Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?
Minecraft would’ve died under Notch.
Same with wurm online
What what.
I thought Wurm online is essentially still dead 🤔
Still going strong 🤷
No, not dead. Works for me.
I agree But for a while he didn’t even do anything It was just jeb
And I think it could of worked out But even with all of the dumb stuff Microsoft brought I can’t say it was a bad thing
There was a social media site called MySpace in the early 2000s that got bought out and my friend Tom made out great and is now a successful photographer. The website went to shit, but my first online friend is living his best life.
MySpace actually just reverted back to it’s intended purpose which is for bands to post their stuff.
Its true intended purpose was online file storage, a full 300MB for free, which was gigantic at the time.
I had an account there before it died, then Tom bought the domain and made it a social network.
Both halves of that comment are incorrect. It wasn’t originally for posting music, it was an improvement of the concept of social networking that started as an alternative to Friendster.
The music stuff didn’t come until years later, and they never had anything you could consider a success in that department, especially after they deleted every song artists had previously posted to the site.
Also, just going in the website right now, that’s not the bands posting those articles. That’s not even people posting news on MySpace. It is literally just aggregating music news from other websites.
I don’t know how to quote, so here y’all go
“There was a social media site called MySpace“
I’ve never felt so old in my life.
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This was going to be my first answer. I had a boycott of ATI due to horrible driver support on Linux.
And now it’s just horrible drivers for windows.
/S? … a 5700xt owner.
Minecraft maybe? I would say at the minimum it’s a net neutral but considering how far off the deep end Notch is now I imagine it was a good thing.
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There were hints that he was already on that path and realized that if he didn’t get off when he did, he would have taken his game down too.
Yeah - he decided he wanted a billion dollars more than he wanted his friends. All he had to do was share.
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They’ve made some pretty awful changes to the game since. That being said, I bet minecraft would have fizzled out if microsoft didn’t purchase them. They’re still pumping out regular updates and its popularity is huge. I’d definitely consider the acquisition an overall win.
What awful changes
The game has overall become way too easy. 1.14 villagers completely broke gameplay making trading and building iron farms way too boring. The pre-1.14 mechanics were way more balanced and fun. Raid farms are just way too powerful especially with the nerf to natural spawning that 1.18 brought making witch farms basically unusable. Loads of features like that which just made things too easy. It feels like you’re rewarded too much for very little effort.
Chat reports and microsoft migration are also really controversial, of course.
Not to say that they haven’t made lots of positive changes but that’s my main gripe with the development over the past few years.
I think it’s only easy if you know all the tricks for farming and whatnot, normal players wouldn’t likely say it’s too easy necessarily, I also didn’t notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?
People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it’s nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is… Cool imo.
To be honest though, I can’t really get into vanilla in general, I’m always playing modded if I’m playing myself, tho I watch vanilla players like Hermitcraft
I also didn’t notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?
They entirely overhauled villager trading making it a game of just placing and breaking workstations to get the trades you want. The pre-1.14 mechanics were a lot better and more rewarding imo. Iron golem spawning was also totally overhauled and they’re just too dead simple these days. You can build a 900 ingot per hour farm in about 10 minutes or less.
People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it’s nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is… Cool imo.
I love farming, I’m a technical player so that’s my main focus. I’m saying that the recent changes have really diminished the skill and fun in creating certain farms. Like how portal based farms have been the new meta for basically everything. Just changing it so mobs have a cooldown period after spawning before they can go through portals would be a massive nerf and force people to actually develop cooler farm concepts.
But you’re a different kind of player then the “target” for these kinds of changes right? Think about kids playing Minecraft, you think they’re generally going to be setting up massive raid farms, shulker farms, etc? Probably not, they’d be playing it more “as expected”, which isn’t really “easy” unless you know the cheese farms you can build.
Same kind of thing with storage, there’s tons of storage systems out there that you can use, but majority don’t know about it unless they go out and find the information online.
What’s great about minecraft is that it can be enjoyed by kids but there’s a lot of depth to what you can do as well. No one complained that it was too difficult to make iron farms before the changes. Also kids likely aren’t farming thousands of obsidian blocks to make portal based farms either. There’s a balance that can be made.
Accidental delete.
Like forcing everyone over to a microsoft account, which will sneakily force you to hand over your phone number for verification for “suspicious activity” ~1 week after registration, no matter what you do or don’t do.
There was also something about channeling all server chat messages to a central filtering team/system, and irreversibly banning anyone who said something that’s not “child safe”, even if it was just on a private server where the measure was not turned off
I guess the Microsoft account thing I don’t really get, it wasn’t difficult to move it over in my experience but I already had several Microsoft accounts for Windows and Xbox stuff
Idk about the filtering thing, i definitely don’t like it in theory but also haven’t seen anyone actually banned/muted due to it, definitely doesn’t make sense that it’s enabled by default on private servers, should have been a realms only thing, then again a majority of servers with most of the population likely aren’t on realms
I guess the Microsoft account thing I don’t really get, it wasn’t difficult to move it over in my experience but I already had several Microsoft accounts for Windows and Xbox stuff
For new MS accounts they now require a phone number. Not at registration, but in a week after it.
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I think the development was reinvigorated when microsoft joined the team here.
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The whole ‘censorship’ narrative was a nazi psy-op. I literally didn’t even hear about it because I blocked all the mientubers for unrelated issues, and the one guy who did eventually tip me off its existence was essentially parroting talking points straight from that guy who I blocked after I caught him trying to groom his majority child audience that what Notch said on twitter was OK and he was being cancelled.
Like obviously I don’t trust macroshaft to do any chat moderation since they seem to think cracker is a deeply offensive racial slur but ret–d is just harmless banter, but when literally everyone making a stink about it is either an outright nazi propagandist or has close ties to one, it’s hard not to see what’s going on.
The most concerning thing to me is the fact that they can ban users from playing on their own servers. Moderation should be on the server owners imo. Microsoft being able to ban someone from their own server that they self host or pay to host via a third party is a big issue.
That being said, I don’t think that Microsoft’s moderation has been as apocalyptic as a lot of people made it out to be. It’s just the principle that I take some issue with.
Just set the server to offline mode…
That’s a security risk because users can log in as other users. Regardless, if you paid for the game, you should be able to play on third party multiplayer servers.
True on the risk aspect, there are authentication plugins you can get instead on the server side.
On the ban aspect, I don’t see people making this claim for Steam, if you get banned on Steam you lose all your games, not just a $30 purchase, and maybe don’t call people slurs in online text chat? Idk, it seems like it was just an overhyped concern with few actually getting banned that didn’t deserve it somewhat.
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The censorship is kind of rediculous, tbh I thought that was in before Microsoft. Don’t see the rest as negative, and development seems more stable in the new groove, with regular larger updates. Couldn’t vote on mobs at all before, and there is DLC for Minecraft??
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I’m not familiar with the detail of that one - was he always a lunatic, or did that come with the money following the buyout?
He always was a weirdo.
Yup. Comes with the nationality.
Source: am Norwegian
That is what I call untrustworthy source, to much conflict of interest.
First thing that comes to mind is Lamborghini which would not exist today if it were not acquired. It was on the verge of bankruptcy and ended up getting passed around a few times before being acquired by Volkswagen/Audi. I think the general consensus is that access to Audi’s technology brought some sophistication in the form of AWD, traction and stability control, and a bump in quality and reliability. I know they only make obscenely expensive cars that few people ever get to enjoy, but they were able to maintain a headquarters and factory in Italy with a few thousand employees which would have definitely shut down without the acquisition.
Edit: On the topic of cars, another example would be Red Bull Racing which originated as a small F1 team started in the 90s. It was bought by Ford and rebranded to Jaguar F1. Ford didn’t have much success with it, so they sold the whole team to Red Bull for $1. Red Bull went on to dominate from 2010 to 2013 and again from 2021 to present day.
What was Red Bull racing originally called?
IIRC Stewart Grand Prix and then Jaguar Squad. Not an F1 guy though so could definitely be wrong.
Not an apple fan really at all but buying that chip design company way back when seems to have been the right move. The M1 chip in my mbp is fantastic.
Even before that, Apple owes its very existence to an acquisition. Acquiring Next allowed them to abandon their dying OS and start anew with OS X, and brought back in founder Steve Jobs (who Apple had previously fired). With Steve Jobs at the helm, they made the computers cool again to buy some time before the iPod completely turned the company around.
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A similar thing happened with Pixar/Disney, where post acquisition Disney Animation Studios started to work a lot more like Pixar. Interestingly, Steve Jobs was also CEO and majority shareholder at Pixar up until that acquisition.
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Nah, that would’ve spread the company too thin. Apple needed that laser-focus approach they had in the iPhone days, else they’d be dead.
An incredibly rare example of ‘I won’t buy it unless you pay me to’ actually working out in real life.
It has some dumb problems though. Lack of dual monitor support and virtualization issues are painful for my users.
Ive been running 2 1440p monitors off a M1 Mini since it’s launch, one over HDMI and one over DisplayPort via USB C… What’re you talking about?
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Windows 11 has 64bit ARM support with emulation for 64bit x86 apps, Windows 10 only does 32bit afaik.
They can’t take the same step as Apple of just killing off x86 because they don’t control all aspects of the devices like Apple does
Not saying I like the forceful move to ARM, I’m honestly not sure how worth it it will be in the long run, but who knows.
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They 100% have been selling ARM windows machines for years now, they just suck in comparison to x86
They did push for universal binaries, but no devs wanted to make the switch, I actually appreciate that Windows didn’t bork all prior applications unilaterally like Apple does with most of their OS releases (I work for a company that has a program with Linux/windows/macOS and I swear every single major macOS update breaks shit and Apple doesn’t give a fuck)
I don’t see the performance being comparable yet, at least in my experience the power of ARM is much more in its energy efficiency, it simply does not compete in actual real world power (at least yet)
Ultimately I think it comes down more to Apple vs Windows approaches, Apple controls every aspect of every official device running macOS, windows is much more free form with so many manufacturers and different configurations being possible.
I would never willingly purchase an Apple device for that reason, but I also like Linux, just too much of a gamer to constantly want to worry about compatability.
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Can you not just install Windows 11 normally on an ARM processor? I would think it’d be included with a normal installer but idk for sure, do people even build custom ARM rigs?
Its sort of a give and take though still, you can’t really build a hackintosh without very specific parts so… The fact there is no “macOS for ARM” copy available at all makes the point somewhat moot no?
UWP still exists, Microsoft is like the only one still developing them though, there are a few others but it’s definitely not a focus for any devs outside of Microsoft that I’ve seen.
Though I do agree that Apple generally sticks to their decisions whether for better or for worse :p
GitHub started adding new good features after being acquired by Microsoft
didn’t they like… scrape everyone’s open source code for an ai and then gatekeep that shit to their own infra?
Thats kinda hard to prove though
And now Azure DevOps has completely been forgotten about. I was setting up an web app in Azure and it gave me the option to do continuous integration from GitHub, but not Azure DevOps.
This one hurts. My team at work currently uses AzDO for our build pipeline. It works pretty well, making it easy to trace which build actually got deployed, plus which git branch and commit got built. The variable substitution feature is pretty slick for test vs. prod builds, too.
You can put together continuous integration with Github Actions, but from what I’ve seen so far, it seems so much more primitive :(
One could make the argument for Disney buying Marvel. They made some great movies. They had also then had enough cash to buy back X-Men, etc and bring everything back in under Marvel Studios. Not a big fan of Marvel stuff lately, but everything up through Endgame was great, especially for a comic nerd like myself.
I enjoyed the story arc leading up to Endgame, but since then, they’ve filmed so much that I just feel like I can’t keep up. The last movie I watched was Multiverse of Madness where I spent about half the movie going “Huh, I feel like I’m missing stuff from the Wanda TV show”. I had never seen Spider-Man: No Way Home, either. And I guess there was a Loki show and a Marvel “What If” series, too?
Being a Marvel fan shouldn’t have to be a job!
With Disney buying starwars I didn’t like what they did with the sequels but just about everything else they did amazingly
“Great” meaning great gigantic messes of nonsensical fanservice and a flood of movies and shows all tied to each other so if you miss one episode of Obscure Marvel Kerfuffle Re-re-revisited you’ll be lost.
You know, like fucking Star Wars is now.
Disney is fucking evil. Fuck Disney.
Were you around when “The Secret War” series came out in the comics? The plot line ran through every single title in the Marvel catalog. Just keeping up with Spiderman required reading four issues. That strategy of story telling wasn’t invented by Disney.
They didn’t have to copy it, now did they? Just because something was shit before something else was shit isn’t a fucking excuse.
As others have said, something being stupid in the past doesn’t excuse it being stupid now. And hey, I’d get it if we were still dealing with a couple movies a year, but now it’s a flood of content that nobody can keep up with unless Marvel is their only hobby.
My dude… the plot lines in comic books were so convoluted that the writers literally came up with an in canon catastrophe to clean up the timeline by collapsing countless alternate universes. Superhero movies being tied to each other and having a convulted mess of a plot that makes you feel lost if you miss “obscure marvel kerfluffle 3 wrath of the plot device” is very on brand for comics based media.
And that’s where comic books went to shit, too. Do kids these days really have no real arguments for anything besides citing even more bullshit to support their bullshit?
- old man yells at comic book
Disney is literally racist, sexist, homophobic… Etc. You name it. They cave to China for money every time, even if it’s shrinking or even removing black people from their posters
YouTube got better before it got to whatever it is now
Volvo has done way better under Geely than they ever have under GM.
Volvo has done way better under Geely than they ever have under
GMFord.Oops, you are right! It is Ford.
From what I heard, Geely bought them and just said “here’s a bunch of money, do whatever the fuck you want”, and they suddenly started making good stuff.
I wish someone would do that to me, haha
Geely did improve their quality and safety significantly by using Volvo’s engineering expertise so it is a win-win for both, and I hope they’ll revitalize Proton and Lotus the same way.
We had a local grocery chain get bought out by whole foods (before it was amazon). They went from 80% bullshit homeopathic vitamin shit and 20% old rotting produce to stores with actual (if overpriced) food. I’m sure the local vegans and crystal mommies were sad, but I thought it was a huge improvement.
Any chance that was Wild Oats?
Hahaha yes
Android being bought by Google
Up to a point, now it feels worse and worse every new version.
I’ve been feeling lately that Google has lost the plot. Material You is an ugly, inconsistent mess, usability is worse, and you can’t expect any feature to stick around because Google is so unreliable.
Android 11 was the last version that felt refined and stable. It was clean, usable, and organized.
I’m going to say 10 because I think 11 was when they first started making it difficult to move apps to SD card external storage and for me that was the beginning of the fuckery.
It’s hard to justify keeping a feature around that potentially breaks new features for such a small population tbh.
Honestly, it feels like Google lost the plot (for the most part) almost a decade ago. Android was really the only product that was consistently chugging along; most of their projects have been nothing but premature cancellations, even if the product was actually good (I’m looking at you, Inbox).
I’m currently really mad at them for setting up to cancel Google Podcasts just so they can move podcasts into YouTube Music.
Why do these companies keep having to consolidate functions into ever-more complex apps? What happened to the separation of function so that they do one thing really well instead of many things poorly?
You know out of all things i miss the candy names
It seems they still use dessert-based codenames internally. Apprently, Android 13 is Tiramisu, and Android 14 is Upside-Down Cake.
We’d be up to Android “Toffee” with Android “Uncooked Cookie Dough” coming out soon.
🤯 Holy crap how did I not know this! I thought they developed it in house!
Looked up the history and they bought it so early on that effectively the whole thing was developed by Google.
They bought the startup in 2005 and the first phone came out in 2008.
Android used to be it’s own thing, check out the “Droid” phones.
What do you mean by this? What did Motorola Droid phones have to do with Google owning Android or Android being it’s own company back in like… 2003? The first Droid used Android as developed by Google in 2009. Google had aquired Android years prior to Droid being a thing. Most Android devices are not created by Google, even to this day.
I didn’t realize that Google owned the company at that time. I don’t remember the advertisements blasting Google’s name like they tend to do now. I know that most Android phones aren’t made by Google, I was mistaken in thinking the Droid was a popular android device prior to acquisition
“droid” was actually a verizon brand, not motorola or google. any droid-branded phone was a verizon rebranding of a phone that was sold as something else outside the US.
but yeah, android never existed outside of google. Google bought out android before their first public release.
This is exactly why they started blasting their name on everything lol
I think android 7 was where it peaked with development and features.
It’s been jvm dalvik hell since then with Google taking a dump on the Linux kernel.
Perhaps 8 or 9 in my opinion - removing background clipboard access in 10 was a Huge defeature.
I jumped from 8 to 13 on my (new) personal devices, so I missed a lot of firsthand experience, but the clipboard thing still affected me by making apps like Google Translate worse.
13 does seem pretty nice in a lot of ways - notifications are even more capable than they were in 8, for example. But I do notice it being more restrictive in some ways too.
YouTube too. For all the shit we give Google for it, there’s no way it could’ve grown into what it is if it didn’t have all that spare cash to burn.
Here’s my full list:
You forgot:
i don’t see what you did there
I just saw a Jaguar that actually looked pretty nice. I hadn’t seen a decent Jaguar since Ford bought them out. So I guess Tata did something right in allowing some style back rather than them just looking like a Ford. But I can’t vouch for the rest of the car, just that it looked nice, which is something the original Jaguars always had going for them. That unique style.
Saw one in traffic the other day and loved the look but wondered if they still live in the shop these days
Great looks and shit everything else would be super on-brand for Jaguar
You don’t like the XJS?
The original is one of my all time favorite car styles. The post-Ford version just looked like a Ford with a mutated Jag frontend stuck on it. The rear shape and lights especially made it literally feel like a Ford sedan ran up the ass of an XJS and the face of the Jag is making an oh shit face. You couldn’t tell it was a Jag at all from the rear or sides.
Ah OK I was mistaken and under the impression that it was originally created under Ford ownership, but it actually stems from the British Leyland era.
However the XJR-15 and XJ220 were under Ford, and look sensational. (Although most of the development was probably done while Jag was still independent).
This is a pretty good example of a mental bias. Most of the times this happens it’s the expected result, so nobody bothers to remember.
Like I can’t remember one either. But there’s a lot of companies that have been rescued from disaster and turned back around into forgettable mediocrity. I just … can’t think of one.
Right? The tagline is always something like “new owner will give us the capitol we need to achieve ____ goal,” and that makes sense from a business standpoint, but every example I can think of involves the new owner just milking the brand until it collapses.
If you really want to find some, just go look through the holdings of some large holding companies. They didn’t make those, they bought them. I’m sure you can find some that were bought at bargain basement prices as more troubled assets and stabilized. Berkshire Hathaway might be a decent place to start.
