Microsoft Tens of Thousands of Layoffs Later
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
Microsoft, Tens of Thousands of Layoffs Later, Can’t Afford to Maintain Windows. Out Go the “Legacy” Components.
Microsoft is unable to tend to Windows anymore after the layoffs and lots of failed acquisitions of unprofitable albatross companies and products, so it starts dropping more “Legacy” components that are the sole reason why anyone is still using this disaster in 2023.
Today it was announced that VBScript is the latest thing that will be tossed “in a future Windows release”. People who are using Windows have no choice about what components get dropped, unsupported, and are unusable, unless they want to brick the update system entirely and get no security updates.
Also coming, is Wordpad being dropped. Microsoft says “go use the clown”, however at least one person on Paul Thurrott’s “SuperSite for Windows” was pretty upset because he says that sometimes a Microsoft “OOXML” document will get so corrupt that nothing but Wordpad can fix it, not even the “.docx repair tool” in Microsoft Word.
OOXML is a horrible format. Microsoft claimed it was an “ISO standard” after bribes and corruptions, but then they immediately violated their own (purchased) “standard” and have spent nearly 20 years not complying with their own “standard”.
Windows is a dying platform and it’s very clear that Microsoft is no longer interested in tending to it. The first thing to get yanked out will be “legacy solutions” that people still use. Next will come announcements that will piss more and more people off and make them wonder why they’re even claiming Windows is backwards compatible with itself.
A statement that is becoming even more outrageously false every day.
VBScript was introduced into Internet Explorer in the mid 90s.
It was an attempt by Microsoft to “NIH” JavaScript, because they wanted to purge the Web of all things Netscape, in ways petty (like renaming Secure Sockets Layer to TLS) and big (competing with JavaScript).
VBScript, like most Microsoft “technologies” was designed to “gain marketshare” and “make development easy”, not to be secure, so it was no surprise when .vbs became synonymous with a computer virus, many of which spread through E-Mail attachments.
At the time, I was a teenager and I started calling it the “Virus Script language”.
The Register is very very apologetic to Microsoft. It says that it “unfortunately” didn’t displace JavaScript. On top of all the other horrors of VBScript, it was Windows-only.
Imagine a Web today full of ActiveX controls, Silverlight, WMA/WMV, and VBS. Yuck.
Their entire goal with this junk was to hijack the Web and make it a Windows program, and carpet bomb everyone with Internet Explorer to do it.
They went to OEMs and told them if they loaded Linux, BeOS, or another Web browser on your computer, their Windows license costs would nearly double, so nobody did.
The result was a catastrophe that went on for years, but made Microsoft a lot of money.
Today we have a lot of other options, thankfully. It was very ironic to see “Satan Nadella” testifying about Google locking people into Google search to get the Play Store, and how the Android devices are all-but-useless without Google Play.
Microsoft has always behaved like this. There’s documented evidence of them behaving like this NOW. I have taken action against Lenovo to over this, and won.
Microsoft hasn’t changed much at all, but they’ve put out different press releases.
Fortunately, with tens of thousands of layoffs that are still ongoing, and unbolting components that people are too lazy to replace otherwise, Microsoft is signing their own death warrant.
If they can’t afford WordPad anymore, hopefully soon they’ll stop being able to afford to bribe and corrupt open source institutions. █