Sony believed that they had so much market share that they could make a console that was leaps and bounds more complicated to code for, which would lock devs in and prevent them from going elsewhere, and they’d just have to suck it up because of said market share. Sony was wrong, and they lost out big time that generation (although they did manage to win the Blu-ray vs hd-dvd format wars).
Microsoft seems to believe they have so much market share that they can force people to upgrade to a privacy invading, ai infested piece of crap, and that everyone needs to suck it up because market share.
I’ve already started hearing wind that people, in statistically significant numbers, are finding alternatives… so is this the same situation as the ps3?
Just a passing musing without much to back up the gut feelings.
No way, unlike Windows 11, the PS3 was actually quite a good product.
Every other version of windows flops or sucks. 98 SE, good. 2k/ME, No. XP, great. Vista,no. 7, great. 8, No.
10…probably the last good Windows unless M$oft unfucks itself and makes 12 good. But I doubt it.
they did manage to win the Blu-ray vs hd-dvd format wars
They didn’t win them: they bought them. Blu-ray won via payola more than popularity or technical superiority. HDDVD has way better error correction and thus longevity, but you can see why corpos wouldn’t want that at the peak of the planned obsolescence / e-waste years.
The PS3 including a BD drive certainly played a part though.
MS tried to push HD-DVD but required a separate device to use it on 360.
It feels like that was the generation of poor console decisions.
Are we past said peak, then?
It wouldn’t be the first time a Microsoft OS was a total disaster.
It does more or less follow the age-old Microsoft pattern: One disaster OS, followed by one improved OS people mostly enjoy.
Only problem for them is that this time there’s actually way more viable OS options for average people to turn to, and they’ve simultaneously leaned heavily into surveillance capitalism, monitoring, and AI when all of those things are broadly unwelcome. Its a recipe for a big loss in market share, and I can’t say I don’t love that for them.
we’v e had improved ms oses since 7?
gestures at fucking linux
linux is ms?
My bad. I read that as IN OSes not ms OSes. Carry on.
no worries!
gestures at fucking linux
Usually Microsoft releases new versions quickly enough to leap-frog each other, though. Windows 98 was still supported when Windows XP was released, so nobody really needed to use WinME. The same thing happened with Windows Vista and 8. People could always just skip over the especially-shitty versions and wait for the next, not-quite-as-shitty version to come out before upgrading. They can’t do that with Windows 11, though.
I don’t think Sony intentionally screwed up PS2s to sell more PS3s though so it’s not an equal comparison.
they screwed up not making ps3s have ps2 backwards compatability outside the first lot of them released. its what ultimately caused me to be an xbox fan because for christmas my dad was gonna get the family a ps3 but when he found out they were no longer backward compatable with ps2 games he got us an xbox 360 instead
they intentionally screwed them up to sell more ps2s. i’m (for the last fifteen years, thank gods) on my third.
When recently onboarding for a new job I heard something I never thought I would hear in my life.
Everyone was given a Mac. Eng, design, finance, HR. Everyone. In my onboarding cohort, someone in finance asked if they could have a Windows PC, which has been the backbone of finance orgs for decades. IT said no. They just didn’t want to deal with Microsoft’s enterprise ecosystem.
As someone who went through this, I would honestly take Window 11’s bs over pos unusable mac.
First time ever I think I felt pain in my wrist from using a trackpad. Absolute clownshow of a UX
Interesting. I’ve got of gripes with Apple hardware (price, upgradability, silly things like notches and Touch Bars,) but trackpads has never been one of them. I’ve always thought the’ve had some of the best trackpads.
What trackpad do you prefer and why?
When I started at my current job, every new hire was given the choice of a MacBook or Linux laptop. I only encountered one person who chose the former and he only chose that because he thought it’d be funny to use Windows on a MacBook in his professional environment. (We were allowed to do pretty much whatever with our laptops so long as we could fulfill our work duties. My then manager replaced Ubuntu, with which we were provided, with Arch on his laptop.)
Two or so years later, the IT department said that they didn’t really know how to maintain security compliance on Linux, but they did know JAMF. Thus, they took away our customizable Linux laptops and foisted MacBooks on all of us. I’m pretty sure even the Windows guy lost that, but he was an exec so it probably took longer.
I still remember when they announced that this would happen. They said it without a timeline in the company-wide group chat and someone I respected previously and respected more afterwards said “so when are you taking away our good laptops?”
My guess that they’re trying to standardize around a platform that has a) no Microsoft, b) won’t cause product / UX / marketing to totally revolt, c) is well supported as an engineering platform (in Silicon Valley)
I got the same treatment recently. All tech departments were issued M4 Mac Book Pros because that was more cost effective than than dealing with the non-compliant fuckery of W11. Unfortunately non-tech departments got the old inventory and are suffering the abhorrent instability of W11. It somehow refuses to play nice with just about everything in our corporate ecosystem.
This is definitely becoming more common. I’ve seen Macs steadily gain market share in my organization because the Windows machines are locked down in such draconian ways that they become unusable, but somehow they allow much better user experiences on Macs as an option, so most people go that direction.
That’s nice to see actually. Regular consumers like us don’t have any pull, but businesses do. So I hope more start seeing Microsoft problematic enough to start shifting away to MacOS to get Microsoft to reassess their decisions.
I don’t know if Apple’s shenanigans are much better with how they’re trying to lock it down
But macOS is even more locked down than windows?
IMHO, it depends on the company, their data retention and security policy, and what you mean by “locked down.”
I’ve had IT departments that are comfortable giving everyone admin accounts and full sharing access, and IT departments that control every little thing that goes in and out of your machine.
They specifically mentioned the enterprise ecosystem.
I would not be surprised at all if Apple’s MDM system is less painful to use for smaller businesses than Microsoft’s AD and everything attached to it. Hell it might even be nicer for big orgs, but I’ve never heard of one (apart from the likes of Google) not using AD
Also if you’re already dealing with one of those systems, an IT department is probably motivated to not run both and set up interop if they can avoid it
Used to work for Apple in B2B sales.
Granted, this was five years ago, but back then it was sort of the other way round. The deployment at SMB scale worked really well and was also free of charge.
AT enterprise you would need a third-party solution typically, something like JAMF.
Locked down would probably be a plus for enterprise.
But honestly I’ve never got that argument. In what way is macOS more locked down than Windows? In the hardware that it will run on yes. But for the average user it seems fairly similar on the being “locked down” front.
I mean the hardware thing is huge imo
True, but enterprise hardware has never been something that IT departments really wanted to upgrade. Even back when everyone had upgradable towers under their desk, IT departments just wanted to kit you out with something that lasted 3 years, then was replaced.
Hell, in the before times, when I’ve even wanted more storage, all of my IT departments were more inclined to give me an external HD than open a computer case. They’re busy and they generally want to do whatever is fast.
Can you install linux on a mac?
Older Intel Macs are some of the best Linux machines. The newer ones with Apple CPUs are a compatibility nightmare.
There is a distro specifically made for Apple CPUs.
Yes, Asahi. It’s still a compatibility nightmare :(
Yup
Yes. And Windows too, on the x86 ones. Those are no different than a traditional laptop.
*At the moment, only M1 and M2 Macs are supported
Every once in a while, Microsoft makes fundamental mistakes which they only survive because of their size. Think Microsoft Bob or Windows 8. Looks like Windows 11 is heading in the same direction.
At least we can all agree that Tay was an AI revolutionary way ahead of “her” time. /s
That’s where it’s heading. Because why would I use software I don’t trust at home? New entrepreneurs will be using Linux because it doesn’t sell their data.
I still have the “Intel Celeron Inside” and “Ready for Windows Vista” stickers on my physical trash can at work.
Nobody sees it that way, nobody notices what we notice. They don’t know any alternatives, it has new features so it’s innovating, it does what they want/need. I hear no complaints, only from tech people who are invested in privacy and digital sovereignty. That’s the reality.
Maybe in the case of windows 11 that will be true, but in the past that has not been the case. When Windows 8 came out regular users were “upgrading” new machines to windows 7.
Those people were still among the minority of PC users.
Microsoft is bleeding power users and PC enthusiasts at an unprecedented rate. This is a great thing for Linux, but they are still absolutely locked into the corporate world and that’s where the money is.
The reality is that Microsoft solved management of corporate policy and identity like 25 years ago and nothing else has come close. It has its problems, but Active Directory is an incredible piece of software. The combination of LDAP, with obfuscation of Kerberos to the point where you don’t even need to know it exists, combined with policy deployment to endpoints is nothing short of a miracle.
Linux has tools for all those things, but none are easy to deploy or configure. If you have to manage thousands of desktops, Windows is still the clear choice
AD and LDAP is notoriously insecure as hell by default. It took until 24H2 for MSFT to enable SMB signing, which was a solid 50% chance for an unauthenticated attacker to reach domain admin on any enterprise network.
There are a lot of solutions that eclipse AD in both quality and scope. It’s just like VMWare, a once solid product that orgs got vendor locked into, and are stuck for life.
If you are a large corporation or government, you’d have the resources to do exactly that. I keep hearing about European governments moving to Linux. And why wouldn’t you? Screw perpetual licensing.
What those EU governments are doing is out of interest for national security rather than hate for licensing. The US has changed drastically in the last decade and getting your sensitive data out of their infrastructure is a top priority.
The cost of change from Windows to Linux is pretty small for an individual. Most people have one or two machines and a handful of programs, none of which are critical to your continued existence.
In the corporate world, you need to be absolutely sure that everything will work flawlessly, which often means weeks or months of testing on top of all your regular IT duties, constant support tickets to obscure software vendors who may not have ever worked with Linux, and if some mission-critical piece of software breaks, then the company cannot operate until it is fixed…or you can continue to use Windows, even though it sucks more now.
I want Linux to have wider adoption in the desktop space, but it’s a catch 22. People aren’t going to move unless the software is guaranteed to work, and Linux-based software isn’t going to be made unless people are using it. This is why Proton was such a big deal. It offered a real option for gaming to move to the platform and now it’s viable and devs are starting to take linux into account.
Its not a guarantee of flawless operation thats required, its a source of liability if something goes wrong. Someone has to be responsible if the latest update blows everything up.
I’m sure large organizations moving to Linux are also choosing a distro that has paid support. It’s probably still cheaper than Microsoft licensing, though.
Now where did I place that consultant…
You keep hearing about the same 3 german states moving to LibreOffice. That’s not quite the same thing.
generally, yes, but it’s a couple more now;
- Austria’s military is moving to open source
- couple of french cities (was is lyon?)
- i think denmark?
- pretty sure there’s a couple others
point being: it’s a clear trend!
it’s slow, yes, but it seems to be picking up steam!
the idea is being seriously discussed at basically all state institutions.
and more importantly: the reason for this trend is clearly data security. which states actually care about. so there’s a very clear and easy to understand incentive, which makes it politically palatable.
we’ll have to see, but the trend seems to be heading in the right direction!
Novell solved directory services 25 years ago. It took MS 10 to catch up.
I was going to reply essentially the same thing! I’m glad someone remembers their IT history. :)
“IT history” :(
Oh, well, time to go back to my crypt.
You mean Novell royally fucked up Netware and people went to AD at first because of that. But yes, AD was quite new then, mostly an add-on for NT domains (and still sort of is :) try going full kerberos…).
How did Novell mess up netware? If anything Novell should have teamed up with IBM or Apple to take on end user productivity.
Well remember netware had a 250 user limit per server before 4.0. Thats not alot in corp space. I remember running many servers just to handle user auth and logon back with netware 3.12
Wasn’t 4 still a flat directory? I’m talking about 5 when it got serious.
I present to you a wild notion:
Adobe OS.
They have the market value and revenue to do what steam is doing.
They could make switching a cost save if the OS integrates vertically with the creative cloud.
To be clear, I don’t want this and would t use it. But any business with licenses would say “wait… Ditch Microsoft ios, and… Poof? Everything works and we pay way less money?”
All that Microsoft provides any business at this point is AD/Azure.
I feel like Microsoft is taking massive Ls between now and 2030. I don’t think Adobe is gonna do this, I’m just saying if they did, it could work. Microsoft is a weak giant right now.
Adobe has been their own worst enemy for decades and their one true skill is fucking things up. The best thing about Adobe trying to make their own OS would be that it could wipe them out.
-signed, a long time bitter former Adobe user that still has to support their shit
Linux is a bad choice for multiple reasons. I wish Linux had better support for games, DAWS (my job) and other software.
Linux has close to the best support for games possible without support from the game developers.
Other windows software usually isn’t quite as good in my experience, but still better than non-native software on any other operating system.
Never used a DAW, so I can’t say anything about that.
I wish Linux had better support for games, DAWS (my job) and other software.
Do you have any examples or details so we can understand your point better?
It runs FL studio and Ableton like complete ass as well as any plugin I need. Has terrible Nvidia support and even worse Intel support.
REAPER is great and has a linux version which is great
Realer is great. Unfortunately I don’t feel like redoing dozens of projects and learning a new daw 😭
FL studio and Ableton through WINE, I presume? That’s really the responsibility of the FL studio and Ableton developers, not Linux. I got Bitwig specifically because it supports Linux natively, and I hear it does it well (I haven’t tried it on Linux yet). From what I understand, the situation with Nvidia is also largely on Nvidia’s camp, although some distributions have gone above and beyond to get their GPUs to work well from the get go, like Pop OS, which I also just installed recently. No idea about Intel, but I thought I had heard that their support (and AMD’s) for Linux was much better than Nvidia’s.
I’m not complaining about Linux. But the lack of support that companies have for it. Seems to be a lack of interpretation somewhere. I have no real problem with Linux other than it mostly require major googling of how terminal works. Windows and even Mac are just simple to use and everything works.
I have used bitwig before too, but I’ve been using FL for almost 20+ years now. I’m not going to change my entire system and knowledge just because a community hates it when someone says windows is easier to use lmao.
That’s all fine and I understand your points and wishes. I think your first reply was downvoted because it was offtopic to the post your were replying to and because it did sound like you were complaining about Linux.
Lets not forget too that Sony ever only started making video games at all because Nintendo thought they had such strong market share that they could bully Phillips AND Sony. Phillips ended up being a little bitch, and didn’t do anything noteworthy. But Sony? Sony bent Nintendo over a barrel, and took their lunch money.
And then waited 10 years to make the same exact mistake.
The CD-I was at least like footnoteworthy.
Switched my home PC to Linux (Manjaro) over a year ago and had little issue getting it to run what I want. Steam works great these days. Wine has come a long way but I don’t end up using it… though might try to run Foobar now that I think of it.
I hear the fleet management argument though. I got a MacBook at work because I couldn’t stand windows 11 and it’s claim on all virtualization (have to disable security features to get VMs access to hardware virtualization), and I don’t envy our IT department having to deal with Jamf.
- Sony won that generation.
- The games are still being made for Windows. The time it takes to lose that whole platform would allow them plenty of time to correct their path.
- Microsoft are crooked AF… They’ve been keeping their monopoly status for over 30 years. They won’t let that change.
Sony objectively did not win that generation. The Nintendo wii did— some gamers don’t want to include the Wii in the running at all, but it was there and it won approximately 101 million to maybe 88 million.
Now, the ps3 made a remarkable comeback and eventually caught back up with the Xbox 360, tying or slightly exceeding it in sales in the very end, but that’s not winning. That’s especially not winning compared to the PS2 generation, where there was absolutely no contest that it won— there wasn’t even a serious rival to the ps2 at the time. It dominated. The ps3 barely squeaking out a second place trophy against a CLOSE third place, when it trailed far behind at first, is not winning the generation. It’s just not.
Sony lost the absolute monolithic dominance they had in the ps2 era. That’s the situation I’m comparing now. Maybe this windows 11 situation won’t echo the past, but it’s a question I’m musing on in the shower.
The Wii sold the most consoles but the 360 had the most engagement. Wii consoles sat in closets or became Wii Sports machines, 3rd parties gave up releasing titles on it due to miserable sales and the only games that sold were Nintendo games. Saying it “won the generation” because it sold the most consoles isn’t really telling the whole truth.
Sony wasn’t competing with Nintendo, they were competing with Microsoft.
lol no. That’s … simply not how markets work.
Well unless Sony was aiming for mums and dad’s who had never played games before yeah no… They were not competing.
The Wii wasn’t Nintendo’s first console. The fuck do you think Nintendo is?
No shit… But the Wii was aimed at a different audience. They used to make playing cards but the PS3 wasn’t competing against that either. It’s about what market they are targeting. Lamborghini makes super cars acts competes with Ferrari, but they also make tractors and that’s not up against the latest Ferrari HyperCar.
lol playing cards… Just admit you have no fucking clue about Nintendo. This obstinant shit is just pathetic.
(yes, Nintendo did make playing cards, but pretending the NES, SNES, N64, GameBoy, and all related consoles and handhelds didn’t exist before is just pathetic of you. Seriously, get a clue. Nintendo have been competitors in consoles and handhelds longer than Sony)
one can hope, but I think it’s a long shot. Most of my normie friends aren’t going to switch even if microsoft assigned a live person to sit next to them and monitor their usage. “it needs to just work, and i know how to use it” they say (or something along those lines).
Its because its used in schools, they learn it, they become reliant on it, its in their workplaces, at their home.
Its why Microsoft dont really care if you pirate Windows, the more people using it, the more reliant they are on it, then they cash in big time at the enterprise level. Same with Photoshop etc etc.
If we taught how to use Linux instead…
Yeah exactly! We need to ask Linux in schools! I even tried to convince the headmaster of a school by telling them how they would save money with linux sice they don’t have to pay licenses and hardware last longer, all the software they use is linux compatible (they even use LibreOffice instead of MS office!) I don’t go to that school anymore so i don’t know if they did it but i doubt
While I run Linux on a desktop, I’ve always owned a Windows laptop. I decided last week that instead of ever running Windows 11, I’m going to buy a Macbook and dual boot it with Linux. Yes I know I can run Linux on any number of PC hardware laptops, there are occasionally windows only utilities needed to run firmware or some other proprieatry application. If I can know I can always fall back to OSX for system updates and running proprietary commercial software, I’ll know I never need to touch Windows 11.
May when Microsoft realizes Windows 11 is Vista 2.0, Windows 12 may be great. With Linux and OSX, I don’t see myself coming back to Windows even then though.
Don’t you have problems with ARM not being able to run x86_64 software?
I’ve been in the Raspberry Pi world for awhile and had a taste of both the more limited selection of ARM based binaries, but also exposed to a bit of cross compiling. I’m sure I’ll run into things that are x86 specific, but that will also give me a chance to be exposed to the benefits and limits of x86 emulation on Apple Silicon.
This brings me to cloud compute. For x86 binaries with no chance of substitution/cross compiling, I am planning on spinning up an x86 cloud instance that will likely accommodate a few more of my needs. I’m fully aware that there will be some applications that will simply have no accommodation, mitigation, or substitution on ARM and I’ll have to “go without”. I do have x86 a Linux desktop in regular use.
Lastly, I also take advantage of ARM based cloud compute, as it is SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper than x86 cloud compute. Having a native workstation architecture matching the cloud compute architecture, I think, can possibly make live easier instead of harder.
Worst comes to worst, I can press an old x86 laptop back into service running Linux.
Yeah, it seems like kind of a headache to try to get Linux distros that work properly on Macs from what I’ve searched at least. Asahi Linux seems like the only one that works reliably compared to all the options available to Ryzen and Intel CPUs.
When it comes to Mac since they’ve moved to their own chips it’s seemed like its better to get a Mac to use MacOS, and Linux is more a fall back option in the future when it loses support with how it can be buggy.
Didn’t Valve just fix this with Fex?
Valve didn’t make Fex, and while it’s a compatibility layer, that doesn’t mean it runs everything.
Just look at Proton and you can see after years (and focusing exclusively on games) it’s still not near 100%.
I’d be curious to hear how you end up liking it.
As someone who spends a lot of time on the command-line, I’ve generally preferred MacOS over Windows as my not-Linux OS. But my impression is that for people who like the Windows or Linux GUI, MacOS is a bigger (and less pleasant) change.
And even on the command-line, MacOS is a different *nix distro and makes seme pretty weird choices (launchd, plists, /etc is actually /private/etc, …) whereas you could have vanilla Ubuntu inside WSL2.
Sony also made a similar mistake when they phased out the PSP, only to later revive it as PSVITA.
