The last major antitrust action on this scale in the U.S. 8 years to process.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

This type of lawsuit is why the billionaire bro’s are backing the senile rapist and felon. Making them play somewhat fair ruins their business plan.

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.

They also need to remove the limited liability from companies for intentional illegal activities.

illegal business practices should be charged to the people involved instead of the company. The executives who made the decision to break the law lose personal assets.

Otherwise the shitheads just pass the company losses onto the employees: no raises, hiring freezes, layoffs, reduction in benefits, etc…

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.

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 were a bit more tricky than that I believe. They capped the user page at 3 years of search. So when you delete everything using those scripts it deletes the newer stuff but misses all the older ones. Then after the script runs it shows - no comments.

The heyday of the forums. For about 2 years the combination of Tapatalk and forums was awesome. Centralized interface with no ads, all the discussion.

Then they both gutted their functionality and spammed in the ads.

Go back and check again. They are actively restoring deleted comments. About once a month I log back on and delete another round. Usually another 10-15 “mysteriously” pop back up again.

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

Forums were awesome until the ads took over. Then apps like Tapatalk made reading them easier. Then Tapatalk went to shit and power users migrated to reddit (mainly for the easy to use wepage and awesome independent apps.).

Then reddit shit the bed so now Lemmy is filling the gaps.

Windows 11 adoption to business customers is really bad. Most of the adoption to 11 has been from people purchasing new home computers and being stuck with 11 (I have two win 11 computers now).

Since the bulk of Microsoft’s revenue comes from business customers, they have a huge impact on decisions.

At this point the only decision Microsoft can make is to write off win 11 as a failue. Resuming feature upgrades to win 10 makes business sense.

Much easier to just raise business taxes by enough to pay for free education at all levels.

Tax based upon the average education level required for the job in the industry. This would change them all to a skills based hiring system overnight.

Pointing out significant flaws that are holding the systems adoption rate back is never popular. Most of them are very techy and don’t have a clue what the average user needs. It’s a great way to get them all riled up.

I spent a few years as a process flow and bug finder for some programmers building a proprietary internal system. Then I trained non-tech savvy people on how to use the system. One of the most difficult jobs I have ever done. Bridging the gap between the two of them was brutal.

That’s not a problem with windows it’s a feature. Even the barely tech literate people can use it to bumble their way through to get the job done, eventually.

They don’t use it well but they still use it. They also rarely break it anymore.

Those of us who worked with these people with win 98 and XP… Shudder. They ways they screwed up the system was truly remarkable at times.

No it doesn’t.

My last attempt was six months ago. Still had a few key programs in a tarball. Dow

Then there’s always the random hardware incompatibility. This last attempt it decided to flip the screen upside down on my laptop screen. Fun times…

It’s come a long way, but for the average user, it’s not anywhere near polished enough.

I have used Linux off and on for almost 20 years.

I install it, see if I can do everything I want.

Get lost in terminal hell.

Give up and uninstall it.

Until I can browse to a webpage, download a program and click on an icon and have it install and work, the OS is shit for the general user. It’s not that fucking difficult of a concept.

Make the policy change, see if they can get it to hold up in the courts. AKA normal business practices for corporate America.

They successfully reverted adding a custom toolbar to the taskbar. I create one for each of my cloud drives and one for the desktop. It turns a folder into a menu.

I organize my files in nested folders. It allows me to open files/programs much faster than searching using the mouse hover on the folders

For example:

Clouddrive^research/2023/ file.

Older files or less frequently used ones are buried deeper in a folder tree. Actives ones are very shallow so it’s fast to find them.

I had to purchase new computers for my wife and son. So W11 home edition it is. $12 for for the family pack of startallback and the PC’s run as they should. It’s so stupid that I have to do it, but it clears out all the annoying shit so it’s worth the few bucks.

I have been using classic shell/open shell since Win8 anyways. My screens look the close to the same since Win7 and I am not changing anytime soon.

At my last job all the default company phones where iPhones. So all the windows laptops had iTunes pre-installed by IT on them.

Having refused apple products due to poverty and being forced to use a Mac desktop at a previous job (clusterfuck) I had not seen it in years.

It’s one of the the most poorly designed, confusing dumpster fires of a program around. The company of “it just works” my ass.

I swear it was like 4 different uninstalls to get rid of it. Only to restart and see another mysterious program appear. I have gotten malware that was easier to get rid of.