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Well if Is seagate reacts by locking down firmware, and deleting the resellers that knew they were getting non factory shipped equipment then this is fine. Part of the issue is the scale was so large some resellers didn’t know, because they purchase from another larger stock company and rightly assume everything is factory original when ordering.
Not sure, someone went to great lengths to pull off a large scam. A smaller scale one was an amazon purchased Xbox drive that did the bait and switch. They put a newer controller board on an ancient drive, wiped SMART in some way, and put it into the Xbox drive caddy with a Void if remove sticker across the seam. Curious at some point, I opened the caddy, to find what I thought was a new drive, was on old board but with an ancient drive covered in dirt and oil all over it. Like they didn’t bother to wipe the grime off since it was covered in the plastic caddy. Scammers going to scam.
As VP of Prime Gaming at Amazon, we failed multiple times to disrupt the game platform Steam. We were at least 250x bigger, and we tried everything. But ultimately, Goliath lost. Here’s why:
The 15+ year long attempt to challenge Steam started before I was VP of Prime Gaming, but we never cracked the code. Not under my leadership or anyone else’s.
The first way we tried to enter the online-game-store market was through acquisition. We acquired Reflexive Entertainment (a small PC game store) and tried to scale it. It went nowhere.
Then, after buying Twitch, we created our own PC games store. Our assumption was that gamers would naturally buy from us because they were already using Twitch. Wrong.
Finally, we built “Luna,” a game streaming service that let people play without a high-end PC. Around the same time, Google tried the same thing with their product “Stadia.” Neither gained significant traction. The whole time, Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company (compared to Amazon and Google).
The mistake was that we underestimated what made consumers use Steam.
It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well.
At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers, but we underestimated the power of existing user habits. We never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions. The truth is that gamers already had the solution to their problems, and they weren’t going to switch platforms just because a new one was available.
We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either.
Just because you are big enough to build something doesn’t mean people will use it.
Reflecting on these mistakes, I realize how crucial it is to deeply understand customers before making big moves. That’s why James Birchler’s guest newsletter caught my attention—his piece is a practical guide on obtaining real customer insights and using them to challenge entrenched assumptions that can hurt product success.
James breaks his advice down into three key steps, illustrated with stories from his time as VP of Engineering at IMVU:
- Talk to Real Customers Before Writing Code
- Test Assumptions, Not Just Features
- Build Measurement Into Your Process
After explaining how he learned these lessons the hard way (getting screamed at by customers and board members), James shares action items you can implement within a week to improve how you understand your customers.
I wish Amazon had followed James’ playbook before trying to take on Steam. But since we didn’t, at least you can.
I’m on opensuse, which has a direct download from nvidia repos, it has been great. Almost all my steam games work. One complains it needs some unity c library , prompts to install then it runs. On the next run it says same thing, but since it is installed dialog prompts yo unistall, I say OK and game runs LOL
I got the notice to update to 11 a long time ago, then months later a notice my work laptop did not comply with requirements of TPM, but CPU OK.
For my HP workstation it had TPM 1.x and there was a firmware update that brought chip up to TPM 2.0. After I did that the W11 then said CPU doesn’t pass.
Then recently CPU is fine. LOL
They don’t even know what they want.
For home stuff everything is moved to Linux.
They still happen even on W10, but we support a lot of customers, that have a lot of users, so I probably encounter them more than a person with one or two PCs ( just statistically)
Often it were would be network or monitor connection.
HP workstations laptops I could blue screen consistently by plugging in my phone set to USB network tether. Immediate NDIS bluescreen. I don’t blame windows 100% for that, it just didn’t like seeing a new network device in the Kernel
Just got a W11 laptop new from work, (replacing a dead W10 machine). It is such a mess. It is trying hard to be a modern desktop like KDE Plasma or GNOME, but without a cohesive setup. And bluescreened twice already, had a WebApp failure error, and locked up completely another time at login. This is brand-new Out of the Box.
You sir are deluded. And maybe that is by ignorance, Please go watch any of countless Louis Rossman videos about how apple claims a device irrepairable and he fixes it for 5 dollars. Etc. Soldered RAM, faulty switches , bad display cable, all easy fixes that the geniuses will suggest you buy new because it will cost as much to fix. Apple is an e waste producing company.
As for scanning peoples data, it already proved that it did more harm than good. CSAm people just change behaviors ur, and you have legit people having their accounts frozen and police called when their doctor during covid asked for photos of skin rashes. It is hard for an innocent guy to live down arrest for false child porn. Don’t drink all the koolaid.
365 is helpful, but feature parity between app and web app is not perfect, and files done in web have compatibility issues when somebody opens on app version. Also have had issues on collaboration where somebody left their laptop open with autosave on, so all my changes and corrections kept getting overridden whenever their system autosaved. Terrible implementation.
Apple will happily throw away a good machine to sell you a new one, their eco friendlyness and repairability scores are self scored bullshit.
Having police access to everyone’s phone would not make people safer. You would not have enough police to monitor and it is a backdoor for hacking.
Just like Intel Management Engine that gave hackers passwordless entry into machines. Having control like that is not safety.
Plus anyone with physical access is going to defeat security anyway.
My linuxOS has a MOC signed by microsoft, an OS can work on TPM with a signature…hackers will find a way to spoof into it
I had an HP Zbook Workstation. With TPM1.x Initially said get ready for W11, then months later meeage: this model fails TPM 2.0 requirement, CPU OK. I used HP firmware tool to upgrade from TPM 1.x to TPM2.0. A recheck with W11 a few months later: TPM OK, CPU no good. Last month the message about the system not being upgradeable to W11 disappeared and replaced with a link: to learn more about W11. Wtf. Do they even know what system requirements they need?
I still have my Logitech BT mouse from 2005. Still working great. Are their newer products bad?