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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Firing middle managers is a fun way to kill the company. Not that cleaning house is a bad idea. Unfortunately the people making decisions of who to keep and who to let go are usually idiots.

    Middle Managers are promoted for two reasons: technical expertise and ass-kissing expertise. Now the technical experts tend to not mix well with incompetent parasitic c-suite types idiots. The ass-kissers are beloved by the c-suite as that is their only role in life.

    So when firings come around guess who they get rid of? Then 1-3 years later everyone is shocked when everything starts to fall apart.





  • I have been using custom start menus since the whole win8 full screen disaster. Every time I see the default win 10 or Win 11 menu I cringe. So much crap in the way.

    Process optimization reaches a point of diminishing returns. Then if tweaked further it degrades the performance. Microsoft reached the close to the optimal OS design at Win7. It’s all been downhill since then.

    The mobile OS systems are reaching the same point. Optimization has occured and most of the “new” additions degrade the user experience.


  • Large corporations rarely innovate and try new things. Most innovation comes from smaller players with limited market share taking risks.

    Large companies buy out smaller ones who create cash cows from taking large risks. The large company then milks the cash cows until they are completely dead.

    The consolidation of studios to a few megacorporations has led to this inevitable end. The solution is simple: break them up. If we have 30 or so similar sized studios competing, we will get better movies/TV again.


  • Windows did a few vital things that Apple failed miserably on in the 90’s.

    Mac dropped support for legacy software and hardware on every new OS in the 90’s. Microsoft maintained backwards capability. It was a major reason windows was more resource intensive and had more bugs. It was a smart move because windows OS was able to handle more software and hardware than Macs. This is the top reason why windows demolished Mac in sales.

    Microsoft’s business model allowed greater range of pricepoints. Most users in business or at home do not need the capabilities of the lowest priced Mac model. You don’t need much to check e-mail, browse the web, and do some basic word processing. Apple did not service this largest section of the market at all.


  • Why is basic math.

    In a made up scenario let’s start with a dumb 50"ish TV. That cost them around $100 to build. Add in another $50 for shipping and distribution fees. It’s at the store for $150 cost. If they set the price at $400. There is $250 dollars of profit to share between the store and the manufacturer. The manufactuerer likely gets under $100.

    Now for a smart TV the revenue stream looks different. First their costs only go up by a few dollars for adding the “smart” chips. So let’s say $155 cost. Then they collect revenue from the streaming providers to be supported by their smart TV say $30 per set. Then they collect the $20 per set per year in user data collected. So if they price the smart TV the same as the dumb one they generate $95 from the sale of the set.

    So the profit from a dumb TV is $100 at he point of sale.

    The profit from a smart TV is $225+ in a constant revenue stream over 5 years.

    And this is why we see so much advertising for smart TV’s as being the best thing.







  • They made it the default option for businesses that routinely buy computers with less local storage than their users need. Pretty much every company I have worked for.

    They then pushed it out hard into the consumer market when SSD came out and the average storage space on lower end models dropped by 75%.

    I see why they did it, how they did it was in usual Microsoft fashion, idiotic.

    It’s sort of their pattern.

    1. Introduce new changes.

    2. Screw it up royalty.

    3. Fix the features that are salvageable and revert most of the remaining except: Double down on the shitty ones that they think will make them more money.

    4. Rinse and Repeat