It could be, but I think it's also as likely it was the scrapers treating that as a trigger event of some type. eg you got a job and might have regrets.
I also saw... not sure what to call them, but honeypot friend requests? I used to get regular requests from profiles I didn't recognize with a generic pretty woman (I'd assume stock photography). Since I ignored them, they would re-request on intervals that were exactly 90 or 180 days. I occasionally glanced at them and there seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to their friends. I'd assume this was also some type of scraping, probably for friends-only profile data.
Sure, but they pretty conclusively lost, and it would likely require a major fumble by Sony to change that. So I'm not sure what they're supposed to do?
Loss is admitting defeat when you have a mature hardware team, decades of fans, and a brand that was born from, and reached its heights, from really connecting with what people want. That's fertile ground that got doused in salt. At some point you just have to admit that people don't want what they don't want. No reality distortion field will make people want crap games made without love bloated to the gills in microtransactions. Microsoft would rather shut the whole thing down than admit that though.
Was it really profitable when it was doing things fans did want? The original console was a massive loss and a mess because they didn't know what they were doing. The 360 gave them a few good years but in the end the ended the cycle in second place yet again. Afterwards it was years of being distant third. Will Microsoft ever recoup that investment? The only good years they had were because their competitor stumbled momentarily. How good was the brand when they never really made inroads into asia?
(I say all this as someone enamoured with the first console as it was a core moment of my upbringing)
Of course it was. The proof is in the pudding. You don't go from a skunkworks program to a major division without profit. Selling millions of consoles and games for hundreds of dollars with healthy margins is a printing press. The issue is while searching for making the printing press to have ever growing margins you squeeze the soul out of the product and make it so your customers leave. Optimizing for 3 months out kills you in 24 months. This is textbook enshittification. It is very obvious when it's happening and it should be very obvious when looked back on.
It was xbox yesterday, it's Windows today. Microsoft is on the way out.
I'm not so sure. Your comment is based on assumption that all they needed to do was launch the thing and then its free riding there. This is developing an entire platform we are talking about.
There are xbox engineers confirmed reading these forums so maybe some of them can shed some light but it seemed like the first console was a dud for multiple reasons and they killed it off early. Why would they do that if it was making money?
So thats a confirmed negative two billion dollars and we haven't even talked about the cost to develop 360.
Sony caught up to them after RROD and managed to turn PS3 around so 360 didn't even end the cycle as number one in sales. After that, they never had any real success again and continued to fall further behind until today.
Everyone's dancing around the problem. People refuse to pay the cost of producing high quality news. Advertising doesn't come close to cutting it.
You can see a new generation of media that charge subscribers enough to make a modest profit, and it's things like Talking Points Memo ($70 base cost per year), Defector ($70 or $80 I think), The Information ($500), 404 ($100), etc.
ArsTechnica has had subscriber tiers for quite a while. I am one. I’m not sure how many people subscribe or what their numbers look like, but I’d hope that Ars will be able to still be able to keep going in whatever the new media market looks like.
Josh at TPM has actually been quite open/vocal about how to run a successful (mildly profitable) media site in the current market. I think we are seeing transitions towards more subscriber based sites (more like the magazine model, now that I think about it). See The Verge as a more recent example.
I came from nvim after using vim for decades. For me, you could approximate Zed with endless hours of tinkering in nvim, or I could just use Zed.
Things that keep me: fast. Easy project wide search that is fast. Easy file completion that is fast. Easy ability to add/remove line numbers from a gutter. Vi keys that... kinda mostly work. Sorta. Code collapsing that I didn't have to spend hours fidgeting with that also mostly works with Ruby (except for rescue clauses / end-of-function exception handling which collapses weirdly.)
... which is irrelevant to the demonstrated and shocking incompetence of being unable to deliver either to the #1 or #2 inbox for businesses in the EU?
I totally agree, and it's basically theft that Apple simply doesn't have a standing offer to outbid anyone else for a security hole.
That said, we all get the same time on this earth. Spending your time helping various governments hurt or kill people fighting for democracy or similar is... a choice.
I don't think democracy is the panacea you seem to think it is, but that's another issue. Certainly, cracking software for governments and the police is no less legitimate an existence and occupation as, say, working for an NGO.
It's not really ecommerce. it's PE parasites selling the brand equity.
The article doesn't really mention: Authentic Brands Group, an asset-light PE org, bought it in 2021; a company called Outdoor 5 LLC now licenses Eddie Bauer's e-commerce and wholesale operations; and we're well deep into enshittification. You can find widespread complaints of bad product quality. Note that ABG wasn't the first PE company to own them, but they seem to have accelerated the enshittification / are doing a bust-out: turning them into a bottom-dollar contract manufacturer scam before people broadly realize the brand name no longer merits the quality reputation it has/had.
These brands are being bought by PE because their business models are under attack by low-cost competitors on one side, and e-commerce on the other. They no longer have a way of differentiating themselves and winning customers, so they become less valuable, and Private Equity investors buy them out at a 'salvage value'. PE often pursues risky strategies in an attempt to make the brand profitable again, and these strategies often fail. Stories like EB's are not ones of PE buying and destroying otherwise successful companies.
It's very popular on here to attack PE--which I'm not going to especially defend. But it's also the case that PE also tends to come in when a company is already troubled in some manner. One answer I guess, is just go out of business on your own which many companies do.
> One answer I guess, is just go out of business on your own which many companies do
Yes. One of the genuine services (in an economics sense) PE provides is to do the dirty reputation-ruining cash-grab tricks that original founder/owners don't have the stomach for.
> But it's also the case that PE also tends to come in when a company is already troubled in some manner.
The problem is that PE also has a nasty habit of coming into a business that is marginally profitable but not spectacularly so, saddling it with giant amount of debt to vacuum up the cash flow, and killing the business.
There is nothing wrong with a sustainably profitable business. Investors, however, want returns from the lottery ticket that they fund.
Yup. They'll borrow huge sums on the credit and good basis of the company, and then "charge it" all to themselves as "management fees", vacuum it dry, and dump the company.
If you are a large business, you likely have multiple lines of credit already establish, potentially into the hundreds of millions or more range. Those are backed by the organizations credit and assets, and aren't likely to be yanked just because the organization has a new owner.
Private Equity has been buying up vets in the UK and jacking up prices massively, causing all sorts of knock-on negative consequences. Vets in the UK were not failing before.
Unfortunately our competition authorities are toothless. Their proposed remedy is that vets will have to publish prices on their websites from now on. Woohoo.
But my question is, how long has this been going on for? I'm in my late 40s. I remember as a kid thinking Schwinn bicycles were the "cheapo" brand. My father, however... would would be in his 90s now... remembered them as a top tier brand.
I have this theory that the reason a lot of prices on goods we've loved our whole lives don't keep up with inflation is because brand loyalty has SUCH power that it's worth it for people to buy and enshittify those brands -- so that they can sell them to us as we age at the prices we are used to paying for them.
They make newer "luxury" brands to sell to younger people who are still deciding what a "reasonable" price to pay for something is.
1 - Piles of parents too stupid or lazy to, well, parent the children they made;
2 - A very reasonable societal expectation that it shouldn't be easy for young kids to access, or even be exposed, to the worst dregs of the internet;
3 - Very different use cases (gaming, kids stuff, free/affordable slack for communities) all on the same platform;
4 - A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse to lay out the actual method. It's a government-wide game of underwear gnomes.
> A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse to lay out the actual method.
This is a case where there's plenty of evidence that it's actual malice, not just incompetence. Leaving aside that this shouldn't be done at all, there is no desire to do this in a privacy-preserving way, because destroying anonymity and controlling online discourse is the point for governments, not the "unintentional" side effect to be avoided. "Think of the children" is just the excuse to get people to unknowingly buy in, just as it has been for generations.
How reasonable is this expectation? All you do by intituting these draconian 'wont someone please think of the children' ID laws is make it marginally more difficult to access mainstream services where there's not much crazy bad stuff anyway. The rest of the internet is the wild west, and good luck controlling that.
The whole thing is security theater designed to conceal the fact that child security is not the objective, it's the justification.
Yeah, this is just long-form linkedin slop. He's thought-leadering to get you to get his (no-doubt slop-written) guides and do leadgen for his forthcoming saas.
I also saw... not sure what to call them, but honeypot friend requests? I used to get regular requests from profiles I didn't recognize with a generic pretty woman (I'd assume stock photography). Since I ignored them, they would re-request on intervals that were exactly 90 or 180 days. I occasionally glanced at them and there seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to their friends. I'd assume this was also some type of scraping, probably for friends-only profile data.
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