awkwardleon

Agree with the weakness, but the benefit of provenance is still there. You can't tell if the picture that person took is of an AI image, but there's some value in saying "I took this" and being able to prove it.

I was at a company acquired by IBM, and left within two years. When asked by HR at my exit interview why I was leaving I honestly answered "Lotus Notes".

My reasoning (which I ranted on extensively for the rest of the interview) was that mandating Lotus Notes as a tool internally, let alone continuing to sell it, reflected very poorly on how IBM felt about their employees, customers, and products. Examples:

* for YEARS IBM had to ship a "killnotes.exe" utility to their own employees because they couldn't figure out how to gracefully exit the app - and that's just one papercut out of hundreds;

* they misrepresented the popularity of the product, as the number of seats sold was tied to other bundled deals - most customers wouldn't touch the product;

* they continually gaslit employees and customers that Notes was great for common workflows (email in particular, searching in general) where in fact it was overwhelmingly a failure - and anyone who complained "didn't understand the product";

* they would send out multiple-choice surveys on "How would you like to improve Notes?" with every question and possible answer tied to developer-focused and database features with nothing allowing feedback on the primary use-cases that were driving users up the wall

In the end IBM's stance on Notes was either tone-deaf, incompetent, mendacious, malicious, opportunistic, extractive, callous, or shameless with no sense of pride in product.

I'm still bitter. Man, I hated that product.

There's so much lock-in/captive-audience on these platforms I don't see this happening with mobile phones as they exist today. The only thing that will crack it is the "Next Big Thing"™, and who knows what/when that will be (AR glasses? Brain chips? Some AI wearable?)?

I like Kurt Vonnegut's take on this:

“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”

I don't know whether to upvote this or downvote this.

I believe the point was these companies benefited greatly and specifically from basic research funded by the government: they should therefore "give back" in kind (vs simply contributing to the tax base and relying on a government to figure out what to fund). The reality is these companies care only about shareholder value, and the current US administration has been terminating grants and cutting funding in basic research. I think it's fair to question, in this environment, what these companies' ethical responsibilities really should be.

"Make good choices!" /That should do it