And a wizard, genie, cat, robot and more

Well, to be fair, it’s not utilizing Microsoft as a mascot, but the era of buying and owning and keeping, as opposed to the current era of renting forever.

Back then, you bought a computer and it came with the programs you needed and they were yours until you got rid of the computer. Then they were the property of whomever got the computer next.

That’s what people are calling for. Which is depressing in and of itself because it’s so little to ask for. They’re the hand that’s starving and robbing us. We shouldn’t be asking for them to stop robbing us, we should be taking the hand and using it to distribute to all who need.

new meta: putting "random trivia:" before your contrarian comments

I don't interpret it as "once upon a time, Microsoft was a good company", I interpret it as "this meme-y and goofy character gave the maximum amount of assistance and intrusion I would like in the products I use". I think anyone would agree that Louis is pro-consumers and tend not to think highly of any megacorp.

The thing is, we have to be reasonable with our expectations. You or I may remember that Microsoft has always been shady and anti consumer, most people don't. They remember a time when you bought things and owned them, and it didn't feel like we were being nickel and dimed quite so hard. We are not going to start an anti Microsoft (or whatever corporation) movement and actually be able to rile the masses to support that cause, but we might at least be able to get them to demand things go back to the quality they were at 30 years ago

I don't think any company that uses AI or scrapes data gives two shits what your avatar is.

Didn't Rossmann say the whole point of changing your profile to clippy was to show everyone participating how many people would be willing to actually fight for consumer rights?

Move out to a rural area were our speeds are mind-numbingly slow and you can still experience the phenomenon you describe. Only problem is now a days there isn't much you can do about it if forced to use Windows.

Louis Rossmann is not the smartest cookie in the jar, but he is a cookie, at least.

I also thought Louis's choice of Clippy was a bit odd, but the fact that there is a symbol people can rally around at all is more important than the symbol itself in many ways.

Here's the thing... Once an organization grows to a certain point, it takes on a mind of it's own.

Decision making becomes fragmented. Details are lost between the decision and the decision maker

It's impossible to manage 100, let alone 1000 people directly, so metrics creep in as a way to reward good performance (and maybe punish low performance).

And because we're a hierarchial society, we further group into divisions and teams. The people who get the best metrics out of their teams are more likely to move up, the bad managers are more likely to be towards the bottom. And honestly, good lower management is mostly taking care of your people

So you're more likely to get managers who don't have the integrity to take a firm stand, so maybe when a worker realizes "oh shit, were leaking into the groundwater" it gets watered down to "we found a leak, but it won't impact production" before it gets up to someone who could authorize a shutdown and fix

It's possible for a company to do horrible things without any bad actors, and we do have plenty of bad actors around.

It's possible to fight against this sort of thing through culture or policy, but the natural inclination is always going to maximize the metrics at any cost

Companies, especially larger ones, abstract away human responsibility and ethics from the decision-making process, making it easier for people to do bad things.

“We do this for the company!”

Plus, an individual’s ability to live being tied to the continued success of said company doesn’t help things either.

“If I speak out, I’m not a ‘team player’. And those people get fired.”

Microsoft nowadays is one of the evil companies. Microsoft back in the day was the evil company.