> bullshit performance management

Having a manager manage performance is the worst organizational option, except for all the others.

Good managers understand they (like senior ICs) are the grease between the working gears of a large company.

Bad managers think it means status.

You get Al Capone on the charge you can make stick.

Right but Al Capone did jail time, here Zuck gets to break and enter into people's homes, take their stuff, then haggle for it after-the-fact, all the while keeping the civilization-domination apparatus that he built using the stuff he stole? That is super not fair. Ordinary people could certainly not get away with that.

The US justice system doesn't start from fair. It starts from what you can prove to the letter of the law.

And when you're targeting someone / something with unlimited lawyers, you'd better have ironclad evidence that exactly that happened in exactly the way the claim is written.

Okay, sure, but I'm talking about being satisfied. I understand reality and that I may not get the satisfaction I would like. And specifically the example of Al Capone who was, yeah, got for tax evasion, but at least was treated ultimately like the criminal he was.

It's hard to get lower friction (register a new account) and lower fee (0%) than Craigslist.

Windows power / restart has gotten absolutely fucked in the last 10 years.

Hibernate? Gone by default.

Sleep? Ineffective 1/2 the time because a Microsoft utility force-wakes it.

It's sad that 15 year old Windows system was more usable than one today.

Close Windows laptop and leave it on desk, open in morning... 50/50 chance:

1. Laptop has most of its battery life still because it slept successfully and predictably

2. Laptop drained battery to 5% and only then slept

There are some well-known scripts. All variants of the same pattern.

E.g. https://gist.github.com/LuisAGC/843a2a45617d7ad05687c2f8a15c... or https://github.com/TheBear1616/CapsLock-PreventSleep-Script/...

Scroll lock and F13 are commonly used

I much prefer an ahk script to move the mouse a few pixels periodically...

Management and PM kung fu:

   - Here's the KPI
   - Team can't figure out another way to boost KPI
   - Team implements dark pattern

System working as pathologically-intended.

The root problem is there are seemingly no user experience quality KPIs on the development side to counterbalance revenue / usage / adoption ones.

Historically, Microsoft never had to consider that, because Windows was always in developer mode.

The Windows pedigree assumed that everything would at most have an ini or registry setting or group policy to override 99.9% of Windows' behavior or at least an undocumented but accessible internal API to set it.

The Windows 11 transition was the first time Microsoft shipped a sufficiently bullshit OS that it actually needed a developer mode.

But most scathingly... and the original sin... was that some shit-for-brains Microsoft leader made the decision to disable configurability for purpose of boosting platform revenue.

Fuck that person, because they knew exactly what and why they were doing it, and still made that decision.

Tolerate or hate them for all their sharp business elbows, but Microsoft of yore (Gates and Ballmer eras) intentionally made the decision that if they built and owned a platform that most people used (because it worked for them) then there would be more than enough money for everyone. And that it was healthy to leave money on the table for their developers, because developers and the apps they built drove people to the platform (see "Developers, developers, developers!").

> Nobody really wants to use their store. Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.

*XBox and Microsoft gaming's $23.5b revenue (~10% of MS's total) enter the chat*

You were saying something about not letting facts get in the way of a preferred narrative, I believe?

xbox is a catch-it-umbrella that includes all the studios bought, and game pass. The xbox hardware sales are beyond appalling[0], $220m a quarter, and it'd be below $1b yearly. That's revenue - the consoles have pretty terrible profit margin by design. (likely negative when it comes to xbox)

No need for snarky remarks.

[0]: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/111349/xbox-hardware-revenue-...

You realize it's a whole thing, right?

Being a console ecosystem owner doesn't work if one doesn't have a console?

Hence why it makes sense to look at their gaming division revenue as a whole: a large part of that revenue is attributable to shipped to date XBox units.

I wouldn't be surprised if most of that revenue is PlayStation. That's why they've been porting their entire catalog over, claimed the end of exclusives etc.

Last I heard the current Xbox generation has sold less than the last, at approximately 30 million. This gives it about 1/3rd the sales of Sony.

The difference

(Previously) Microsoft EVP: "Dumb decision" -> org executes

(Now) Microsoft PM: "Dumb decision related to AI" -> team immediately executes

So they've pushed bad decision making down the hierarchy?

That's a good point, but literally every company I know of is doing that rn. They're still doing it in a distinctly Microsofty way.

Also Fringe, which captures every plot point parent suggested (salted with a heavy dose of post-9/11).