Tangent: if you like cringey social awkwardness comedy (not my usual cup of tea, but in this case it's extraordinary, and hilarious), try "I Think You Should Leave".
How strong does a company's reality distortion field have to be for people to think your friends are going to want to come over to play with a new version of Windows?
I mean, why not "Let's all have wine and cheese and do root canals on each other!"?
I honestly was excited about Windows 95. Win98 was underwhelming, and WinME was a joke that I never bothered to install on my own machines. Win2K brought back some of the excitement, but not much.
Then Vista came out, and it was a total flop at first. Win7 fixed most of those mistakes, but the damage was done. Vista basically killed any chance Microsoft had at building excitement for an OS.
FWIW, I think the last macOS version that I was really looking forward to was High Sierra.
Yeah, younger folks don't remember that new operating systems used to be a thing of excitement -- what cool new features will we get? -- and not, like today, a thing of distress -- what did they break this time, and which new ways have they found to piss me off
I remember my dad driving us to the local Windows 95 pre-launch event by Microsoft. I was 10 and had learned the ridiculous and useless skills of DOS memory configuration and bootdisk juggling to get all of the games to run. Win95 was so cool! I remember spending hours on the multimedia catalog and demos on the CD-ROM and marvelling at the possibilities.
Here's one of my favorites, of Lars doing the Wave dance on stage to ad-lib over connectivity hiccups. For some reason it evoked a lot more empathy from me...
I was on the Wave team! Our servers didn't have enough capacity, we launched too soon. I was managing the developer-facing server for API testing, and I had to slowly let developers in to avoid overwhelming it.
Neat, thanks for sharing this tidbit of history. Hey, what did the team think of the decision to build it on GWT at the time? (From the outside, seemed like an enabling approach but a bit like building an engine and airframe all at once).
Hm, I didn't work on the frontend but I don't particularly remember griping..GWT had been around for ~5 years at that point, so it wasn't super new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit
I always personally found it a bit odd, as I preferred straight JS myself, but large companies have to pick some sort of framework for websites, and Google already used Java a fair bit.
It was fun! Now we still see Wave-iness in other products: Google Docs uses the Operational Transforms (OT) algorithm for collab editing (or at least it did, last I knew), and non-Google products like Notion, Quip, Slack, Loop from Microsoft, all have some overlap.
We struggled with having too many audiences for Wave - were we targeting consumer or enterprise? email or docs replacement? Too much at once.
Journalistic integrity (or not) arguments aside, that this happened with such an expensive piece of equipment is disappointing. Reminds me of Deal of the Century; “you ever heard of rain??!”
We got phones for our kids primarily to keep in touch when they are away, especially when they have after school sports, at work (yes, even at 14 they can have gainful employment opportunities like reffing soccer). It would be great if the "smart" phone had a true "dumb" mode where the phone basically becomes a Nokia Blue vintage talk / text device. Not an app you have to install, but something that is part of the OS which I, as the parent, can control.
Does iOS not have pretty robust parental controls and locks? I ask this seriously, to see if any parents have experience locking down iPhones against a motivated adversary (their child) within the last few years.
No. Screen Time (their parental controls implementation) is easily circumventable, includes a “One More Minute” feature that can’t be disabled, doesn’t sync properly, manages to crash Safari in mysterious ways… I could go on.
It’s disastrous, like an intern-level project that was shipped and never improved upon. And these are the only parental controls APIs available, so competing apps aren’t even possible, they ultimately just serve as alternate frontends for Screen Time.
You can kind of get away with it, but even with just SMS you are losing a significant amount of flexibility that effects how much and what people are messaging you and is the exact reason why I stopped using a dumb phone. People sending pictures or emojis or to ask a question pointing to a link. People get tired of you asking what the hell they just sent you, whether it was a picture, or just a reaction with an emoji, because often both will fail to display right or at all.
True, and we considered that. But there are benefits to a smart phone that we also wanted them to have, just not all the time, and it should be easier to make a smart phone dumb than the other way around.
