261–270 of 349 posts
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I am still salty about how badly they ruined Skype, though.
Skype was amazing until it was acquired. Would Zoom even exist today if Microsoft never bought Skype?
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>Kinect => It's not dead ??? Is it alive? It very much has an immensely passionate community of students and hobbyists using it in ways well past its intended use (e.g. it's some of the cheapest mocap hardware you can buy). But I don't think you've been able to officially purchase one for 4+ years now. Hard to call that "alive" in a business sense. Honestly a real shame that Xbox hasn't pivoted it into some other tea…
I'd call it dead I guess, but I don't see why that's a problem. It's a physical product, you can't keep manufacturing those forever. They supported it until the next generation of consoles came out. Would it be fair to make a site called "Killed by Nintendo" and list the Game Boy and Wii?
I'm not offering judgment on whether they ought or ought not to, I'm merely observing that they have power and are exercising it as they choose.
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Nope. I've been left stranded by Google over and over. Talk to all the happy GSuite/Free users around now. Or people who developed Chrome Extensions prior to Manifest V3. Or who were banned from Google Fi, Youtube, or your app store of choice by an automated, broken algorithm. Or who developed Workspace Docs prior to mandatory security audits at price points which will break most independent developers. Or.... The ke…
I think you're lashing out at Google for a variety of different (and very good!) reasons, but they're outside the range of my comment. People getting banned from Google services because of broken automation is bad, of course, but it has nothing to do with the issue of whether migration paths are provided when services are sunsetted at Google. My point is that for Google's core services, they generally due try to migr…
Try telling that to Picasa users.
When Google announced it was "moving on from Picasa", they stated:
"We apologize for any inconvenience this transition causes, but.... Google Photos is a new and smarter product that offers a better platform for us..."
A better platform for Google. Not users.
Many Picasa users, like my father, were left frustrated and confused by the change. He was not a "cloud user" of anything, and he took lots of hi-res photos and wanted to manage them locally. Picasa failed to install on Windows 10, and some people were even rolling back to Windows 7/8 just so they could keep using the Picasa application.
I hope you don't consider migration from locally controlled photo management to the cloud as "generally the same features", because it isn't.
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>Kinect => It's not dead ??? Is it alive? It very much has an immensely passionate community of students and hobbyists using it in ways well past its intended use (e.g. it's some of the cheapest mocap hardware you can buy). But I don't think you've been able to officially purchase one for 4+ years now. Hard to call that "alive" in a business sense. Honestly a real shame that Xbox hasn't pivoted it into some other tea…
The Azure Kinect was released as a successor for the research and business applications[1]. I know one roboticist who has used one, but no one aside from that. Definitely dead as a consumer gaming device, but a product evolving towards a discovered usecase is a surprisingly happy outcome from MS. [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/kinect-dk/
Really nice price too, while being (based on a bit of research) much more powerful than the old Kinect.
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Likely not, not in its current form. I wouldn't be surprised if in 2010 that Kinect was being sold at a significant loss (as is the usual trend in the games industry). They'd need to tweak the device quite a bit to be B2B, but given the success of game engines, asset packs, and other tools I don't think it's impossible. Creators will absolutely pay a premium for such tech when the alternative goes for thousands of do…
You're describing the Azure Kinect, which does exist and you can buy.
Microsoft Graveyard - Killed by Microsoft
https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...
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There was also MSN messenger, which was more capable than Skype other than the connection to the actual telephone network (having messages be delivered later without requiring both people to be online at the same time - amazing!) and when Teams replaced Skype, even more features were dropped. What part of that is positive other than "well, you can still do some of the things but we prefer to give you an inferior prod…
When Teams came out it didn’t have feature parity with SfB, despite their claims that it did, but here in 2022, it does. At least I can’t think of a sing feature in SfB that’s not in Teams now, and can think of many features that have been radically improved. Never used consumer Skype too much, what are you missing in Teams now?