No, it's because their current CEO is incompetent. Microsoft wasn't always this way. Satya Nadella has done exactly two big things in his 11 years as CEO: execute (and take credit for) Ballmer's Azure plan and "invest" (i.e. lose money) in AI and game studios.
He has canceled or scaled down practically every single other project and created no new ones. He laid off Microsoft's smartest people and replaced them 4-to-1 with new hires from India. Under Ballmer, Microsoft was releasing several new products a year including:
Zune, Xbox (Original, 360, and One), countless amazing games like Halo and Age of Empires, the Kinect (that sensor was so amazing it still is used in industrial applications today), Office (huge difference between Office 2000 and Office 2013, but almost no changes have been since 2013), Windows XP (massive change from Windows 95 with a new kernel and tons of features), tablet PCs, media center PCs, Windows Vista (Aero was unlike anything seen before), Windows 7, the Surface (both the table and the tablet), .NET, C#, TypeScript, Windows Mobile (precursor to the modern smartphone), Bing, MSN, and many, many, many more innovative products.
Ballmer's Microsoft did more in six months than Nadella's has in over 10 years. The company back then also had a small fraction of its current headcount.
He probably is the one who killed the windows beta program. I had a friend who worked for microsoft for the beta program. Believe it or not, at one point, Microsoft had an inhouse beta team to beta test windows updates before they went live. He told me that there was about 1000 people in a huge cubicle laden room, each one with a completely different build of a PC. Every PC was a random selection of motherboards, chip speeds, video cards, memory, etc. All various brands. As many completely random permutations as possible of parts. And the updates would go through this beta team so they could attempt to find if the update crashed even the most esoteric combination of PC parts and drivers so it could be remedied before release.
He told me that somewhat recently - with in the last couple of years Microsoft did away with that whole beta program when they figured out they could shitcan all the beta testers and instead use the end users to beta test the updates instead. It's the main reason microsoft switched to rolling updates for windows, so when it bricks someone's setup, they can find out and fix it before it gets to more people. As with everything in tech the past 15 or so years, it's become cheaper to just release shit product and let the end user beta test it for free and then fix it.
Any fucking symphony concert always involves sitting through some shithead's (white or red or yellow or black) stupid atonal composition entitled "faggottry for woodwinds and triangle". It's so bad you might as well not even show up on time.
Can confirm. My fiancee is a professional flutist and every time an orchestra she plays with is debuting some new piece, it's always this. Some faggot atonal garbage. I complain about it all the time myself when I go to her concerts. I honestly think that it's because there's such a low barrier to entry now in the arts that most people just don't have the skills or talent to actually compose a legitimate work. The easiest thing to do is just paste random shit everywhere and act like people are too dumb to understand your genius.
For an example that has stuck with me for a very VERY long time, Juilliard (and I assume other schools like MSM, Rice, and Thornton) do not require composers to play an instrument. They are given Sibelius and told to go crazy. A coworker of mine from years back was a composition grad there and he told me how he hated what he wrote, how his professors marked down any work that didn't sound academic. These faggots are responsible for creating and corrupting generations of composers who have been browbeaten into writing for academics, then feel hurt and confused when the average person says it just sounds like noise.
There is a legitimate hierarchy in music school. When I was young, I went to a prestigious music school in Manhattan. I really do love composition and I'm fortunate enough that aside from my playing career I've been able to write for a number of companies / television programs. But when I went to music school I was originally going to enroll as a comp major and my piano teacher was like, "No no no no no...pass your performance exam and go in as a perf major. You can take comp classes as a perf major. Anyone who goes in as a comp major is seen as someone who wanted to be a performer but wasn't good enough to make the perf program so they had to be a comp major. You go in as a comp major and you'll get zero respect from the rest of the students". He was 100% correct. I passed my performance entry exam and went in as a perf major but I could see how he was right - that almost all of the comp majors were shit musicians who couldn't or didn't even play an instrument. It kind of shocked me seeing how almost all the legitimate composers of the past were all very competent musicians before they composed. Then again that's why everyone writes atonal now. Somewhere we flipped to upside down world.
This blows my mind. When I was 18, I was working as a waiter in an Italian restaurant, going to college, spending weeknights practicing with shitty bands trying to get my music career going, and spending friday and saturday nights cruising and chatting with chicks trying to get laid. Then I wouldn't even bother sleeping because Sunday morning my restaurant always hosted some kind of shit breakfast for some organization or another so I was always expected to be there 8am on Sundays already cutting bread. This was basically my life from 17-22.
I guess young activists have always existed in some form, but the thought of being obsessed with politics enough at 18 to be firebombing tesla dealerships or spray painting cars of people who have nothing to do with said politics is so bizarre and foreign to me, and there seems to be so many of them. I would assume the internet is partly to blame for radicalizing these weak minded individuals.
Thankfully for me when I was 17-22 this was during the 80s. A little simpler of a time.
Every one of these micks throwing a tantrum seems to have an anime avatar so their opinions do not count.
Nerdy hobbyists have always been prone to having weird fetishes. I'll bet that in the 80s, model train enthusiasts were disproportionately likely to subscribe to especially weird porn mags and read particularly gross erotic novels.
Pick up any random Heavy Metal, and you'll find weird shit. I just did that right now, and it didn't take too many pages to find this:
That's some nerd's fetish from 1989. What happened is that one particular fetish, cross-dressing, became a cause celebre on the left, and you are now called stunning and brave if you tell the world your masturbation closet is full of women's undergarments.
Ahaha you get a point for posting a frame from "The Venus Interface"
God, Heavy Metal was one of my favorite mags, I had a subscription, and this magazine sustained me for most of the 80s.
Yeah, there was a lot of degenerate things in that mag, but what you're not mentioning, and if you didn't read it you're probably not aware, but the material in Heavy Metal was almost always 100% European. It was always stories from European artists and writers. So as expected, most of the degeneracy was coming from Eurocucks.
Of course, at the time it was the only real way to get any exposure to anything that was different to American offerings, which is what made it exciting. For kids who didn't grow up without an internet existing, they'll never understand how hard it was to find any influences that were radically different to what was easily available in America, whether it was music or art.
Heavy Metal also introduced me to a lot of amazing artists like Moebius.
Also for people who weren't old enough to have lived through the 80s in America, it's hard to explain how strong the fantasy zeitgeist was at the time. It seemed like every week there was some kind of fantasy sword and sorcerer movie coming out - whether it was ladyhawke, labyrinth, legend, conan, dragonslayer, sword and the sorcerer, excalibur, etc. There were TONS of fantasy stuff. So heavy metal just kind of fit in with the whole creative fantasy thing going on at the time. Honestly, thinking back to living through the 80s, if you were a creative minded individual, and driven, it was a great time to grow up in.
Did someone finally really release unredacted Epstein Files?
