The tech world has gone to hell

Anyone looking at the tech world 10 years ago, then looking at it again in 2019 would be totally shocked, and probably wouldn’t believe a thing they were seeing. It makes little sense even to seasoned techies who are watching the tech world shift and morph into something quite unbelievable. I’ll give you a few examples;

Microsoft embedding Linux in Windows – making it a 1st party extension. Whaaaaaaat? Balmer and Gates must be traumatized!

Apple iPhone sales falling, with no ‘next big thing’ in sight.

Microsoft showing off an Android phone!

Apple selling Microsoft products on their website

Apple launching a (near) budget iPhone, and possibly a real budget iPhone next year

Microsoft and Google working together

Microsoft and Samsung working together (I think that’s more about Microsoft’s litigation threats though)

Microsoft and Intel no longer best friends, and MS porting WIndows to ARM!

AMD beating Intel at their own game, and Intel cutting prices to try and compete! Madness.. but great to see.

WIndows being pushed further and further down Microsoft’s priority list. It’ll be off the bottom soon (recent patch quality indicates this is now a certainty).

Google, who started as a simple search engine, are now one of the biggest tech companies in the world

Everthing’s a subscription, subscription, subscription!

Plenty more I’m sure, but it’s certain the tech world has gone to hell. What happened to good old competition? Now everyone want’s to work together…

Conversation 25 comments

  • wp7mango

    10 October, 2019 - 1:10 pm

    <p>Why is this hell?</p>

    • Orin

      10 October, 2019 - 1:18 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#479610">In reply to WP7Mango:</a></em></blockquote><p>Perhaps "tech world is upside down" might be a better title?</p>

  • kherm

    Premium Member
    10 October, 2019 - 1:18 pm

    <p>Don't know how these examples mean the tech world has gone to hell. </p><p><br></p><p>The fact that Intel is sweating at the pressure that AMD has shown is amazing. While Intel will most likely always be the leader by far in Laptops, that is no longer a growing market. Where they're really feeling the pressure is in the datacenter where intel's best, dual-socket 28-core Xeon systems are being curb-stomped by AMD's single-socket 64-core EPYC system</p>

  • ErichK

    Premium Member
    10 October, 2019 - 1:34 pm

    <p>Lots of unexpected things have happened in the last five to ten years, but I don't know if it's as bad as you make it out to be.</p><p><br></p><p>Think of the late '80s, early '90s: IBM was conquered and clones took over. A little startup called Microsoft starts to turn into the world's biggest software company. A thing called the Internet starts to invade our lives and changes how we work and communicate. You get my drift.</p><p><br></p><p>But yeah, I never thought Microsoft would give a flying hoot about Linux. </p>

  • illuminated

    10 October, 2019 - 1:37 pm

    <p>If you consider Apple, Google and Microsoft as major tech religions then it is hell. No way to know which church to go to to be "pure". </p><p><br></p><p>The real hell is somewhere else. Too many subscriptions. It is no longer possible to just own tech stuff. Phones spy on their users. "Honestly tech" companies have no chance without doing some sort of spying or spamming. Worst of all users are OK with spying, spamming and manipulation. </p><p><br></p>

  • Daekar

    10 October, 2019 - 1:53 pm

    <p>It is enough to make one long for the slightly more straightforward days of embrace and extend. However…. with the notable exception of subscription fatigue starting to set in already, I look at a lot of this as a positive.</p>

  • kevinbouwman

    Premium Member
    10 October, 2019 - 2:02 pm

    <p>This is the Dark Mode for the tech world.</p>

  • dave0

    Premium Member
    10 October, 2019 - 2:10 pm

    <p>Working with IT people my entire career I have noticed a funny thing: They can be very regressive when it comes to technology change. This post reminds me of that. I have suffered through impassioned "this is why we can't change" diatribes on more than one occasion. When my company moved from on-prem email to Office365 there was almost a civil war despite it being the best thing to do objectively speaking. </p><p><br></p><p>Nothing has "gone to hell" in fact, the opposite has occurred. More people use tech than ever before, all of the companies mentioned are not only doing fine, but thriving. </p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

    • illuminated

      11 October, 2019 - 4:13 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#479642">In reply to dave0:</a></em></blockquote><p>On one hand some people hate change with passion. On the other hand some changes make sense only to the ones making changes. </p>

  • simmonm

    10 October, 2019 - 2:16 pm

    <p>Here I thought this post was going to be about all the tech giants bowing to China. Disappointed…lol.<img src=""></p>

  • jwpear

    Premium Member
    10 October, 2019 - 2:29 pm

    <p>Interesting list. I've thought the same on many of these points.</p><p><br></p><p>This isn't the first time AMD has bested Intel, so that's not too surprising. Did it in the early '90s with the 386/486 clones (better than Cyrix). Did it with Athlons. And with 64-bit extensions (AMD64) to the x86 instruction set (bye bye Itanium). And today with Ryzen. I'm sure I've missed a few important challenges, but that's my memory of each ADM challenge to Intel over the past three decades.</p><p><br></p><p>AMD hasn't always been on top, but there is no doubt they've played an important role in challenging Intel and advancing the state of CPUs. I'm thankful we've had them. I just wish they had made their chipsets.</p><p><br></p><p>I got off the AMD train sometime in the mid-2000s. Had a machine that had issues with the VIA chipset on an ASUS motherboard. Had an Athlon CPU, but don't remember the model now. Felt it was a mistake that AMD didn't make their own chipsets like Intel.</p>

  • wright_is

    Premium Member
    11 October, 2019 - 12:57 am

    <p>Apple has always sold MS Office, among other things.</p><p>Microsoft have been best frenemies for decades. They hate each other, but can't live without each other. If you look back (and read Paul's Windows Programming series, you'll see that there is a rich history of non-Intel processors. NT ran on MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, Itanic, erm, sorry, Itanium and a couple of other obscure platforms. But there was no real interest. The mobile versions of Windows have always run on non-Intel chips.</p><p>AMD beating Intel, yes, been there, done that. Early 2000s, the Athlon was streets ahead of the Pentium, in terms of price/performance and power/performance. It was only really when the Pentium M for mobile and then Core series came out that Intel was clearly back ahead of AMD and before that, they made their name with cheap, competitive 386/586/686 alternatives. It has taken AMD over a decade to come up with the next leap ahead of Intel, but it is an old game.</p><p>Google is now the biggest advertising company in the world.</p><p>Posting…</p>

    • jimchamplin

      Premium Member
      11 October, 2019 - 7:07 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#479736">In reply to wright_is:</a></em></blockquote><p>Itanium was Intel. ?</p>

      • wright_is

        Premium Member
        12 October, 2019 - 12:17 am

        <blockquote><em><a href="#479968">In reply to jimchamplin:</a></em></blockquote><p>Yes, but it wasn't x86 or x64.</p>

    • MikeGalos

      12 October, 2019 - 11:45 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#479736">In reply to wright_is:</a></em></blockquote><p>In fact, the first Microsoft hardware product, years before the mouse was a Microsoft card that plugged into the Apple ][ with an 8080 family processor that let the Apple run CP/M and Microsoft development tools.</p>

      • wright_is

        Premium Member
        13 October, 2019 - 6:40 am

        <blockquote><em><a href="#480069">In reply to MikeGalos:</a></em></blockquote><p>Yes. I remember that. I used to work in a shop that bought bankrupt stock and I was (at 14) responsible for refurbishing and preparing the computer equipment they bought in. I had several Apple ][s to deal with, several with the 8080 or Z80 cards.</p><p>My favourite machines from that time, that came across my workbench, were a Shelton Signet (it had a hard disk and Collosal Cave) and a Z80 box running a cut down version of UNIX!</p>

  • stevem

    11 October, 2019 - 3:52 am

    <p>The tech world has come a long way. If only countries and religions could follow this inspiring lead.</p>

    • Thom77

      11 October, 2019 - 12:46 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#479774">In reply to SteveM:</a></em></blockquote><p><br></p><p>You mean the inspiring lead where tech companies spy on us, track us, sell our data, invade our privacy, censor us, interfere in elections while claiming someone else did, ban people they disagree with, collude with communist countries, anti-gay countries, horrible women rights countries, apartheid countries while lecturing us about social justice, create technology for drones to kill people in third world countries while calling other people racist and also technology that kills American citizens abroad without a fair trial, mix and match employees with intelligence agencies, discriminate against people who are anywhere from moderate to right wing conservative while lecturing us about diversity?</p><p><br></p>

  • musanna

    11 October, 2019 - 7:18 am

    <p>i think so. no interseting thing happend in this year</p>

  • sentinel6671

    Premium Member
    11 October, 2019 - 10:00 am

    <p>I like it and can't complain. Never has the world had so many good choices. Users can go whatever direction they prefer.</p><p><br></p><p>My only compliant is the Windows update situation…I wish Microsoft would cure it's horrible case of rectal-cranial inversion where that is concerned.</p>

  • minke

    11 October, 2019 - 11:47 am

    <p>The biggest problem is that all of these companies start with the question "How can we make more money from our customers?" instead of "How can we make a great product that will also make us money?" I don't sense any of them have people at the top who have a passion for making great things that will also be wildly popular. Instead, the default is how to maximize revenue while minimizing expenses. The removal of the headphone jack on phones is a perfect example. Remove a feature that is both loved and inexpensive in order to force people to spend more money purchasing accessories they don't want and are inferior in performance.</p>

  • jedwards87

    11 October, 2019 - 1:39 pm

    <p>I don't know. Apple stock hit an all time high today on very strong iPhone 11 sales. I would not count them out yet. I also imagine whenever the get around to actually releasing their smart glasses that could be the next big thing. Or not. I don't know how popular glasses will be unless done right and I am not sure what that is. I know it wasn't Google Glass.</p>

  • hrlngrv

    Premium Member
    11 October, 2019 - 1:58 pm

    <p>Re Linux, there's a consequence to Windows never going much past 33% usage share on servers and effectively 0% on mainframes and supercomputers. Shells, POSIX tools, Python and other substantial scripting languages have become the primary way to approach certain computing tasks. At this point, it seems Windows using CMD.EXE or Powershell simply aren't going to challenge Linux in those areas.</p><p>FWIW, Google 10 years ago was already large enough that MSFT couldn't afford to buy them even if regulators had allowed it.</p><p>Everything a subscription is least surprising on your list. Public companies prefer steady revenue streams, and even give some randomness in who drops out/signs up, it's a lot steadier than buying upgrades ever 3-10 years. [Thinking in terms of Excel, there was no pressing reason to upgrade between Office 2K and Office 2010.]</p>

  • paradyne

    11 October, 2019 - 2:26 pm

    <p><span style="color: rgb(89, 89, 89); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The tech world has gone to hell … And is doing some skiing and ice fishing while it's there.</span></p>

  • jimchamplin

    Premium Member
    12 October, 2019 - 5:49 pm

    <p>Dogs and cats living together. <em>Mass hysteria!</em></p>

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