AI to power the corporate Windows 11 refresh? Nobody's buying that In the early 2010s, Intel's PR did the tech press rounds with a hot story. We're so far ahead in chip fab, they said, that nobody will ever catch up. The hacks concluded two things from this: Intel was losing ground fast enough to be scared, and it was right on both counts. How did that pan out again? So it is with the news …
Microsoft has a huge advantage here because it has an unparalleled ability to understand not just what is normally thought of as corporate data, but the way it's used and how it flows.
Except that it doesn't. The Microsoft bandwagon is driven by very average corporate drones. Innovation, insight, change, customer focus not wanted here. Powerpoint slides and inter-fiefdom wars, yes please.
Even some very basic features of Windows and Office remain flawed, whilst new and unasked for capabilities have been added over the years, or popular features and capabilities are deprecated or simply left to wither. A good example of unasked for features are the planned changes to Outlook that'll stop it working with Exchange as most business customers require it to. Or Recall, asked for nobody, but still the clowns of Redmond push on with it in spite of the cries of horror from everybody who can think.
Microsoft understand only how they themselves use their own products. They have no interest or knowledge of what corporate clients want, and quite frankly they don't care.
CTOs never think. They just apply for the next job.
Our own company has gone through a dozen in as many years. Not one of them did or said anything relevant.
Meanwhile, IT on the ground is an increasingly obsolescent shit heap that grunts have to maintain. Thank $deity for virtual machines or it’d be all over.
I see who the CTO is on this forum voting you down :) however it IS an issue..everytime I hear the word transformation, I want to kill myself..you know a lot of noise will be made, the CEOs name will be repeated several times & priorities. They'll hire project managers & PMO type people, harp on about agile & a bunch of Six Signa puke belts will come in. THEN they'll find out they maxed the budget before they hired any engineers, the BAU staff will be forced to shoe horn in some crap that no one uses, costs £millions & the CTO will put a successful transformation on their CV, everyone else will carry on working in the same crap way they've always worked...repeat ad infinitum
As to Microshit knowing about corporate data....how does Sharepoint handle media files these days? Photos op, video files etc? The type of workflow where graphic designers like to copy the files locally to work on?
No, with so much browser / cloud based or good enough free tools, it's a handful of business packages only on Windows keeping Windows alive. Home users (apart from niche gamers) are using phones, tablets, Chromebooks (now more like Linux laptops), Nintendo switch, Playstation and Xbox.
I know 70+ year olds that have migrated to Linux from Windows. Only the serious Apple fans pay the premium for a Mac now. Or a few artists.
The win11 changes are not what the market wants.
I beg to differ.
After wrestling with MS for decades, I retired and gave everything MS the big middle finger.
These days, I use a Mac as my workhorse. The tools available to me on the Mac are much better than for Linux. Apps like Scrivener make writing novels a lot easier.
The integration of the Mac and my iPhone (bought secondhand) is brilliant. MS tried but didn't get anywhere near that level of ease of use that Apple gives us on a daily basis.
I use Linux daily. My website uses Alma Linux as does the old Dell PC that controls my 3D printer.
The cost of a Mac with Applecare is worth it in my opinion given the pounding my M1 MBP gets. It has now helped me write 2 400+ page novels and a host of other short stories. No Windows based device lasted long enough to do that.
I know many former Windows users who have given up with MS and moved to Mac's and not looked back. Non IT people move quite easily.
Naturally, YMMV.
I'm a fan of Mac for standalone devices. Very capable of networking though I would not want to go down the road of trying to create group policies and equivalent on multiple macs, chiefly because it's hugely unfamiliar.
The non-standard, enforced hardware selection is an obvious minus.
The missus gets a mac because it's better than having to troubleshoot MS. Linux for just about everything else outside of work-supplied (mandated?) choices.
Recent articles on George R R Martin's writing practises and using thoroughly obsolete tools do rather make the point that a lot of the time none of us need the charge to shiny and features just because they can exist.
"Recent articles on George R R Martin's writing practises and using thoroughly obsolete tools do rather make the point that a lot of the time none of us need the charge to shiny and features just because they can exist."
If you can call a word processor an obsolete tool. The typewriter got many writer's scribbles into something legible that could be delivered to publishers. Photocopiers could take that manuscript and duplicate it cheaply and easily so the story could be sent to several publishers, the writer's agent and so forth. With computer based word processors, the text can be more easily manipulated. The internet made it possible to move copies around. The art of story creation and telling hadn't changed at all, only the mechanics behind the scenes. The big question is what moves past the word processor in terms of tech that aids the writer?
I use the lowest form of editor when I'm writing. I don't want popups trying to help me, I'm not that concerned about spelling and trying to keep things in nicely rounded paragraphs is able all the formatting I will do until much later. The goal is converting my thoughts to language/words and getting that in an external useful form. I even do that with super obsolete pencil and paper if I sat on a train and don't have a laptop with me. I find that to be more productive many times and I also find the train a good place to think and create. (and nap).
The Linux fanboys are so predictable. Even after decades of this stuff..well I can use Linux so everyone else must be able to!
I've got a windows machine that cost me several grand that I haven't turned on for over a year. I'm fully macced up. Because i know my m1 air still has at least another 2 years in it. It's far better than windows, which has been crap since XP.
I use Linux when I'm dealing with appliances & stuff at work, I DON'T want to use it at home or for personal stuff, especially the shell.
Jimmy Kimmel Live did a segment where they told people they worked for Apple and they had pre-sale iPhone 16s that they wanted to give to people to show off how amazing they were, and they could instantly (within a few seconds) transfer everything from their old iPhone to the new one. Behind their backs, they just changed the case or in some instances just removed the person's case, then handed it back to them. They of course only showed the ones that were duped, but they were absolutely amazed by how much faster their "new" phone was, how much sharper the screen was, how much faster web browsing was, and how it had upgraded the quality of all their existing photos. One of those people actually worked for Apple.
Small and medium businesses employ almost half of the workforce, and they don't need AI features in any way, and they don't upgrade on cycles. They often keep machines well past the 3 year mark, and they continue to do the job just as well as when they were new, until hardware actually dies. I had customers on 15-year-old servers before they finally failed. Only forced obsolescence makes them get upgraded before that point, with software that is forcibly updated with unneeded and unwanted features until it becomes so bloated it feels slow. Even in larger corporations, the majority of users don't do work that would get anything out of AI in the way it functions right now. Nobody wants it, nobody needs it, and it doesn't really work that well.
Obviously, I'm not sharing the link with you lot and reducing my chances! (Although, correction, it was DOS in general, not DR-DOS.)
But "experience of working within the Financial Services Industry an advantage" and a requirement to be "FSA competent" made me think its a banking system.
The add also described Linux as "legacy technology" (I hope they meant it's a really old version - but doesn't make clear.)
I was hoping it was a typo for DBase IV. But there does appear to be a DbaseV released in 1994.
The constant incremental difference that keeps them coming is the camera system. People may not be taking better pictures and videos than they did with previous generations of iPhone, or against the opposition's flagships, but the new features and capabilities are instantly understandable and the results immediately appreciated.
The only camera "improvement" I'd like to see is a button that turns all the AI nonsense off. Seriously considering getting a separate digital camera with no AI nonsense built in to take actual pictures again.
That is one of my biggest peeves with recent iPhones. Photos taken with the X and even the 5s that I had ten years ago have better detail and more depth, with none of the smudging or oil paint effect resulting from the "intelligent" post-processing that is applied by the current phones. Surely all that post-processing is carried out by software. If that is the case, then Apple should add an option to turn it off.
Exactly, most old kit will just work and run. Its like the old days where progression from processor to processor made a noticable difference, or you could go from 2/4MB RAM upto 4/8MB
Most old kit I had recently, replace the spinner with an SSD and off it goes, a new lease of life.
And lets not forget the rebuild every so often to get rid of bloat.
An old company I worked for, as we pulled older servers out, if they were not reused they went into the "spares" pile for older servers that had no support for.
admittedly they were old days and less hacks and threats were around due to initially,none, then limited internet access
Concede in firewall and endpoints you want to keep in line for when the vendor stops maintaining it
I used to work for a company that raffled off the "pulls" every year (minus the HDDs). Got a couple of still-in-use laptops that way, and my brother is running an old Dell desktop that came (with a parts spare) from the same place.
Sadly, we got bought by a much larger organisation, and all things PC are now centralised and inflexible. :-(
Probably. I have on occasion asked, and the reply varies from "we have a recycling vendor who is contracted to take these for <small money> each" to "it's corporate policy not to give them to employees"
Funny, when they used to give them to us, there were never any problems. When *I* am in charge (hah!) surplus gear will be auctioned off. If the lawyers insist, I will add a disclaimer to the raffle entry slip that says something like "I agree that any equipment I receive is without warranty and absolve the company of any responsibility" Seems like even the lawyers couldn't argue with that (given the insane latitude of shrink wrap EULAs).
If the old school hardware runs a current Linux, then it's still a supported OS, with all the updates etc.
Wife is running an AliExpress special with a 12 core Xeon and 32 gig of ECC RAM and a NVME SSD. Not officially Win11 supported. Was running Linux just fine, until a Roblox update update broke things. That's a "mission critical" app, as she plays it with the kids. So I ran it up with Win 11, which also ran fine. Not supported, but it's a 12 core CPU, bulk RAM, a SSD, and a 4gb AMD GPU, so it's not a potato.
Until... Daughter installs "Teams". Not sure what crap was going on, but it crippled the machine. I suspect it related to MS sign-ins, and running a local account. So a but of putzing in the APPS section had Teams off the auto start, and "Insight" bloatware binned. Machine runs fine again.
But the Mrs did acknowledge why I like Linux, and I acknowledged the Roblox issue. If Roblox decide to allow Linux use again, using Wine or Proton etc, she would happily switch back. Because why they heck should installing Teams cripple a perfectly good PC?
The thing is, Microsoft has quite successfully spent the past few years getting application workloads pushed into "the cloud". So, if all your data and workloads are there, what business processing needs to be done on local PCs? Surely they should be becoming more of a simpler, cheaper client machine for the corporate cloud if the last few years of cloud hype have any truth to them?
It's the old client / server, thin client / thick client, local app vs web app debate yet again, in a new dress, but this time with very few, if any applications where "client side AI" might be needed. And it only seems like a few weeks since they were pushing "cloud PCs". Has that stopped now, as they've realised that they were basically reinventing cheapo Chromebooks for office use?
Microsoft pushes both. Gotta have a hand in every pocket, even if you only half-ass all of them. The other companies are doing the same. Client-side AI is pushed as a reaction to concerns about privacy, avoiding having all your AI activity and usage being processed in the cloud and used by companies for training their AIs and the like (and in the rare case that you're offline, still working). It also cuts the company's costs, not having to process all that stuff. Theoretically, even a "Cloud PC" would still work the same, where that data wouldn't be getting sent outside of the virtual machine, even though that VM runs on shared hardware and a host OS. At that point, the risk is just the usual of shared hosts being compromised in ways that allow malware or someone with remote access to read the data of guest VMs either by peaking into the memory or storage or exploiting something like SPECTRE, or any other method where a master admin can access it.
>"It's the old client / server, thin client / thick client, local app vs web app debate yet again"
I think you're on to something. The "AI enabled" crap will be the pendulum swinging back to local processing power once again.
Apart from the fact that the CxOs of most large organisations are under a continual fire hose of consultancy bullshit about how the latest fad is transformational, and the organisation needs to act NOW. For corporates the rationale is "competitive pressures", for public sector it's about "efficiencies".
All I hear at work regarding tech is senior people prattling on about how AI will change the world, how we'll miss out if we don't grab it now and skill-up. Most of my colleagues recognise that AI is this year's snake oil, but when do senior people listen to their own staff, when they can claim that EY, PWC, or some other bunch of charlatans have forecast billions in value available to those who seize the moment?
You are completely correct on the 4 year comment.
Properly designed electronics hardware (ignoring the spinning things for now) should easily last decades. The biggest single hardware killer is excessive heat which is why we go to great lengths to get it out of the box.
The rule of thumb for silicon devices is that for each temperature rise of 10C, the life will be halved. This is based on the Arrhenius equation
I have some really old equipment (30+ years old) that is still going strong.
I am in the high reliability business so typical system life has to be measured in decades (some parts are allowed to fail after a few years which can be an obsolescence nightmare), but that said, some really old parts are still being manufactured such as the 741 (designed in the 1960s).
An office or home based system should easily last 10+ years. Pushing users to dump it just because the vendor no longer supports the OS or insists that a certain type of device be present that is really not necessary is, to me, a form of vandalism.
Another problem is that way too many parts are used for a given system. We could probably use 50% of the components that actually exist in equipment with probably no noticeable change in response. This does require a disciplined software approach: don't require 16G RAM for a simple app because it happens to run well on <framework that is downloaded in its entirety>.
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Tomi was bored and tired of the Commenturds.
But this piece was spot on, Rupert.
"There is a way forward, from Apple's parallel consumer universe. While Cupertino has the strong advantage of directly controlling both OS and hardware, it also has a lot more competition, at least on the surface."
Apple are Microsoft Mark 2. Only a twat wouldnt hate them these days. £1000 for a stand! See Sam Time for more...
Apple are a hardware company and AI done well isnt about the hardware so much. I disagree with photos being the most important part of the phone. I wish Apple didnt have those ugly-as-sin cameras on the back and i dont really give a monkey's arse about the camera.
And they way they have tied their Win3.1 AI with the 16pro is straight out of the Microscumbag's book.
The AI will be your future OS. I might noty come back here again as it seems more like Old Get's Corner than a tech site. And that is the reason why high-level folks like myself rarely drop down amongst the masses like we have done so.
But, the most disappointing factor is that they still dont get it. Even old people are telling them to get into it and find their niche and still the knobs sound like Victor Meldrew.
The Reg would not bother with you lot were it not for coins. No way wd they do this web1 hobby-style. No with you lot (exception: 5/6 people on here scored over 130iq. The rest averqaged nearly97. You laughted when we said we were running an IQ model on you retards. LOL. OpenAI have it now. A cornerstone of future developemtn.
Now, piss off back to your postions of no power.
[PURE LNN SSLN text and can't be bothered to human edit it being this is the last one. C U, girls]
I disagree that MS never invented anything, however the pace of innovation is glacier
Just look at the other leg of MS cash cow. MS office.
A MS office license is hoisted onto virtually every machine, either in the rarer bought one, to the annoying Office 365 subscription. You would of thought with all that money coming in, a lot would be invested in improving the product
However if you look at Word, Powerpoint and Excel and compare them to their 95 ancestors, it's really hard to see the killer features that have been added. Yes they added (the annoying ribbon), but in terms of usability and functionality they are just th same
For example, compare the animation transitions in Powerpoint. No new ones added in 30 years. How about better formatting and management of pictures in word. Still as borked as ever.
While there has been a few new macros in Excel, generally it is the same beast, abused by many around the world
Problem is MS is still a monopoly. They really don't need to try hard to make billions, that is just what they tell there shareholders. Therefore when they do need to innovate, they find they just don't have the cultural weapons to do so
That was it, SSDs killed the need for new PC for most people who were not doing intensive tasks anyway.
All of a sudden you realise how much that little bit of spinning rust was slowing everything down.
My son's little micro PC for doing homework on etc went pop a few months back. Bought an ex-corp SFF desktop for well under £100. Turned out it was very slow but swapping out the disk for a cheap SSD and it's suddenly plenty fast enough.
Will it run W11? No. Time to show the boy Linux after that.
And AI, really, what is the fecking point of 99% of generative AI (seperating that for a lot of actually very useful ML stuff). I work on this stuff, I've got Stable diffusion on my laptop to try, my employer is heavily comitted to AI and we can't see the fecking point other than rising that bandwagon.
Notice just today that CoPilot (the new Clippy it seems) it trying to put itself into the mix at every unwanted opportunity.
Borkzilla is heading for a wall of its own making.
It promised that Windows 1 0 would be the last ever version, and now it has proven that you can't trust its words.
Nobody cares about upgrading a PC that is still working satisfactorily. 5 year old equipment is good for the trash ? I don't think so. Come back in six years and we'll talk about that again.
Face it : the least capable, lowest-cost laptop is fine for surfing the Web and doing mail. Companies have equipment that is much more powerful and will last a decade or more.
The renewal treadmill is over, Borkzilla. Deal with it.
How was it out of context?
The developer in question said: "Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10."
Back in 2015, when the Verge contacted Microsoft to confirm that Windows 10 could possibly be the last version of Windows. The spokesperson did not dispute the claim but instead said: "Recent comments at Ignite about Windows 10 are reflective of the way Windows will be delivered as a service bringing new innovations and updates in an ongoing manner, with continuous value for our consumer and business customers."
Sooner or later, the AI bubble will burst. At the moment, it feels like 20+ years ago when we were in the height of the dotcom bubble. Building a website was seen as a guaranteed way of getting rich, investors were flinging money at anyone who said "hey I've got an idea about a website", without any business plan or any clear design on how this new website would turn a profit.
Then the bubble burst. The good ideas, profitable sites, those with potential all survived. The crap disappeared, and many people who'd blindly thrown money at stupid gimmicks ended up out of pocket.
That moment will come with AI. Hopefully soon. Not saying AI will go away, it has its uses and it will survive in areas where it can actually offer useful value to people. But the pointless implementations, those that have no chance of making any money and which 99.9% of people are shunning, those will die off, and good riddance.
And let's face it, MS has a wealth of experience of jumping onto failed bandwagons. Just ask the teams behind Windows Phone, Cortana, Silverlight, Zune, Paint3D...
I remember seeing a Google Gemini ad recently with a young girl asking it to write a fan letter to a pop/sports star that she really adored.
Maybe I'm a bit old fashioned but surely such writing should come from the heart. Passion and your thoughts conveyed from your own brain and spilled out onto the keyboard?
Gemini can get in the bin.
They're really not. Sure if you have a decent SLR shooting RAW there'll be an advantage, but for an older compact camera vs a phone phones tend to win. I recently took pictures of the same scene with an older Canon Ixus, a newish phone with an awful camera, and a slightly older phone with a decent camera. The slightly older phone won every time, the only real advantage with the Ixus was probably the ability to zoom.
SLRs aren't pocketable in the same way a compact or phone is.
Well, yes and no.
In good light as long as the subject is close, a modern mobile phone will create images as good as a average DSLR. However as light levels fall or the subject needs to be zoomed into, te photos tend to fall apart
Certainly the computational photography of modern phones hide some of the deficiencies, but its not a panacea. Some of the issues are hidden by the fact that most people only view images on handheld devices are this can mask a lot of ills. I took a photo on my pixel phone recently and it looked fine, until I downloaded it on my PC, there the AI artifacts were writ large
Mobile phones are great tools, but if you want a camera which take take images in all conditions, can be extended by zoom lenses etc, and can be displayed at a reasonable size, a good camera is still a must
Learn to read instead of completely ignoring what I posted and re-iterating your viewpoint.
SLRs do not fit in your pocket, they may have advantages but are not portable. It's an apples to oranges comparison, at least compact cameras and phones are broadly similar.
I've done the mobile phone vs older compact camera comparison as mentioned. Yes, it was during daylight, of a tree if anyone really wants to know. The Canon Ixus (not the most up to date one) was clearly inferior to a four year old mobile phone (all image enhancements turned off), although better than a slightly newer mobile with a widely panned camera.
Our policy (and many other companies at that) is to deliberately be one major release behind on purpose, because the bleeding edge is a shitshow.
Persuade me why any of us should do MS beta testing for them?
Win 10 will stick around at least as long as it is mainstream supported; and likely beyond that. There are NO new features in the OS that are compelling reasons to swap.
If MS actually gave us what we wanted, that is, a very clean and minimalist desktop, file manager and vehicle to launch applications; plus decent network security and driver framework that would be an instant buy. Never gonna happen.
A generic i3-something laptop, bought new. I think it came with Win7 on it but the spinning rust was swapped for an SSD with Ubuntu, the memory upped to 12Gb from the 4 it came with and that's it. Oh, external keyboard and monitor - I'm old enough not to want to hunch over a laptop any more.
Bought to support a new business venture - and still pretty much *the* daily driver, handling everything I've thrown at it. That was almost 13 years ago. And it can play Doom for those re-live-your-youth moments. Bonus! It'll die one day, of course, and I'll never find a replacement MB now - but seeing as anything can run *nix these days, it's not keeping me awake at night.
The way I see it, an office pc is a bit of hardware: historically, budgets were never planned around replacing desks, chairs and so on on a three-yearly cycle and I'm not doing it with things ON the desk, either. Get off the Operating System upgrade/new shiny gravy-train and you'll be surprised just how long the hardware will carry on delivering.
Well actually I don't but they won't replace my 7 year old work laptop with a spanking shiny new touchscreen MS laptop unless I relent and take it with company sanctioned Win11 installed. Oh the agony of choice, laptop with more than 8gb memory and battery that last more than 35 mins or.....Windows 11......oh dear gods of fate why do you toy with me for you sport?!
Either we get more frequent desktop refreshes driven by the need for an increase in power required to perform everyday actions; or we have the majority of day to day business activities in the cloud. The latter *should* require far less local resources required on each PC because the cloud servers are doing the heavy lifting.
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