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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I think O365 is a bigger lockin than anything else. But you are right that AD/Entra, for example, is pretty much only because they also have the desktop market locked up. To the extent anyone bothers with Windows Server, which is almost no one anyway, it’s only because the desktop market, so that slice is at risk.

    So you have Excel/Powerpoint as the biggest lockins for them outside of Windows itself, but Azure is broadly considered an acceptable choice alongside AWS or GCE, and your cloud provider selection tends to be pretty vendor locked pretty much instantly.

    Of course, the bigger threat to them on the “desktop” is not so much RedHat/Ubuntu/SUSE as much as it is Android/iOS.

    Not about Windows 11, but another discussion where laptops are infeasibly expensive this year drove some people to report that their companies have begun moving technicians they formerly required to use a laptop to tablets and phones. Having a tablet-in-a-laptop form factor with Aluminium flavor of Android may be an attractive option between hardware costs and Windows 11 nonsense piling on top of long-term Windows desktop nonsense (companies pay microsoft and several security companies to try to wallpaper over security, and Android/iOS are very appealing for their more restrictive privilege model).


  • In this scenario, you have a number of these AI companies contributing to the hoarding having their equipment handled through ‘asset recovery’, which means that at least companies that can drive 15kw to a system and water cooling will probably get them on the cheap and run it on their premise, or in a colo. Maybe some of those parts will trickle down, but admittedly a good chunk of the stuff is hard to accommodate in a residential setting.

    Longer term, the hardware becomes obtainable as supply chains re-calibrate back to identcal or more close solutions. Ten years ago, a datacenter GPU was likely to be same hardware as consumer, but with a different thermal solution, firmware, and the video ports unpopulated. The AI rush has made them shift to exotic packaging so they can have absurdly unreasonable wattage in small places that doesn’t work in home settings. I anticipate a swing back that way eventually.








  • In terms of why some of the “goto” brands aren’t the best, it’s generally because they were the best, got popular on merit, and then business folk come along to suck the life out of it, spending brand goodwill while gouging customers and cutting costs.

    Some food product recipe changes to cheap, more shelf stable crap for mass production and easy logistics. Some device gets locked into a paid subscription. All the helpful service people get fired and replaced with chat bots and offshored/outsourced staff. Metal components replaced with cheap plastic that degrades. Shipping times increased so they can make everything an ocean away and give the boat time to travel. Also run big marketing pushes so it’s really hard to find the quality offerings.

    There’s just so many ways you can have big margins on big revenue by screwing customers while going they haven’t noticed the decline in quality. Very hard for investor class to leave good product alone.




  • I am not sure. They have other businesses but not sure those other businesses are able to sustain the obligations that nVidia has committed to in this round. They are juggling more money than their pre-AI boom market cap by a wide margin, so if the bubble pops, unclear how big a bag nVidia will be left holding and if the rest of their business can survive it. Guess they might go bankrupt and come out of it eventually to continue business as usual after having financial obligations wiped away…

    Also, they have somewhat tarnished their reputation with going all in on the dataenter equipment to, seemingly here, abandoning the consumer market to make more capacity for the datacenters. So if AMD ever had an opportunity to maybe cash in, well, here it might be… Except they also dream of being a big datacenter player, but weaker demand may leave them with leftover capacity…



  • While I think, technically, strictly correct, the big question wild be how much they could realistically “save”, and in such a hypothetical, would it really be significantly more encouraging results.

    Our, realistically speaking we are generally already looking at that reality, with people putting aside a relative pittance but still feeling that they live paycheck to paycheck, largely ignoring anything that goes toward retirement.

    I get it, I’ve had relatives buy stupid expensive pickups or muscle cars with obscene payment plans while barely keeping their heads above water, but even the more careful ones barely scrape by.