> I understand that these public companies are required to act in the best interests of shareholders but I fear that the obsessive push for revenue gains only benefits short term shareholders. Long term shareholders get the shaft when every decision is aimed at squeezing revenue just for the next quarter.
Never so succinctly have I seen described the economic problem of the modern age; endless growth for its own sake. Sure, it's motivated by profit, but society and global elites don't act as if there are significant downsides to an investment-driven economy. Rather, it's treated as a virtue, else we wouldn't all be buying into it, literally and figuratively, for the bare minimum of not losing our wealth.
> Halo on Steam
Hah, you don't hear much about Halo anymore. But it's entirely possible you may be able to play Halo on Steam on your Linux machine in the near future. Combat Evolved plays really well on my M1 Macbook through Parallels (even with Anniversary mode, given some settings tweaks) and Reach is playable but drops a lot of frames; if you ever get a Linux machine that runs on ARM then you can virtualize Windows for ARM in a way that blows away any x86_64 emulation I've seen in the past.
Of course most of the work to make that a reality isn't even because of Microsoft besides their compiling of Windows for ARM.
Besides that...
> xbox, windows, office, WSL, VSCode, Visual Studio, hololens, phones, laptops, Halo on Steam, etc.
Honestly, the only decent things you mentioned are Office, VSCode, and Halo, which are all things that just about any other company could have created. Office itself is begging for a viable alternative, but has been effectively grandfathered in to being a necessity for businesses. I mentioned Halo but not Xbox because, IMO, Xbox is an obsolete concept and Microsoft knows this.
There's GitHub, but it's only a matter of time before Microsoft decides to add "plans" for features that are already free as well as forms of prioritization for all things Windows.
I guess I'm not exactly sure what point I'm trying to make besides that I kind of agree with you in the sense that M$ has been less problematic than other Big Tech in recent years. With Windows 11, now I'm not so sure.
Imo their Lumia phones (and the accompanying OS and new UI philosophy) were also something special, and I say that as a hater of those products earlier on (i.e. before I got to know them better). It's a shame that those phones didn't catch on.
Just a side note: I already can play Halo on Steam on Linux with only one minor issue (Proton's conversion of DirectX to Vulkan works almost flawlessly, but doesn't seem to handle single-faced triangles, so the hologram of Cortana in the opening scene looks bad as you see the back of her head transparently through her face).
> but doesn't seem to handle single-faced triangles
Highly unlikely that this is a problem with backface culling, that's too basic to screw up without also affecting countless other games.
I haven't played Halo but if [0] is how it is supposed to look then there is proper occulsion (i.e. depth testing) between different parts of her body. This would also make backface culling only a performance optimization if everything else is working correctly so may have been left disabled.
Never so succinctly have I seen described the economic problem of the modern age; endless growth for its own sake. Sure, it's motivated by profit, but society and global elites don't act as if there are significant downsides to an investment-driven economy. Rather, it's treated as a virtue, else we wouldn't all be buying into it, literally and figuratively, for the bare minimum of not losing our wealth.
> Halo on Steam
Hah, you don't hear much about Halo anymore. But it's entirely possible you may be able to play Halo on Steam on your Linux machine in the near future. Combat Evolved plays really well on my M1 Macbook through Parallels (even with Anniversary mode, given some settings tweaks) and Reach is playable but drops a lot of frames; if you ever get a Linux machine that runs on ARM then you can virtualize Windows for ARM in a way that blows away any x86_64 emulation I've seen in the past.
Of course most of the work to make that a reality isn't even because of Microsoft besides their compiling of Windows for ARM.
Besides that...
> xbox, windows, office, WSL, VSCode, Visual Studio, hololens, phones, laptops, Halo on Steam, etc.
Honestly, the only decent things you mentioned are Office, VSCode, and Halo, which are all things that just about any other company could have created. Office itself is begging for a viable alternative, but has been effectively grandfathered in to being a necessity for businesses. I mentioned Halo but not Xbox because, IMO, Xbox is an obsolete concept and Microsoft knows this.
There's GitHub, but it's only a matter of time before Microsoft decides to add "plans" for features that are already free as well as forms of prioritization for all things Windows.
I guess I'm not exactly sure what point I'm trying to make besides that I kind of agree with you in the sense that M$ has been less problematic than other Big Tech in recent years. With Windows 11, now I'm not so sure.