AliExpress isn’t the problem here. This is fake Shopify sites spun up and down in a matter of days that only exist to harvest info and payment. I’ve placed dozens of AliExpress orders, I always get what I ordered even from new stores.

Wow it’s almost like buying up half the gaming industry and then producing literally nothing wasn’t a great idea.

I don’t think that’s a fair interpretation, I think Microsoft absolutely intended what they said here, that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows. Hence the shift in development strategy. Annual breaking updates rather than new full releases, the new month-year versioning cycle, free for anyone with a valid Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 license.

I think the goal was to eventually drop the “10” and for it to just be Windows as a service, where major versions don’t really matter and the UX slowly evolves over time rather than in one big change.

Then, something happened. Obviously this is purely speculative, but I suspect either the executive championing this strategy left, or they saw it cutting into their profits more than they anticipated, or enterprises complained about frequent breaking updates, who knows. Then Windows 11 appeared out of nowhere. The signalling from MS for enterprise was clear. Stop monolithic imaging and site-wide rollouts, instead test applications with a pilot group and then push the annual releases wide if no issues are found.

I definitely think something changed. While you’re right that this is the only quote supporting it directly, when asked in follow-ups Microsoft went out of its way to NOT deny the statement or confirm it. If the plan was the status quo, they would have just said “we have not changed our release model at this time” but they didn’t. They knew full well that based on how widely reported that quote was, people would infer that it was the strategy. If they felt so strongly that it was just a simple misspeaking, they would have said so.

Yeah because PlayStation Now, OnLive, Stadia, xCloud, GeForce Now & Luna were such rousing successes.

When are people going to realize that the AAA gaming crowd just isn’t interested in Cloud gaming? They have oodles of disposable income, “cost” is not a real barrier to entry for this group.

Microsoft should abandon the Xbox and offer some kind of BC program, I agree with that. But any box is as good as the next. Offer xCloud and game streaming on everything, stop making hardware, and publish games for PS5, PC, and Switch where it makes sense.

Maybe it’ll take off, maybe it won’t. But the actual console part of the business isn’t doing them any favours, they’re just PCs sold at crappy margins now.

Underlying technology is completely different. One is Swift, one is React. It talks about this on the GitHub.

This is one of those cases where two is better than one, because not everyone can contribute to a Swift app, and multiple projects isn’t splitting effort, it’s bringing on people who wouldn’t otherwise be involved at all.

Plus, probably worth having a few going just because there is so much activity now. Mlem is moving a little slower than I had hoped so while I’d prefer a native Swift iOS app, this one is already a little more functional and it’s the first release.