My main gripe with this travesty of a “Start menu” is that it isn’t the Tom Hanks movie of a similar name.

The other is that even if it were, it won’t just play, but rather send you to the shiniest new subscription service to subscribe.

It’s a both-ways situation.

They allow only the Fisher-Price version of phones so less-than-power-users don’t do something stupid.

They also allow only Fisher-Price so power users can’t beat Celebrite as easily.

It isn’t misleading (that’d be a technically true headline, which this isn’t). This is a downright lie, or as some might say, “fake news”.

Asskissing.

Decisionmakers at MS are divorced from reality. The cognitive dissonance is incredible. They make shit up as they go along and the rest eat it all up and re-spew some new godawful incarnation of the terrible ideas.

None of the decisions are based in reality or quality market research (what users want). Their market research boils down to AI is god and we need to make it even more ungodly.

Which isn’t that surprising. When you have a single company dominating a market niche (say, desktop OS-es on PCs), the focus isn’t increasing, retaining or in any way satisfying customers. It’s making shit up as you go along, trying to get your department’s lines a bit higher than the other one so you as a high-to-mid level manager get that sweet, sweet bonus.

It’s not limited to MS and OS-es. The same thing applies to Google and the search and browser markets, as well as Nintendo and their ecosystem, or HP and printers.

You don’t even need a monopoly for this shit to happen. You just need to be “too big to fail”. Luckily, such unsustainable behavior won’t be “too big to fail” forever, but it’s impressive just for how long a company with such rotten echochamber decisionmaking behaviour can keep chugging along just fine, all the while hurting the customers and the economy in general through knock-on - or shall I say trickle down - effects.

Unlawful detention, obstruction of justice, overstepping bounds,…

Wait, qualified immunity.

What a joke.

Nor does it “read” its input. It doesn’t even process it.

It’s built/tuned using it. Or as AI techros would say, trained.