable individuals, and then ignore all those little people to do business exclusively with other big businesses.

There's just one problem with that: the simple fact that personal computing is personal... and that interacting with those people directly is the only way to know anything about them. It's really hard to build a framework that will let you deliver services to individual consumers that you don't understand at all.

Samsung's DeX may succeed at turning Android into a viable mobile/desktop hybrid OS... and pose a significant threat to Windows.

Ever since Apple debuted the very first iPhone, tech media pundits have been forecasting the end of the desktop PC as a viable thing. Mobile devices, we were told, would soon be able to do everything that our PCs could do, thus eliminating the need for PCs altogether. But while there are lots of things that you can do with a mobile device, a fact that's made Android into the most-used OS on earth, you simply haven't been able to use your smartphone as a viable productivity tool. Touch interfaces are inaccurate, imprecise, ergonomically awful, and require you to have your hands between your eyes and your screen in order to do anything; compared to earlier phones' 12-digit numpads, touchscreens are a huge improvement, but for every other kind of device, they're a huge step down.

So, mobile device makers tried again, with tablets. Remember when the launch of Apple's iPad was supposed to sound the death knell of traditional laptop and desktop PCs? Remember when even Microsoft bought into that hype, and replaced Windows' desktop with an iOS-style app store? Windows 8 was one of Microsoft's most unpopular products ever, rivalled only by Clippy and Windows Vista. Tablets, it turns out, have all the same touch interface problems that smartphones do, except without the portability that makes smartphones so ubiquitous.

And so we lurched onwards, with Windows dominant on laptop and desktop PCs, Android dominant on mobile devices, and no apparent means of bridging the gap between the two, with Microsoft's UWP having failed to do so. Google's ChromeOS, which was recently expanded to allow users to run Android apps, has been growing steadily, stealing desktop/laptop market share from Windows in a mature market where PC sales have been declining steadily for years, but even Google hasn't eaten into Microsoft's lead enough to be truly worrisome yet. For all the hyperbole on all sides, the PC market really seemed to have matured, becoming resistant to change in the way that mature markets tend to be; the mobile market didn't seem to be too far behind.

That, however, was yesterday. Today, it suddenly looks like all of that may be about to change. Because today, we now know that Samsung have cracked the code, with a new Desktop Experience (DeX) dock that bridges the gap between the convenience and ubiquity of mobile devices, and the ergonomics and versatility of a desktop PCs. More importantly still, DeX seems to actually work.

From The Reg:

Well, no one saw this one coming. Samsung has succeeded where Microsoft and HP have struggled (so far) in turning a phone into a PC.

When Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S8 last month, its new multimode capability DeX (for "desktop experience") barely got a mention. With a new dock, the DeX Station, the Galaxy could plug into a keyboard, mouse and a larger display, for a desktop-like experience: with apps that rescale smartly to landscape format, overlapping windows and window management. After putting it through its paces, I'm hugely impressed. Samsung has done a solid and thoughtful job here.

This is significant. Giving a phone multimode isn't a new idea, and was pursued for a while by Motorola with Atrix. Atrix was canned five years ago, and for ages nobody picked up the baton, even though phones got ever more powerful, and the software more mature.

For Continuum, Microsoft created a class of portable Windows 10 mobile apps that were desktop friendly (UWP), but it failed to support the existing WP app catalog, which couldn't convert. Microsoft's already weak position in the mobile market deterred app writers from targeting a niche within a niche. And Microsoft has been slow to develop the functionality: here we are, two years on from the first Continuum demo, and it still lacks the promised multiwindow support.

Android doesn't have these problems, because it's already the world's most popular OS, and because it's Java and the apps are portable. A Remix OS PC will run apps from the Google Play store. So Android has great untapped potential to be the leading multimode OS. And with Android Nougat 7.0, Google has built much better multiwindowing capabilities into Android.

[...]

It wasn't quite perfect. The browser will default to mobile scaling, so text looks gigantic.

And the absence of a mic port is puzzling. The DeX station booms out decent audio for conference calls, but I don't necessarily want all phone calls piping through the speaker. The DeX station wouldn't recognise a Plantronics USB headset, so that leaves Bluetooth as your only option for privacy here.

But these are minor wrinkles. DeX greatly expands what you can do with a phone. Continuum's app gap means it currently has little appeal beyond Microsoft enterprises. But Samsung already has a strong offering here with Knox, and it knows how to make a phone. I found the Galaxy S8 experience significantly marred by a single poor design decision (the sensor) and Bixby, both of which made the device unnecessarily annoying to use. But given the pace of progress, millions, and soon billions, of phones will be able to run a DeX-like experience.

Yes, that's right: DeX is here, it works, and it turns Android into a viable desktop environment in which you can actually get some work done. Against this, Microsoft has one, and only one, defense: the simple fact that Windows has, until now, been the preferred tool for getting stuff done. Everybody runs Windows, and has done for decades; combined with Microsoft's obsession for backwards compatibility, this ensures that every Windows PC comes access with a huge library of software that it can run with few if any problems, and an even larger pool of programs that can be made to work on a current PC with just a little tweaking.

Except, of course, for Microsoft's latest Windows offering, 10 S, which doesn't come with that functionality at all. Oops!

Microsoft are so intent on being Apple, and Google, and Amazon, all at the same time, that they're actively undermining their single biggest competitive advantage. Their desperation to convert Windows into a walled garden ecosystem will also wall Windows off from an enormous trove of the very software that makes it worth running Windows in the first place; the underlying assumption, that they owned the desktop market with Windows, was the only thing that made their strategy seem viable.

Well, now Android is a viable desktop operating system, with millions of compatible phones about to enter circulation, and a respectable library of apps ready to go, right out of the gate... something that Windows' UWP ecosystem still doesn't have. That's right: the "app gap" which killed the Windows Phone, and strangled Windows 10's Mobile version before it could even get started, is still very much a thing, and suddenly relevant to the one market that seemed to be safe ground for Microsoft.

Even better for Google? They didn't have to lift a finger to make this happen, In much the same way as Amazon was able to seamlessly merge dominance in cloud server and storage with their existing product distribution capacity, all to make Echo a viable thing, DeX is all based on systems and structures that are already in place. The ground work was already done, here; Samsung is just showing everybody how to reap the seeds that were already sown. Worse yet, now that Samsung's DeX has showed everybody how to do this, and make it work, the imitators are sure to follow. If HTC doesn't have some version of this in production by the end of the year, I'll be very surprised, and you can that Apple isn't far behind with a similar dock for their iPhone... which also has a robust user base and app assortment on tap.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Microsoft do not have the resources to be Apple, and Google, and Amazon, and still be Microsoft; Apple and Google alone are each larger than Microsoft is. And that doesn't begin to include all of Google's smartphone hardware partners, all of whom are just as capable of innovating as Microsoft are themselves. And by abandoning that which made Microsoft a uniquely dominant force in personal computing for decades, the team at Redmond might just be dooming themselves to irrelevance in the one area where they probably felt completely secure, until about five minutes ago.

Now, for anyone that's concerned about the fate of Windows here, don't be. While high-end smartphones have more computing power than ever, they still don't have enough power for graphics-intensive applications like video editing, CGI effects, and gaming, all of which will still need dedicated workstation PCs for a long time to come; this is why gaming PC sales are booming, even while PC sales overall are in decline. There will still be PCs, and there will still be Windows. But for less-demanding applications, Android could easily become the "PC" of choice for almost everyone else, leaving Windows PCs in a position much more akin to MacOS and Linux, than its current position of desktop dominance.

Microsoft wants Windows 10 PCs to become Amazon Echo competitors

Continuing Microsoft's quixotic quest to become everyone except Microsoft, while still somehow maintaining Microsoft's user base, it seems that their next target is Amazon Echo. And why not? when they're already trying to duplicate all of Amazon's other cloud-based services.

From The Verge:

Microsoft has been working on a new HomeHub feature for Windows 10 to better compete with devices like Amazon’s Echo. HomeHub is designed to create a family environment for a PC with shared access to calendars, apps, and even a new welcome screen. Microsoft is even planning to support smart home devices like Philips’ Hue lights, to enable Windows 10 to act as a hub to control and manage smart home hardware. While we’ve heard about HomeHub before, The Verge has obtained internal concepts of exactly how Microsoft is imagining HomeHub will work.

Microsoft is aiming to include the new welcome screen, shared desktops, and easy calling in the Windows 10 update due in September. This update should also include improvements to Cortana, and support for third-party smart home devices. [...] Microsoft is tentatively planning to support Hue, Nest, Insteon, Wink, and SmartThings devices with its connected home app. Cortana will be used to send commands to devices, just like Amazon’s Echo.[...] Any devices that come with these new Windows 10 features will rely on PC partners to create. 

And that's the problem, right there, with Microsoft trying to become all of its competitors, overnight: Amazon Echo is a total package, with the consumer electronics front end already built to go with Amazon's cloud-based back end, which itself ties into Amazon's existing distribution infrastructure, and network of retail partners. Microsoft has none of that, really; even the software that's supposed to drive all of this is a work in progress, and the hardware is actually vaporware that third party OEMs have to design, build, and market.

Microsoft is all over the place, right now, trying to leverage their PC OS market share into, simultaneously, Google's business, Apple's business, and Amazon's business, all while trying to sustain Microsoft's own business. Time will tell if that's sustainable, but I have my doubts: after all, Microsoft (Mkt. cap. $532.35B) is actually smaller than both Google ($658.89B) and Apple ($824.28B), and only slightly larger than Amazon ($462.60B), but seem to be pursuing a strategy that requires them to become bigger than all three of these competitors combined. I'm not going to say that it's impossible, but I don't see how it would work, and the attempt has them wildly all over the place.

Even saying that Windows 10 is the common thread doesn't help, since it really feels like they're trying to force their OS to be a one-size-fits-all solution to every technological problem. Microsoft is like the proverbial handyman with only one tool available, treating every problem like a nail. Why is Windows 10 a better fit for Amazon's Echo business than Amazon's existing cloud-based computing, inventory management, and product distribution tools? How is Microsoft planning to build the network of retail partnerships that help make Echo work, when they can't even build the hardware that's needed for that job? Or are they just building it and hoping OEMS, retailers, and consumers all come to their HomeHub of Dreams?

What's the plan, here? Is there a plan, here?

The Tech media, like a lot of mainstream media lately, seems to be obsessively focused on The Latest Thing, and not really looking at The Big Picture, but they really should start looking at the big picture. Microsoft might be able to turn Windows 10 into iOS for PCs, or they might be able to turn it into ChromeOS, or they might be able to turn it into Amazon Echo, but I seriously doubt that they can do all three of those at the same time, while also chasing Steam's and PlayStation's businesses in the gaming space, and maintaining their hold on business workstations and laptop. Surely something's got to give; it's just a question of what, and when.

Chromebook shipments surge, cutting into Windows 10 PC sales

When Microsoft announced Windows 10 S earlier in the week, their obvious "Chromebook killer" that was locked to Edge and Bing as unchangeable defaults, and laden with even stronger software-installation restrictions (Windows Store only!), Google didn't seem to be worried about it. Given the way sales are trending in their favour, that attitude would seem to be entirely justified.

From ARN from IDG:

In a slowing PC market, Chromebooks siphoned market share away from Windows PCs in 2016 as their popularity grew outside the education market.

Chromebook shipments grew by a stunning 38 percent in 2016 compared to 2015. Gartner estimated 9.4 million Chromebooks shipped, compared to 6.8 million units in 2015.

The number is just a fraction of overall PC shipments, but growth came in an otherwise down PC market. Overall PC shipments in 2016 were about 270 million units, a decline of about 6.2 percent, according to Gartner.

Looking forward, 2016 may go down as the best year ever for Chromebook shipment growth. Gartner is estimating shipments to continue growing in the coming years but at a slower pace.

[...] Analyst firm IDC has also predicted Chromebook shipments will grow by double-digit percentages in coming years. Most of the Chromebooks are shipping to classrooms in the U.S., Nordic countries, Australia and New Zealand.

There is also growing interest in Chromebooks from businesses in the finance and retail sectors. Companies are using Chromebooks as no-frills mobile thin clients, considering they are cheap to deploy and easy to manage, said Mikako Kitagawa, an analyst at Gartner.

Yes, Microsoft would definitely like a piece of this segment of the market; whether the Surface Laptop, with its hobbled OS, is good enough to make that happen for them, is anyone's guess. 

PC sales have been declining for years, a situation which was only exacerbated by Microsoft's high-profile Windows 10 giveaway (a giveaway which isn't actually over yet, although its profile is certainly lower), so the fact that Chromebook sales are up by 38% is more than merely significant. This looks like a huge shift from from Windows PCs and towards any viable alternative; one has to wonder if Apple could be reaping more reward from this same shift if they weren't so busy dropping the ball with their own laptop line.

It remains to be seen whether consumers will be willing to accept Microsoft's anti-consumer Win10 S bullshit in ordet to get cheaper laptops. The fact that Microsoft has already backed off the $49 fee to upgrade from Win10 S to Win10 Pro, at least for the rest of this year, speaks volumes about Microsoft's own confidence about that happening. 

What we are seeing already, though, is that consumers really aren't waiting for Microsoft to get their heads out of their asses; they're looking for alternatives, and anyone who has their shit together can probably make a lot of hay out of Microsoft's disarray. Makers of Linux laptops should take note; if they're wanting to be one of those alternatives, it's probably now or never.

This is why I'd like to see Cortana become an optional thing.

From PC Gamer:

Windows 10's search is a constant source of frustration

Small, unsolved issues with finding files and settings menus persist while Cortana hogs the spotlight.

Two years and two major updates later, Windows 10 is mostly the OS I want it to be. It's fast, stable, and the recent Creators Update included a lot of small changes we liked. But search—a feature I use every day—still annoys the hell out of me. The Windows 10 Creators Update did nothing to improve Windows 10's basic file system search results, which will on occasion omit program results for no obvious reason, bury its own menus, and default to searching the internet with a browser I don't use instead of surfacing one of my own files. These failings are a daily reminder that Microsoft's search priorities and my search priorities are not identical.

[...] When I want to set up a task to complete, I use Asana. When I want to send an email, I use Gmail in my browser. I think the real problem is less being old fashioned, and more that I already have specialized tools or preferences for doing the kinds of tasks Cortana can handle, and I don't solve most of those problem with Microsoft services.

When I hit the Windows key and start typing, there's one thing I want Microsoft's help with: getting to my files as quickly as possible. Windows 10 has some problems with that.

This, in a nutshell, is why half of PC users, and over half of Windows users, are still using Windows 7.  

Microsoft wants to be in control of every aspect of your PC use, from your choice of OS, to updating your OS, to buying the software, to accessing your own damn data. They want to be Apple, serving apps to a captive marketplace with them taking a cut of every single program installation; and they want to be Google, replacing your browser of choice with their own, and using Bing for fucking everything, even though nobody uses Bing outside of Microsoft's employees; and they want to be Amazon, skimming a little more off the top by storing your data on their cloud-based OneDrive service, and selling you extra storage space when your OneDrive is full, in spite of the fact that your Terabyte-sized hard drive almost certainly isn't. 

And, you know what? I understand that. I understand why Microsoft would love to leverage their dominance on desktop and laptop PCs into market share dominance of the cloud-based businesses that they hadn't cared about until companies like Google, and Apple, and Amazon all started challenging (or surpassing) their market cap. I get it. I really, really do Get It. I just don't care.

Here's the thing: Microsoft having missed the boat on web search, or mobile computing, or cloud-based server and storage services? Those are Microsoft's problems. They're not our problems, and I personally don't give a flying fuck about any of them. Microsoft keep trying to make their problems into our problems, and I hate that. Seriously, there are very few things that will piss me off faster, almost none of which are things that I come across on regular basis. 

And Microsoft just keep doing this, shoving all things Windows 10 under users' noses at every opportunity, over and over again as if we haven't been refusing Windows 10, by which I mean actively avoiding the fucking thing, for nearly two years now. We can't ignore their shit, and we can't forget their shit, because they won't let us.

Seriously, Microsoft, how can we ever start to miss you, if you never fucking leave us alone?