371–380 of 399 posts
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> It's happened before. source?
Seriously? Have you just emerged from a hundred-year sleep in a monastery on the top of a mountain?
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I don't see how "most successful and profitable product" is supposed to disprove a big drop in quality.
people dont use and pay for things that suck
And it's easy to imagine a situation where the other options are still mediocre most of the time, so switching has an advantage but it's not a big compelling thing you shout to the rooftops, so it doesn't get a big popularity wave.
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It's cheaper to buy a Linux machine compared to a Windows machine by roughly the cost of the Windows license
Maybe in theory, or for power-users, or a couple niche company. In practice for the vast majority of people if it's not a Chromebook, then they're either buying a laptop or a pre-built tower, and it comes with Windows. It should be cheaper to buy a linux machine, but try and find a computer without an OS at Walmart.
Chromebooks I forgot about. But every time I’ve seen them at a store they’re not mixed in with the “computers“, they’re “othered” into their own little section of the computer area. A bit like Macs in the late ‘90s or early 2000s.
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They were asking about "internet" versus "internet explorer", so that's not relevant.
The Internet Explorer is not for exploring the internet, but the world wide web, so the name never did make sense.
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every time these companies make a mistake and waste billions of dollars it is well-publicized. so there is plenty of data that they are frequently and preposterously wrong.
name a technology that every single top tech company has invested billions of dollars in and then has flopped. the metaverse does not count unless google, amazon, microsoft etc was also throwing billions into it.
by that logic financial crashes wouldn't happen
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If you want games, you want Windows. Though Valve is finally chipping away at that. But mostly it’s cost. It’s simply far cheaper to buy a Windows computer than a Mac if you just want a computer. There are no sub-$300 Macs brand new. In so many ways, for so many reasons, people “must” use Windows.
It's cheaper to buy a Linux machine compared to a Windows machine by roughly the cost of the Windows license
irm https://get.activated.win | iexEarlier quoted context omitted.
Failed to do what? I'm sure you can find good analysis of why specific products failed. And both Google/Alphabet and Facebook/Meta have a bunch of side projects that are reasonably successful.
They have failed to diversify, is what I meant, despite being around for approx 2 decades
meta $164b revenue in 2024: 98% advertising
google $350b revenue in 2024: 76% advertising, 12% google cloud, 12% other
apple $391b revenue in 2024: 66% hardware (iphone, ipad, mac), 25% services (app store etc), 9% other
amazon $638b revenue in 2024: 64% amazon store+associated services, 17% AWS, 9% ads, 11% other
microsoft $245b revenue in 2024: 40% azure/server products, 22% office, 10% windows, 9% gaming, 7% linkedin, 5% search+ads, 8% other
I'm not particularly a microsoft fan, just making this point because I think MS is poorly understood by the HN crowd
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The product is the stock price, not Office or Windows. From that perspective they are doing it right.
Is sacrificing everything for short term gains really the right move in any situation?
It seems to me that CEOs have a different opinion than anyone who cares instead about actual people.
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I don't see how "most successful and profitable product" is supposed to disprove a big drop in quality.
people dont use and pay for things that suck
Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular. Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time. They could have pounced on this opportunity to…
Nadella himself wrote: "2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. [...] We have moved past the initial phase of discovery and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion. We are beginning to distinguish between “spectacle” and “substance”." Customers are not buying the spectacle and investors are wondering why there is no substance. [1] _ https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/