This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
How this usually goes:
Introduce new controversial feature
Backlash
Postpone deployment
Soften public opinion with marketing, rename product, change minor features, etc
Deploy product regardless
Enshittification complete (Until next time!)
You forgot put the option back in a random windows update without prior knowledge
Yup, you’re right. I had a bullet for that originally, but changed it.
You are absolutely correct. All the focus groups and consultancies that were surely involved in something like this and we're supposed to believe the backlash was a surprise?
This is what is happening at Redmond right now:
This is hilarious.
I love the faith, too. Like, of Microsoft, of all people. The "your Xbox is your cable box now" Microsoft. The "Here's mandatory Kinect, the Wii killer" Microsoft. The Windows Me Microsoft. The "Windows 8 is now a touch OS" Microsoft.
I gotta say, you guys really give tech companies the benefit of the doubt. I've seen too much, perhaps.
In that vein, let me propose a more accurate picture: https://img.movieboom.biz/movie/screen/681/19.jpg
I love the faith, too. Like, of Microsoft, of all people. The “your Xbox is your cable box now” Microsoft. The “Here’s mandatory Kinect, the Wii killer” Microsoft. The Windows Me Microsoft. The “Windows 8 is now a touch OS” Microsoft.
In that vein, let me propose a more accurate picture:
Unless not attaching one was your punchline, I think you forgot to attach one. :)
No, I did. I can see it.
Welcome to the Fediverse, where me attaching a picture and you seeing the picture are not necessarily the same thing.
Hey, I am an equal opportunity criticiser. Fedia/Kbin/Lemmy suck at this.
I added a text link, at least, but that's already way too far to go for that joke.
Entire tech industry does this over and over again. The only way to stop dancing along is to switch to Linux instead of praying to Microsoft or Apple corporations.
All hail Linux, the One True King
At some point I'm gonna get bored of reminding people of this.
Hey, remember Timeline?
That's how you know this isn't how it works.
Did MS derive any particular benefit from Timeline? It was a lot more localised as far as I recall. Recall seems geared to give them a lot more data that they could monetise.
Nope, it's the exact opposite. Timeline looked a lot more like Apple's Recall equivalent they're rolling out. It monitored your activity, not just your screen, and then stored the output on the "cloud" so it could be shared across computers.
I don't want either, but if you ask me if I want my screen recorded on-device or my logged activity shared across all machines and stored on MS's servers I'll take Recall any day.
So my point is, Timeline didn't "soften" anything. It went away on the launch of Win11. And nobody was "softened" because when it resurfaced as "Recall" everybody freaked right out immediately all over again. Bad ideas are bad ideas. You can wait for people to get over minor inconveniences or tradeoffs, or just live with whatever percentage of people find something to be a dealbreaker if the value you extract from it is way higher than the business you lose. But a bad idea is a bad idea.
Also my point: people here don't know how to take a win. Recall is gone, I'd expect it to never come back, unless Apple does MS's job for them and when it resurfaces it works exactly like the Apple feature that works exactly like Recall without anybody freaking out about it.
Apple's Recall equivalent
Makes me think of Rewind.ai but you’re referring to how Siri can use context from your screen when you ask it? A feature distant from Recall/Rewind.
Might be missing something.
They just announced an AI integration across the entire OS for iOS, iPadOS and MacOS. Basically they'll log all your activity and feed it to multiple AI models to let you ask for what you want, as they describe it. It mostly looks like Timeline but with AI search and assistant features bolted on to it.
They did a good job of not making it sound as creepy as Recall... but it kinda is.
Gotcha, made a couple posts about their announcements.
Techies - AI skeptics - seem widely impressed (per ArsTechnica and Hacker News and Mastodon posters). Since your description is at odds with my understanding, I will review some more details. Thanks.
Yeah, I've been talking for a few days about how bizarre it is to see the difference in reception to what is conceptually a couple of very similar features. It's nuts how good Apple are at selling this sort of stuff almost with zero correlation to what it is that they're selling.
Which is, I suppose, why nobody will ever bring up having said that the Vision Pro was an iPhone 1.0 moment. They know who they are.
Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit and they aren't that good. Admittedly MS did an amazing job at making this Recall thing seem as unappealing as possible at every step, so... maybe the bar was just that low.
And they will be sure to make every "mistake" people warned them about in stage 2 when they reach stage 5.
Lmao they recalled Recall
In a few years time we will recall when Microsoft recalled Recall, but we will have to wait for a a few decades longer to get to Total Recall.
A small conspiracy theory of mine is them trying to disassociate the term windows recall with negativity. But it backfired hard lol.
Next update: Well, we never actually removed the feature because it's already irrevocably engrained in the file system. It can't be turned off or opted out of because it'll cause your hard drive to explode. Instead, we've buried it so deep that only hackers, malware, the government, and Facebook will be able to make use of it.
Microsoft: we can't turn the always online feature on the Xbox One off.
They never learn
Not good enough, it should have cancelled the feature altogether.
The tech industry is so invested in "AI" at this point that if it admits defeat, the bubble will pop.
Even the cancellation is not good enough. The fact that this was even entertained shows how disconnected Microsoft is from the real world. If they can get this so wrong what else are they getting wrong.
Security. 😅
That's never really been a priority for them. Can you get something wrong that you weren't trying to get right in the first place?
They did tell their employees to prioritize security above all else, right before not doing that.
So by implication they have not been telling their teams that since when, Windows95?
Yeah, that was basically my reaction, too. There was also some news that the CEO would now be taking responsibility for security, which had me similarly questioning what the hell they were doing so far.
Surely, the CEO is responsible for everything. So, did they just completely forget that security is also part of that?
Could not have said it better myself.
It’s hard to appreciate how much like catnip/crack AI is inside micro$oft.
They think they’re going to corner the market on AI before it ever actually does anything. No matter that 90% of people want absolutely nothing to do with it. As our de facto tech lords, they’ll tell us what we want. lol
But even if that is their semi-delusional master plan why scupper it by association with such a bad idea. There was not one person in all the hours of talk they must have spent on this that wondered if every device taking a screenshot every few minutes was a good idea. No matter the security it will be breached and this feature could be astoundingly destructive.
That’s the crack effect. AI is a helluva drug. For every 10 developers and team leads who pointed out what a horrifying clusterfuck it would inevitably become, there were two senior directors or one VP who thought they could advance up the ladder by supporting it.
I don’t doubt that the majority of M$ employees are properly embarrassed about the whole thing. Not that that has ever mattered with regard to corporate direction.
I fully expect it to be running in the background with the interface part the user can see turned off.
As we say in Germany: 'Aufgeschoben ist nich aufgehoben!'
And for those that don't sprechen die Deutsch, "postponed is not canceled!"
Ah, neat! The wordplay is definitely stronger in German, which I’m sure is why it became an idiom in the first place.
The fuck are Copilot+ PC's? Are they regular PC's with Copilot+ branding?
pcs with enough NPU compute power to run copilot locally in a reasonable performance level.
e. g with AMDs current laptops, the 7840 can do 10 tops, the 8840, which is core config/gpu wise, effectively the same cpu but with a larger NPU, pushing it to 16 tops for AI use.
outside of ai use, the one benefit to ai is that igpus are better and more of a focus, so expect low end laptop gaming to get a lot better.
They are PC that have NPUs (Neural Processing Units) in the CPU/SoC, and a few other requirements.
They are ARM based
Nope, Windows will still not be my next PC. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you can't get fooled again.
Its kinda funny this happened with iCloud e2ee. Backlash, then much of it now is convergently encrypted but they still have the filenames and checksums/hashes for everything (which is emphatically not e2ee or at at least zero-trust as implied by the designation) and they never really needed the contents anyway. All the deets are in the metadata which is only "standard" (un)protected.
Good, now keep it that way
They won't
