Selling you shit has always been the point for echo/alexa. The device is sold at cost and the assistant is “free” because they’re trying to make money from the other side of the business.

It hasn’t worked at all, by the way. This more aggressive version is a last ditch effort to make it profitable. The only ones who managed to make smart speakers profitable are Apple, but that’s because they charge much more for the device

As of the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, the Americas held around 41 percent of the revenue, whereas Europe came in second with roughly over 26.5 percent.

source

As the second largest revenue generator, Europe has a powerful voice.

i never had the “pleasure” to use teams. Is it also replacing outlook? And is it worse somehow than fucking outlook?!

oh, they’re there and they’re just as useless. I’m the kind of person who refuses to remember things so I have been using google search to take me to the particular website which contains that one liner which I know fixes my issue. For the past 4 years or so, I started actually remembering a lot of things because it’s impossible to get to those pages through all the spam.

A search for a specific question used to take me to a stack overflow page with that specific wording to which the answer was the specific command and a description of what it does. Now not only does google ignore half the search terms, but the first 5 results are crap websites with a long description which seems to be close to what i’m looking for only to prove to be useless 3 minutes in.

it’s funny how the conventional wisdom at the end of the last decade was that slack was preferred over other simpler/free alternatives because of its UX. People were hailing it for how simple and intuitive it was to use, etc.

5, 6 years later, it has become a bloated piece of crap riddled with bugs. And the UI changes which come unannounced… it should be a criminal offense to change UI through automated updates.

Anyway, here we are, companies have handed their data to this monster and we’ll see how they react when the data gets misused. Hopefully that would be the beginning of the end for it

You can imagine whatever you wish, but quoting random people is just stupid when you have access to actual research (incidentally the same material used by those nobodies in a twisted way to manipulate you). Get out of the youtube rabbit hole, there are no rabbits at the end of it.

Anyway, Andrewism’s latest video directly addresses your originally expressed concern

Oh yes, somebody without any formal education on the subject and no credentials whatsoever except the fact that they have a face to put on a vide is the perfect person to quote here. Well done.

No, it is just incompetence. There’s a serious disconnect between the people making the return to office call and the people dealing with it. The thinking is that, over years, the talent lost will be replaced and the backlash will subside and whatever reason they have for the RTO is more important than these.

The trouble with the software industry upper management is that they never haven’t had to deal with an industry in trouble. They’ve been working in a rapidly growing industry for their whole career. Bad decisions matter very little in such environments so they think they don’t make any.

am attempt at what? not everyone has a hidden agenda, who are you talking to?

The rest of us have work to do to end the violence.

I cannot imagine a world without oppression, this is true. However, I grew up long ago in a world where oppression came from those who said they’d overthrow it last time. They were using the same ideas you flaunt around and much like you (or whomever the person I was talking to before was), they had superficial understanding of what they were advocating for.

Sorry, i wasn’t aware you were advocating for Anarcho-syndicalism. I thought we were having a conversation in good faith about the current situation. Good luck with your revolution

you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.

no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities. There are, of course, other types of societies in which workers have this power, but then there’s not real point in debating the role of the union in that completely different context.

There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.

Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.

First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.

And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now. There is no growth vector but loads of people who aren’t producing value (not their fault, there is nothing to produce). Of course, better protection for employees is always needed, but as someone who watched an european company reduce its workforce from 110k people to 19k over the course of 3 years in early 2010s, i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.

This is what we’re seeing now: the work is simply not needed.

Why are we still surprised by stories like these? Post pandemic tech layoffs are not performance based. The tech industry has decided that less employees is better than more employees and they’re laying off entire departments.