o8o8o8o

My favorite anecdote about Microsoft's Xbox strategy is that the original Xbox was a net loss of about $4 billion, and they considered that to be a huge success because that's just how much money it takes to muscle your way into an industry like gaming.

Slightly offtopic, but I feel like America's lack of a true public broadcaster like the BBC in the UK, ABC in Australia, CBC in Canada etc. is a major contributor to America's polarization issues. NPR is okay but it doesn't fully fill the void that's missing there. Since Americans don't have a public broadcaster that they all have a stake in as taxpayers, Americans pick and choose which news sources they listen to, which inevitably leads people to listen to news that confirms their personal biases. Of course, Americans are allergic to such things as "state run propaganda".

I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world on fire the way Gmail did for email.. The product its self was good and they were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver it, but they bungled the launch and then let it rot for 3 years. In my opinion that product is the perfect distillation of Google's problems.

I would 100% use Bing more if they offered a "minimal" or "low bandwidth" mode that cuts out all of the pictures, news, weather, etc. and just takes me to the results.

The rumour I keep hearing is that it's like the Hunger Games inside Google at the moment. Total chaos and infighting at all levels, investors are freaking out over AI and Bard's middling performance compared to OpenAI and blood is in the water. Sundar may be forced to resign and Larry/Sergei deployed to rescue the company.

Personally at my work I've been trying to navigate migrating our CentOS 7 production servers to EL8 (Looking at Rocky Linux) and it's been a bloody nightmare thanks to RedHat prematurely killing CentOS8. It seems like there isn't any kind of tools available on the internet to migrate off CentOS to another RHEL clone, so we may end up having to rebuild of our affected production servers before doomsday in 2024. Rocky has a bash script, but it only supports systems running EL8 or higher.

There is something charming about the amateurish feel of their livestream, like the money I've given them is going to real people doing real work and not into a bloated marketing budget.