And I've seen Microsoft buying companies and killing their products despite active communities over and over again. A blatant breach of antitrust laws that Microsoft somehow managed to get away with.
55 karma · joined May 18, 2020
Microsoft, being a monopoly, hardly cares about customers, especially about closing some imaginary "gaps". What they care about is preserving their dominant or monopoly position wherever they can, since in the last 25+ years, they lost so badly so many times, they shifted from "owning" the whole industry to being a monopoly in particular segments. They are basically repeating the path of IBM from being the industry to being irrelevant and struggling desperately to stop that inevitable process.
If Microsoft had listened to its customers, it would never have neglected and killed Skype, it would have continued to support XNA, so adored by the indie game devs, it would never have closed Arkane Austin and Ghostwire studios, it would have never preinstalled spyware with every single Windows installation... But Microsoft hardly cares.
There was no real point in WSL in the first place, except for desperate attempts by Microsoft to stay relevant in the cloud age. To take two huge and very different systems with all their bugs and idiosyncrasies, merge them (creating even more bugs and idiosyncrasies along the way), and call it progress? I call it insanity. Only now with FreeBSD.
The entire Blender story is captivating - from modeler and raytracer prototypes on Amiga to the Internet bubble startup to the famous crowdfunding campaign to free Blender... It is a story that deserves a movie.
For anyone interested in open-source history who is not familiar with the Blender story, I would highly recommend Ton's interview with Blender Guru, where he reflects on his journey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg&t=1523s
According to Hitler (as well as Putin, who really justified Hitler in that same interview) Poland made him start the war by refusing to give up Danzig.
Any dictator in history had a cover story before starting a war. And by spreading such a story you become a part of the aggressor's propaganda machine.
Let's assume the usage peaks on Friday eve in LA area. The LA resource pool must have enough capacity for the peak. And on Saturday early morning that usage drops almost to zero. Now we might want to reuse freed resources to serve another currently active user pool, maybe in Tokyo. But we are dealing with highly specialized cloud resources not that easily reusable. You can't use LA servers to serve users in Tokyo - the latency will be too high.
Now we need to deploy our resources near all big urban population centres for all target markets. And these resources would stay mostly unused because of the latency and usage patterns (unless we're going to mine crypto with unused GPUs). And once we move out of densely populated areas, the problem becomes bigger.
So it is really hard to see how that can be economically feasible.
Who said hardware is the problem? Modern consoles are relatively cheap, especially considering modern $60 price tags on games. So why Stadia tried to solve that?
I'm sure Google has a lot of brilliant engineers who can build a state-of-the-art streaming platform that can leverage existing Google cloud infrastructure. But that's all it is - a brilliant piece of technology nobody really needs. And not that innovative as well - I've met a bunch of game streaming startups back at Jan 2016 CES, something like two years prior the launch of Stadia, so the idea has been around for quite a while.
Hardcore gamers are buying a lot of overpriced gaming gear all the time. I can't see how people spending thousands of $ on tuned hardware suddenly would want to change all that on a faceless streaming platform. Ownership and belonging is a big part of that subculture.
Stadia could make sense for a casual gamer who doesn't want to invest into expensive hardware. But games a casual player plays are not GPU-heavy and work fine on any relatively modern platform.
Too basic for a hardcore gamer, too powerful and demanding for a casual one. The Stadia's fate was sealed.