“I want to use this tactically vs. GOOG/AAPL” (2022)
twitter.com
twitter.com
It’s probably still too little too late, but apples latest metal conversion tool and iPhone event have me hopeful about gaming on apple devices.
RealityKit looks promising at first glance, but it’s definitely AR first, and has some odd limitations like no tvOS.
Like your reply hints, their strategy seems to have shifted to making it easier to port games from other platforms rather than build them on Apple’s.
As fiber is being installed into more residences, streaming becomes an even better prospect. I would much rather be vendor locked into steam than into the xbox, play station, or ios stores. Steam still has execs that think about more than next quarters profits, they aren't trying to bleed their cash cow dry like most other companies seem to be doing. From a monetary point of view $10 a month with no contract is more appealing than $500 or even $3000 every several years. It definitely seems like there are many economies of scale wins to be had via centralization.
Apple also failed to create a marketplace culture. IOS gaming is synonymous with "pay to win". Good games just aren't put on those devices with the exception, maybe, of riot's games and pc ports. I would be worried about Apple's "lets make money off kids gambling" culture, that is absolutely pervasive in mobile gaming, becoming more pervasive due to cross pollination. Apple is generally a benevolent dictator, but when it comes to mobile games they are a slum lord.
Streaming is awful.
It perpetuates the idea that you pay for a thing but don't own it. It creates more incentives for ongoing monetization (to support the streaming infra) like in-game ads and loot boxes with paid keys. It introduces horrendous input lag that fluctuates based on network conditions and it means there's yet another probably buggy layer of abstraction between the game and the player. (edit: and you can't play on LAN!)
Unless you're playing Yahtzee, streaming delivers a suboptimal gaming experience.
Renting is an old concept and it's not going away any time soon. Maybe the technology is not there yet but I don't see what's inherently wrong with the concept itself. Owning is wasteful unless you have close to 100% utilisation. Why pay for the full price of an X-Box that sits idle most of the time? If every idle X-Box could be utilized by anyone in need, we would either see a significant rise in the number of people able to enjoy gaming, or a decrease in the number of consoles required to be produced.
If you're going to veer into Economics 101 then you'd better reconcile with the fact that this "renting" only causes more surplus to be captured by the publisher, and not by the consumer.
A. You pay for an x-box and you own it. You can mod it, develop games on it, play games on it, sell it, whatever. Economists tell you this is "inefficient" because the xbox is not 100% utilized, and so in theory you have incurred an opportunity cost.
B. You pay $amount for the privilege of "renting" a game that is streamed to your television over the internet. You own nothing. Your access to the game and/or the game console and/or the service as a whole can be terminated at any time, for any reason, at the whims of a gigantic faceless transnational corporation. You have no means to contact an actual human at customer support because there aren't any humans working in customer support. The corporation gives less thought to you than you do to a mosquito that splats on your bumper as you drive home in your Elonmobile (which, incidentally, suffers many of the same problems)
I'll take option A, thanks.
This assertion is demonstrably false. If this were the case, it would beg the question as to why many consumers and businesses willingly opt for rental models. Cloud hosting and music streaming are prime examples of the popularity of such models.
You have a personal preference for ownership, but if we look at consumer trends in the past decade, I doubt your preference will be shared by a majority of consumers. My bet is the majority of consumers are likely to prefer the flexible, less costly options, rather than ownership (assuming the technology is competitive).
Anyways, not interested in discussing further with someone who quotes selectively to argue with a strawman. See ya.
What I am saying is that, looking at past trends and assuming the technology becomes competitive, I believe a majority of consumers will opt for option B (streaming) rather than stick with option A (owning).
Lack of understanding on consumer side and malicious intent on business side?
Consumers: because "as-a-Service" can have cheaper sticker price (often free), people have hard time seeing long-term costs, and social immune system hasn't caught up with this particular type of abusive business practices.
Businesses: because they're much more focused and high-cadence economic units than are individuals living a life, and most importantly, they're abstract. Their don't have lives that are valued. They're an entirely different kind of economic agents, and it makes much more sense for them to be "cash flow minded" instead of ownership-minded.
Then there's also the angle that, in B2B, typically both sides of the relationship are much closer in terms of relative power than in B2C, which is why there's less blatant abuse happening there.
That seems a bit elitist to me. "Ah, if only the consumers knew what you know?" Maybe you're right but I find it more likely that they simply like the deal being offered.
Why should the savvy renters care? They aren't generating the surplus captured by the publisher.
then who is?
> You own nothing. Your access to the game and/or the game console and/or the service as a whole can be terminated at any time, for any reason, at the whims of a gigantic faceless transnational corporation.
Your access to an Xbox is, and has been, gated behind a Microsoft account for a decade (same with PlayStation). That "facless transnational corporation" can ban you from using your _purchases_ Xbox and physical games just as easily as they can revoke your streaming access.
> You have no means to contact an actual human at customer support because there aren't any humans working in customer support.
You're speaking about Google here, but Microsoft, apple, Sony (can't speak for Nintendo) and valve all have open,semi-reasonable support channels.
> The corporation gives less thought to you than you do to a mosquito that splats on your bumper as you drive home in your Elonmobile (which, incidentally, suffers many of the same problems), sell it, whatever
I hope you had fun writing this drivel. It reeks of immaturity, pomposity and navel gazing without any real substance, and your post would be better without it.
Klaus Schwab "You will own nothing and be happy" dystopia. No thanks.
often the decision is to move somewhere warm and sunny or to travel but it can be to have all the streaming services and a nice little cottage in the country.
evidently someone downvoted me for the suggestion that such societies exist - gee, I wonder what their problem is.
We are already seeing this problem with specific games that force online verification. Let’s not break the gaming platform itself as well.
With dealers included, exhaustion occured between producer and dealer. With dealers removed and products rented exhaustion no longer occurs at all.
That's a significant change, much more so than removing dealers or a switch to renting alone.
Producers retain full control, and individual consumers lack the negotiation power dealers had, which is an issue if there is no eqivalent alternative product from a different producer.
Because it's available at a moment's notice. You don't have to actively schedule around its availability, or otherwise worry about it. It gives you consistent play experience, freedom to use it in nonstandard ways, and if anything goes wrong, it's likely you can do something about it now.
In general, ownership removes worry and gives you more options. Those have utility that more than offsets reduced utilization.
As for example of what I mean by worry, let's take video streaming. Between Netflix's failure rate and unexpected catalog removal, my ISP's failure rate, OS (both Linux and Windows) and browser (both Firefox and Chrome) being what they are, and anything else that happens between my machine and the CDN hosting the video I want to watch, there's a non-trivial chance it may be not available at the time I want to watch it, or it will be non-watchable (e.g. because it's pausing every few seconds to buffer, because of some failure somewhere). I experience some sort of a failure like this roughly once every week or so. That doesn't seem like much, but it generates some anxiety - a worry that at the exact moment I wanted to stream, it won't work, e.g. ruining an at-home movie date with my wife, or my personal "sit down with my favorite supper and put on a show" unwinding ritual.
Contrast that with the same video, acquired on the high seas in form of a local file. This. Just. Works. If the same or similar video file worked last month, it will work today, 100% of the time. Even if the Internet goes down, even if Netflix goes belly up, even if my ISP gets hit by a fire, even if a war starts somewhere and there's a billion people rapidly F5-ing news videos - my video file Will. Just. Work. I can set dinner and sit down and double-click and, not for a second, worry about the hidden weather of markets and networks ruining my evening.
That's just one small part of what makes ownership good despite seeming economical drawbacks (well, drawbacks to whom? it really seems to depend on one's accounting methods...).
But Stadia is definitely not a counter-argument to your first point. ;)
> It perpetuates the idea that you pay for a thing but don't own it.
That is probably true in the case of the streaming that you're discussing, but I want to bring up something that I think is pretty cool, Steam Remote Play: https://store.steampowered.com/streaming/
I actually had a case where I wanted to play a game on my netbook, but it just wouldn't run on the device (Transport Fever 2, which was demanding both with its OpenGL and Vulkan renderers). So instead, I setup the game on my PC and just streamed it to my netbook, over wireless in the house.
I'm mentioning this because it was actually playable and honestly it was cool to see the tech getting better for this (not a bunch of input bugs, or performance as bad as what VNC/RDP would historically give you) and being able to do something like that without a hassle.
Of course, that's a bit different from not owning the game and just renting someone else's hardware/service to play it on.
Rather than buying a new computer to play cyberpunk, I streamed it and it and was quite happy. It cost me $10 for one month and my relationship with the company ended afterwards. I've used streaming a bit more and I've tried several different services and generally been happy with all of them. nVidia now is great, I just finished BG3 on it and it ran well.
> It perpetuates the idea that you pay for a thing but don't own it.
I think that's myopic. A new computer every 8 years for $2000 or $10 a month for 8 years? From a purely monetary and economic point of view, there are clear advantages to subscriptions. From economies of scale perspectives there are clearly advantages to subscriptions/centralization. There are disadvantages, too. So it's most correct to talk about trade-offs.
Where I think you are right is that it gives vendors power to alter the rules and leave you praying they alter them no further. We are seeing the down side of now, with the enshittification/shrinkflation/brand looting of nearly everything in the American economy. So I agree that in a might makes right world, a world in which there are no consequences for our aristocracy, centralization/streaming/etc puts you in a weaker negotiating position and could very likely be good in the short term, but bad in the long term.
> It creates more incentives for ongoing monetization (to support the streaming infra)
I think that depends on if these streaming companies are subsidizing the streaming or not in the same way Uber subsidized rides: at a loss. Allocation for peak capacity is the direct cost to the company, and any unused capacity could potentially be re-tasked for other purposes. Any user that doesn't contribute to peak capacity+growth projection is free from the perspective of hardware acquisition. Hardware is an economies of scale world, there may even be positive tax implications.
I'm not sold that there is any special incentive to monetize streaming unless the companies are streaming at a loss. Letting kids gamble is the culture of mobile gaming, and I think it's culture that perpetuates it more than structure. I think the PC market salivates at the idea of loot boxes (just look at EA), but the culture is quite against them. PC gamers have provided consequences to predatory publishers while Apple and mobile gamers have not.
> It introduces horrendous input lag and it means there's yet another probably buggy layer of abstraction between the game and the player.
I haven't personally experienced this. I have had almost entirely good streaming experiences on broadband. I think from a purely theoretical point of view, input+vision doubles the potential latency and therefore it should be worse.
I think from a practical point of view it's probably easier for one company to "solve" input/graphics lag for all games while games run in ideal conditions, than it is for every game's netcode to be fantastic.
While we're comparing and contrasting:
Have you read the EULA's of the anti-cheat software on some of these games? Literal root kits, some from Chinese companies, some that allow direct raw memory dumping from the computer if not direct RCE/remote access for investigation.
From an environmental point of view computing from a datacenter as well as time sharing devices is probably a win.
So while you come in strong against it. I think you should be somewhat respectful of other people's positive experiences.
"Streaming is awful" is poor criticism. "Streaming quality is greatly dependent on where you live and your internet quality" is probably an accurate criticism. Streaming from SJC in San Francisco is probably going to be a pretty good experience.
I’ve paid for and used multiple remote GPU gaming services and all of them suffered from horrible jitter in input lag. If even once every 20 minutes you suffer in a (even single player) game randomly due to network latency, you’re going to hate the service. This was on residential fiber as well. I think this is why Google exited the market. It’s just a bad gaming experience.
When you think about the type of player that would need to champion this service for it to reach critical mass among hardcore gamers, think of a speedrunner or top-level competitive MoBA or FPS player. In the offline case, they are honing thier skills at a time resolution of 16ms or less (in the case of an FPS player 8ms or less). This type of gameplay just isn’t possible over the Internet in general. Live more than 400 miles from a datacenter? Whoops, you can’t get good at games.
Game streaming, not to mention the “own nothing” aspect of it, is just horrible from the perspective of anyone who cares about the game they play and getting good at the game they play.
Likely nothing. Forget about Raytracing, the tech. But RayTracing as in better Graphics. iPhone has been able to output very decent graphics for games for quite some time. Arguably since Unreal Engine Game running on iPhone, and if I remember correctly that was Infinity Blade. And yet the market for hard core games on Smartphone is just not there. To the point where there are very little overlap between Smartphone Gaming and PC / Console.
And if anything the small market of Console Games wanted on Smartphone may be much better served by Cloud Streaming.
Edit: Also worth mentioning the constant iOS changes means developers have very little incentive to keep updating their game over a long period of time.
Or who wants their saves and profiles different on their phone.
if connectivity is a concern, it is also a justification.
save profiles can go back up to the cloud, where the download came from. now those that want to use a different device can do so.
who thinks this much about what have become minor details?
IPhones start with 128GB of space and charges a hefty premium for storage.
I would deffo not want a game to consume 40G of space
if you buy the smallest configuration storage, you will have to care more. that’s the choice.
how many people actually use their space? really use it. not just use a quarter of it and keep the rest in reserve.
my phone has 256gb right now. 150gb are free. (cloud storage doing its part.) that’s two large games and 40gb+ to spare. so as much as a larger capacity would allow for more, this is still… fine.
A lot of the technology has a lot of potential but I don't know how you get past that hurdle to broaden iPhone gaming.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/connect-a-game-contro...
It’s hard to understand specifically what he means here, which just may be due to a lack of context, even though I generally get his point.
I think mostly I’m just being a harsh grader here because I expected someone like him to communicate very clearly and concisely.
"I have something to ask of you" is not a novel term for request. And ask is softer than request, giving the other party more opening to decline. I don't hate it.
> I find that limiting the number of things that drive you up a wall is good.
Me too, but if this is really just a way of saying "this shouldn't upset you", you should just say that. As stated, it comes across as condescending.
I still hate “learning” as a noun though.
I've been reading @TechEmails for years and I've never seen any email as incomprehensible as this one.
I work with execs at our company a lot and am often in their email chains - agree on the lingo and shorthand for stuff, but it’s usually clear. You’d be surprised at how candid people are and how much cussing there can be lol. But I was specifically referring to the clarity of the message.
Either way it’s just an opinion and as I said, I think I was just idealizing too much and expected something else.
It’s possibly to figure out what he meant, but it requires significantly more time than if the sentences were constructed “correctly”.
Missing pronouns are easy to fill in, but consider this sentence:
> But [I] want to use every opportunity to make Cloud Streaming more mainstream the better it is in the long run […]
As soon as I reach “the better it is” I feel a mental jolt because I expect a construction along the lines of “the more <X> the better it is” (apparently this is called a “correlative comparison”); even though I just read the word “more”, it didn’t fit into the expected construction, so I go back over the sentence to see if I misread it.
"The bear is sticky with honey." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i92Ws7qPTRg
In all fairness, many people absolutely suck at writing emails.
(However, that case concerns digital advertising, and this document seems to have been produced by discovery in a different case. So I'm not sure if it's relevant beyond the general theme of "Google considers other companies competitors.")
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
Analogously, Microsoft doesn't want to be subject to the duopoly of Google and Apple with mobile (gaming), so they want their cloud steaming platform available on competitors.
Not sure if typo or a newly coined cloud computing term :-)
to create a software platform which is platform agnostic.
to not depend on other businesses for your company's success
Then, as a bit of a tangent:
Windows only has a "monopoly" on PC gaming because Apple refuses to licence their operating system for non-Apple hardware - and because Linux just isn't mainstream enough.
If you could buy OSX just like you can buy Windows and install it on your home built PC, I'm confident the landscape would at least be somewhat different.
(It is certainly possible to install osx yourself on your own PC hardware, if you put your pirate hat on and are happy with massively outdated GPU drivers etc - or at least it was half a decade ago when I checked last).
Of course Apple would also have to develop some care for gamers.
“Windows has a lock on PC gaming because macOS isn’t available for PCs. Of course, macOS would have to radically chamge to be even remotely usable as a gaming competitor to Windows.”
If macOS is that bad for gaming, no gamer is going to use it even if it was available for PCs.
If a significant user base of PC users had OSX, then with a bit of TLC/ development from Apple I'm sure it'd be a very viable platform for gaming as well.
I.e. Microsoft are going a crap load of work behind the scenes to provide the best gaming experience, so Apple would have to step up their (sorry) game to compete.
Worse than ignorning really. Games for windows from years ago largely still work. Games for Mac Os X don't because Apple regularly breaks compatability. This means the long tail of late sales won't happen without more developer effort, which isn't usually available.
See nvidia basically banned from the macos ecosystem, or the whole fight with Epic as they couldn't come to any resemblance of a compromise.
Also as others have already pointed out, Apple has historically hated games. The only reason they tolerate it now is because of the massive revenue it brings with iOS
Devs will be able to optimize for apple machines in much the same way that they currently optimize for consoles, and you'll be able to know exactly how a game will perform on your system before buying it.
I wouldn’t mind a 30% markup for an apple gaming pc, but based on the markups the currently charge for compute… I’d expect the top of the line $2k PC I built this year to cost $4k-$6k if it came from apple. I’m extremely skeptical of the vision for the same reason. You need raw power for driving high end displays.
They will probably compete in the console market though. Kinda like how their headphones compete in the “rich but not knowledgeable about audio” demographic. Actually, I’m kinda selling my self on this. I should buy more apple stock.
I mean, defend it or don't but it doesn't make it a not-monopoly that its competitors are not able to compete effectively for various reasons.
TL;DR Gaming is partially fed by innovation in hardware and AAPL hates that.
You don't think Apple Silicon constitutes "innovation in hardware"?
I thought it was clear that I meant the innovation that they don't control.
I have no idea what you are saying. I don't think we are having an exchange about the same things, or at least not the same context.
ie The reason AAPL's board doesn't want to support 3rd party hardware, which is usually based around the newest gaming technology from potential competitors, is some opposite reason?
> it doesn't make it (MSFT) a not-monopoly that its competitors are not able to compete effectively for various reasons.
My assertion is that AAPL could, but won't. The monopoly of MSFT in the gaming sphere is because of a sort of happy coincidence between a massive company willing to support third party hardware (MSFT) and another massive company that depends on not supporting it, to maintain a stranglehold on their market (AAPL) and all the minor players who can't afford to support hardware at scale for a prolonged period of time, to compete with MSFT...even thought a few have for a short time and fell behind or were acquired.
Apple is going to be huge in gaming in the mid-term future. If you have a limited, controlled hardware range, developers can tune Apple-targeted games in the same way that they tune console games. They can guarantee that everything works exactly as intended, which has been the achilles' heel of PC gaming since time immemorial.
I grew up a hardcore gamer and vehement apple-hater, but over the past decade, Apple has become the most competent consumer hardware company on earth and I'm super excited for the future here.
So if apple does get into gaming it’s going to be incredibly gimped and ten years behind the tech curve. (Or at the level of consoles) Which might be competitive against that market.
But I am extremely skeptical that apple will compete with top of the line pc gaming in a meaningful way. Pushing +100 fps at 4k is not easy or cheap, and if apple wants to win enthusiasts (or even have decent looking VR for the vision) they’ll need to offer significant compute at a competitive price. So basically, they’ll need to completely change their economics model… and I don’t think they’ll do that.
Microsoft poured money into game tools since the 90s, published a large library of in-house games themselves, litigated and demolished it's competition (both Apple and Linux), and courted every single hardware manufacturer in existence. XBox as a console came into being from this massive investment.
> because Apple refuses to licence their operating system for non-Apple hardware
Reminder that Microsoft poached Bungie, who developed Marathon and others exclusively for Macintosh, to develop Halo for PC and XBox exclusive releases.
Imo it’s inline with Satya’s Microsoft Everywhere strategy. Office and Xbox are everywhere now with the cloud
Nadella is acknowledging that being an app means the platform hosting the app has a lot of leverage. Apple could potentially prevent Microsoft from releasing an update on any of the apps they publish on the App Store. Apple and Google essentially play a gatekeeping role between many Microsoft Users and Microsoft itself. This is big for Microsoft because they have a huge install base on Android/iPhone/iPad, and have some exposure to macOS. Teams without iPhone won't work. This is a topic Microsoft is specifically sensitive too because of it's history.
Nadella is saying it's worth investing in less popular devices in hopes that they become a bigger competition again iPhone and Android. In fact, Nadella is hoping Meta takes a small but meaningful portion of the market.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/22/23828302/microsoft-activi...
For Game Pass specifically, you don't own the games... it's a subscription service, like EA Play or Ubi Plus, that lets you play from a library of games as long as you're subscribed. Of those, several (but not all) are also playable on GeForce Now. You still have to have a PC Game Pass (or Ultimate) subscription.
Without GeForce Now, if you have PC Game Pass (the cheaper plan), you have to install and play those games on your own computer. If you have Game Pass Ultimate, you can also stream some of those games from Microsoft's cloud of Xboxes. They are inferior to Nvidia's offering, but the selection might be better as long as you don't mind lower resolution and having to use a controller for most games. You also get access to the EA Play subscription library that way.
Confusing, right? It's a pity. When GeForce Now first launched, you could play any game on it -- all of Steam was available -- but publishers started complaining I guess (who knows why? maybe they wanted to one day launch their own services, heh, good luck with that).
Notably, there were a few games that were Stadia streaming exclusives (like Red Dead Redemption and Elder Scrolls Online). Once Stadia died, there was no way to stream those anymore (unless you rent a whole virtual PC like Shadow.tech). Can't play those now, sadly.
There are a lot of streaming services now: First-party ones like Playstation Plus, Amazon Luna, Xbox Cloud, Ubi Cloud (via Luna).
There are third-party stream-a-game-directly ones that just launch you into Steam and/or the game directly, no OS maintenance required: GeForce Now and Boosteroid.
There are also "rent a PC" style streaming services like Shadow, AirGPU, probably others (including renting them directly from cloud providers, usually at an incredibly high price).
Of all those, GeForce Now offers by far the best performance and quality, because Nvidia both controls the supply of RTX cards and also has written some incredible software to support the streaming, enabling play at 4k/ultrawide/120 Hz/low-latency via Reflex, etc. It is also the best value in terms of monthly costs. Its primary downside is the limited library available; only some games are available on there (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/).
They could simply want Nvidia to purchase rights to use their game. If you made a movie you wouldn't want random streaming services to be able to stream your movie without paying you for the rights to do so.
So, I don’t understand publishers’ complaints, people could only play games they paid for, and Nvidia provided the streaming service. It’s probably technically correct on the publisher side, but I feel Nvidia did nothing wrong there.
But they do use the games commercially.
>So, I don’t understand publishers’ complaints
Nvidia gains value by having publisher's games in their catalog. Publishers want Nvidia to pay for that value.
And those games are still playable on Shadow, Airgpu, etc., just as bigger headaches.
There are many titles I've purchased because they were available on GFN. (And many I didn't because I don't have a machine to play them on otherwise).
I am cynical enough about the games industry to say this is possible, even probable.
What’s next? Should I pay 2x a game for a SLI config with two cards on my PC?
You could own it. Even if someone owns a movie, you can't stream that movie to them.
If you play on PC, PC Game Pass gets you access to hundreds of games but no streaming.
If you play on Xbox, Game Pass Core gets you multiplayer and a few free games but no streaming.
If you want streaming or play on both PC and Xbox, the Ultimate membership gets you everything.
If you want just the PC games and streaming, you can sign up for PC Game Pass and separately for Nvidia Geforce Now, which streams a subset of Game Pass games but at much higher quality and performance.
There is no such product. The comment you’re replying to said it correctly.
it wouldn't be a microsoft product without 8 different editions
Thank you to the people who corrected me.
I wouldn't call it well polished though. It works but it's kinda janky, with heavy compression artifacts and occasional input sensitivity issues.
https://www.xbox.com/en-us/xbox-game-pass/ultimate?xr=shelln...
If you want better graphics fidelity and performance, you can also now play certain Game Pass games on Nvidia's Geforce Now. Whereas xCloud games stream from underpowered consoles, GFN runs on RTX 4080s and offers MUCH better graphics and performance. It also lets you use a mouse/keyboard for all the supported games, while xCloud streaming games normally limit you to the Xbox version and don't let you use a mouse or keyboard unless the game itself supports it on the Xbox (like Gears).
To do this, you would need both a GFN subscription and a PC Game Pass subscription (though not ultimate).
You can also just use GFN with Steam, which offers a superior experience overall.
There are some weird rough edges, though. I was very excited to play Fallout 76 with my brother and very disappointed to discover that the cloud gaming system has some limitation around headsets and wireless controllers.
But now I'm a digital nomad with just two laptops, the best GPU I have is a Radeon 680M, and I really wanted to play Baldur's Gate 3. So I signed up for a streaming service and it works great. 9 euro/month and I can play more than I need to over some sort of VDI setup I guess.
I think it can be a real hit for a lot of games, to a lot of people, but some games obviously are best played locally.
Corporate speak isn’t the speech of a human. It’s constructed PR.
CEOs can counter-signal power by not using it.
CEOs dont feel compelled to do that on "private" emails but they sure as hell do it in public statements. They dial it up to 11 during layoffs or being interviewed about unethical behavior.
As a first approximation, just think of the size of the destination audience:
- if it's a few people, the language will sound direct and casual
- if it's many thousands, millions (likely to include government, investors, customers) then it will sound formal, corporate, "PR"
Because we're more often likely to be in the 2nd category, we're used to hearing senior leaders sound like their words have been carefully edited.
But we shouldn't be surprised that when we get a glimpse of their comms in smaller settings, it sounds "just like us".
```
FROM: $ProfBigShot
TO: $PoorPhDStudent
Come visit me tomorrow at 2pm
Sent from my iPhone
```
Show up, prof is busy, says they meant the next day/hour/etc
Speaking directly and clearly is a core skill of successful executives. Corporate PR speak only interferes with conveying direct and clear internal messages. You aren’t worried about accidentally offending the people you work with, you’re more worried about not getting your point across as directly as possible.
I'd argue corporate PR speak directly and purposefully interferes with conveying any kind of message clearly. It often skirts the line between misleading and lying. And obviously you don't want to poison your own well with lies.
I appreciate the dogfooding.
Outlook Express was almost peak outlook usability, and is on the decline ever since. More useless features, and ever worse GUI.
On top of that it just wastes so much space. It's offensive how they manage to both waste space and still have things right up against each other blurring the lines of emails.
Besides Edge and ads everywhere in windows, I think the complete mishmash of design styles and general "unpolished" feel of their apps are really making me wonder why even use Windows. I don't want to fight my software just to use it.
I bet he hates it but can’t stop using it. It’s strange how terrible the tool is given the CEO is using it.
Although perhaps he did like many others and updated the iOS mail signature to say “Sent from Mail for Windows.”
It should be the expectation, not celebration.
"Sent from iPhone", and later "Sent from Mobile" were a thing because virtual keyboards were new, and at first, everyone was slow and imprecise on them.
So the signature was basically a way to say "Hey, sorry if this is abrupt or have typos, but I wrote it from my phone".
It makes zero reasons to include an automatic "Sent from <Desktop App>" signature in every email, except for sad, pathetic, marketing.
Unfortunately they are replacing it in 2024 with Outlook Lite, which takes solid 2-4 seconds to come up.
But those are nothing compared to people using LLMs to generate ostensibly handwritten emails.
kthxbye
Thx.
They've learnt it from Batman.
I would feel so completely naked having my work emails on display for all to read.
It doesn't matter if they're end-to-end encrypted with something like Signal. Microsoft would still be required to hand over what the court requested.
Like if all messages were auto-deleted after 30 days or something.
SOX compliance requires 7 years.
https://www.pymnts.com/news/regulation/2022/goldman-sachs-an...
That said, there are some categories of information that Microsoft would have to retain. In particular, once you reasonably anticipate imminent litigation you have a duty to retain related information.
For the CEOs, they were already under intense scrutiny for every single trade, so it makes more different.
IMO rules like this are why American corporations are investable. Rule of law is and must be respected.
This includes information that is submitted voluntarily or extracted via a discovery request. (Not everything you find is public only what you submit as evidence)
Note you can avoid things becoming public but you need a decent reason to "I don't want to share that" isn't enough. It looks like this document was partially redacted for instance.
To your original question courts make the proceedings "public" although there is a process for getting a copy. Not so much a "can you get this" more of a "we don't upload to a server and let web crawlers index everything".
Does the law allow you delete communications after some amount of time has elapsed?
P.S. The US Chamber of Commerce is NOT part of the US Government and you should not trust what they say.