I think the attempted argument is anti-competitive collusion among all these companies. That GARM, fundamentally, is illegal as an anti-competitive initiative.

The apps may have been a bit anemic, but it was early enough that all the app stores were not great. They were certainly hurt by their initial “JavaScript only” stance.

Really painful was that they had exclusivity with Sprint of all carriers. That was a really limiting decision.

I think ultimately the singularly fatal issue was the HP debacle. The initial circumstances of the acquisition might have been ok for the platform. Thanks to some leaked material HP under Hurd actually seemed to have some vision for reinvigorating their consumer brand including an emphasis on former palm products. But Hurd was ousted and that whole initiative was canned and the new leadership killed the product line that they had just bought. Which was the most baffling call, they didn’t make room for some other smartphone or tablet platform, they just shrugged and killed off a product that was their only shot at relevance for a clearly exploding new consumer market.

I’ve seen enough traps set by Oracle to be extra afraid of any wooden horses they are offering up.

That was one thing that was wild about the Palm WebOS devices. It was just plain old linux. Games? They were just Linux games using SDL. Porting WebOS applications to desktop linux would have been nearly trivial. It would have just been amazing if Palm had pulled it off (alas, they chased a single design, Blackberry-style with small form factor, which missed just so much of the market). The users were utterly oblivious to all this (which is good) and it was just the best combination of capable of great things easily with a power user and able to run whatever the casual user would have needed.

It was still before Android was pretty much a sealed deal in the market (2009 Android was still horribly rough) so it had a shot, but Palm just couldn’t pull it off.

I’m running the one true distribution, SCO

The software side bubble should take a hit here because:

• Trained model made available for download and offline execution, versus locking it behind a subscription friendly cloud only access. Not the first, but it is more famous.

• It came from an unexpected organization, which throws a wrench in the assumption that one of the few known entities would “win it”.

Guess we have very different experiences.

I work with a commercial software development group and they suck

Not one of the developers had a shred of experience aligned with their target market segment. There is a design team, but they also don’t know the segment, but the division between design, architecture and development leads to a clunky mess.

Professionals in the target market are frequently higher paid than the developers, so management refuses to fund hiring actual experts in the field, and instead just nominates seemingly arbitrary people in the organization to stand in for the “customer” in all those processes that should actually include customers.

So when they are disappointed with losing to a number of open source solutions in the field, they just accuse customers of being cheap rather than facing the reality they have ivory towered themselves into a corner.

Maybe for some markets it is different, but now those markets face the reality that the vendor is trying to game then for subscription revenue and add ons and is making deliberately customer hostile change for the sake of gaming the revenue in the short term.

Now there are certainly markets with no FOSS option, as just no one is interested in developing. I suppose in markets with OSS software there’s may sometimes be a divide between what the developer inclined half of the market would want for themselves versus those not minded toward development, and that could be a weakness.

Ultimately I’ll always remember one review for an open source project. They stated that at first they were underwhelmed because it felt like software they’d write for themselves, and not as flashy as commercial alternatives. Then they realized they would write that software because the commercial software was not for for purpose despite how nice it was, and the project was just they easy they wanted it.

The reason for this is simple enough. The proprietary software has an agenda to squeeze as much from the user as possible, and the Internet has enabled this to horrible degrees.

Windows is about making the least effort to be the de facto OS while slamming you with ads and insistence that you must subscribe to various Microsoft services.

Applications that make zero sense to be browser hosted are browser hosted, because it means to have to be approved by the vendor every time you run the software, it must be subscription.

Transactional software purchases are garbage for the business side of software, there’s a mandate for recurring subscription based revenue.

It used to be these opportunities were impractical and the commercial company budget would sometimes lead them to an easier product than open source, but that ship sailed.

Now for technical users, open source almost always has won and will continue to win, because they are dealing with like minded developers writing for themselves, and so they internalize the use case in a way a commercial approach never can.

Maybe I could see that for Windows server. As more of that market moves to azure, the os matters less.

I’ve heard rumors that the dom0 equivalent in their azure virtualization platform is now Linux based. They still use an in house hypervisor, but may have moved to Linux as the management stack.

It’s a long shot, but if Microsoft were moving anything at all, it would be the server product given it actually struggles in market share.

On the desktop, they just don’t have much reason. They barely evolve the NT kernel so it doesn’t cost them a huge amount. The Linux approach to drivers would completely mess up their driver ecosystem. With the world of modern standby, windows pretty much gave up on long term suspend and instead hibernates, Linux refuses to even try to hibernate with secure boot. The features a Linux kernel brings to the table just do not matter to the windows desktop market. It would be a giant migration expense for no benefit compared to their current strategy of just hosting a Linux kernel as a virtualization guest.

I mean I would love to use a Linux oriented desktop management instead of Windows shell, but it’s abundantly clear that would be non negotiable for Microsoft, so I’d end up still stuck with my least favorite part of the windows experience even if the kernel were Linux

They are back with the “no buttons” design. People swear the haptics make it better, but it doesn’t. My work gave me one and the touchpad gets phantom taps and now the pad “clicks” when it hasn’t even been touched sometimes and there’s nothing that can be done.

Tech companies were in that boat in the late 90s as well.

The dot com bust deflated it somewhat, but somehow the industry got right back to it within a couple of years.

Option C, just no thanks for the same thing as TikTok in general.

I work with some Intel folks… The place just seems terribly mismanaged and the tech world would probably benefit if the technical folks would work elsewhere.

It depends on what you want to self host.

As an example, a family member self hosted home assistant. They didn’t have to know anything really. That was all they were doing and they bought the canned implementation.

If you have multiple services, you may need to know nginx configuration with virtual hosting.

You may want to use podman or docker or kubernetes.

It all depends …

This is the lock picking lawyer,and today…

Yeah I remember an at in the 90s of rolling a shopping cart without scanning and here we are 30 years on… Still scanning…

But they are the only sort that would be applicable to the suggestion of “replace CEO with AI” today.

I’ve found that for a lot of groceries, the online shopping prices are just absurd compared to the in-store grocery store pricing.

For gadgets and such, online is pretty good still, though a maddening amount of crappy knock offs to wade through…

It may be all sorts, but I suspect the biggest “shrinkage” cost is due to more organized crime. E.g. covers over the detergent, it’s not because of people sneaking it for themselves, it’s because some folks did a black market of stolen detergent.

I will say one time I placed a big box to the right of the scanner then scanned it, but the machine vision system had already decided I was trying to sneak that box past the scanning area and flagged me as a potential shoplifter, despite having scanned the item before the vision based anti-theft flagged things and shut down the isle. So Walmart’s anti-theft still does flip out on occasion.

Certainly better than the days when every other item would do “unexpected item in bagging area”, but still can be obnoxious and the employee acts so suspicious when you trigger it.

Between having about 10x self checkout as manned checkouts, and some bad bagging experiences, I strongly lean toward self checkout, at least if I have a reasonably small amount of stuff. Larger orders I do the “load my car” which is supreme laziness for me and most work from the employees, but don’t trust them with perishables and produce.