keyringlight

I'd be interested to know how complex the modelling behind this is for the companies involved, what reasons they think are behind changes and what levers are within their reach to pull (and what's outside their control).

One aspect that springs to mind immediately looking at that timeline is the rise of mobile, it wouldn't have happened immediately at launch (around 2007) but has been a building wave that meant practically everyone has a games device in their pocket. For audiences of certain genres is all they need where they might have contributed to the overall picture of dedicated gaming devices, leaving other gamers and companies to balance the books for other genres that are left.

Similar with Westwood (part of Virgin interactive) and Bioware (parceled up with Pandemic studios, owned by Elevation partners, who sold it to EA)

I think a large part of the issue is that the sum total of ME trilogy is a hard act to follow, without aiming to sound hyperbolic it's a very bright light that outshines a lot. Anything trying to be a sequel has a difficult balancing act of being familiar versus being different and bringing new ideas in.

The thing that strikes me about the 'paperless office' as it was hyped isn't how much paper use was reduced, but what was enabled or sped up by computer databases or the internet to work with a head office. Consider how restricted most mail order companies would be compared to the modern market if they could only communicate with their customers, suppliers, logistics and other partners via phone/fax/physical mail, and they either had one central records department or the difference in efficiencies handling a network of local branches/franchises.

That leads to pondering if we're actually seeing a similar shift today with AI.

Another angle on this is general reliability and what that does to the experience. I'm reminded of Linus having a moan about poor availability of ECC in consumer RAM and how many errors that get blamed on software are actually down to something happening to hardware but it isn't specifically identified. Plus when you're talking billions of devices even small proportions are significant. Firefox built a memory tester into their bug reporter tool as that 'noise' became a large enough problem for them.

I'd say there's similar challenges to changing legacy hardware/software and all it interacts with. If all you're doing is new then you could probably devise a robot friendly standard and they'd take over the profession, the issue is the huge variety of how plumbing is implemented within a building of any given age, different building eras in a city, across a country, different countries, complying with all their different sets of regulations, all the variety of parts they connect to. That's with very little plumbing knowledge, in my field of courier shipping where companies have been actively pursuing automation for a long time and still are, even if one of the largest companies with influence like amazon are able to standardize on a few things, it's a huge number of other entities they need to interface with where they are limited on how much they can push (i.e. standard size items) without making themselves irrelevant.

The thing I liked and still like about dedicated (audio) media player devices is physical buttons so you can have non-fiddly control while it's in your pocket, and it's responsive. With my phone and bluetooth earbuds I have to either pull out a 6.7" slab from my pocket and unlock it to adjust anything complex or get the right morse code tap on the exact right spot on an earbud and deal with any bluetooth delay (I find it a blessing if the phone is oriented in the right way where I can use the vol +/- buttons).

Where I think they're missing a trick is trying to imitate the admittedly iconic iPod classic design, especially when no one is building around a hard drive any more.

Going back a few years to covid lockdowns, work from home exploding and a shortage of computers, I thought the mirror image of that was something MS should have tried. Enable a variant of windows on the xbox (probably locked down) so people can plug in keyboard/mouse and do some desktop tasks on the recently released consoles, and it'd also serve to seed a userbase for the gaming side.

The aspect that's depressing to me is that we've shown many times that we can throw huge amounts of resources at various projects, numbers quantifying them so large most people don't have the context for the scale, but not for projects that preserve our environment. If anything it seems like doing so would give us a greater time span to do things like colonize the nearest chunk of rock in space (which is a figurative paddle off the coast compared to reaching other habitats) and terraforming our own world first might teach us things we need to know for greater projects.

Another aspect I'd wonder about for relatively simple tasks is just freeing it from memory and being prepared to pay the cost of loading it again, it's probably already on disk. Latency matters, but it seems there will be limits especially considering the transfer speed and latency improvements we've seen to storage commonly installed in most systems over the past 15 years or so.

Then comes the challenge of deciding what processes/data to free or page, whether that's flagged by the system as it's running or at coding/compile time. And that seems similar to the issue of picking a swap strategy for a distro/OS, which will depend on the user's demands or system, setting a good default and exposing how to change the configuration to a better match if needed.

From what I remember it was a project for Coffee Stain (the studio) to train up/onboard new hires, having started as a modding team with Sanctum for UT3 and later a full standalone release. Then they ran with it for a while after it struck a chord with people willing to give them money.

That lack of care is the part that's annoying to me, combined with them being one of the largest corporations that has the resources to throw at those issues if they chose to do so. Quality issues aside, there's lots of similar aspects like the long drawn out migration of the control panel (i.e. their own control panel applets, putting aside third party) since win8 in 2012, if they wanted they could have completed that in the last 14 years and however many major releases you count since then.

It may not be the bean counting optimal, but it is a long term image they project of the company.

I think any movement is gradual and for it to be significant it would need to be sustained, people love dramatic sudden changes but it's going up against decades of momentum. As you mentioned mobiles, that took a long time to transition and that was with a starting point where a large proportion already had a non-smart phone along with the decisions they made about replacing aging devices.

The point about "fighting the last war" is interesting as there's a lot of uncertainty right now about how personal computing with a PC is going to look in the next few years. The angle I've been wondering about with the pressures on consumer hardware pricing/availability is if manufacturers can use it as an opportunity to establish new standards if/when it's easier to buy new again (eg, a major ATX revision/rethink) or if they keep following the same template. Over on the software side, what could a non-stagnant OS offer that would be attractive to consumers, what can consumer/desktop linux do that isn't following windows/macos, what would create a need for a mirror image of WINE as linux is leading with new features first?

A tangent to this which annoys me is not specifically windows, but the way the ecosystem has evolved over the years, by guidance/enforcement or lack thereof from MS. Unless you're very careful about what applications you install and how you manage/monitor them, you can end up with a lot of background applications loaded each boot, each doing some combination of non-centralized updating itself or applications it manages, preloading, quick launch, etc.

I'm pretty sure some versions of DOS had a defrag tool, or at least windows 9x had a DOS mode equivalent where you could see the block map getting moved around.