Microsoft's Vanity Vapourware ('Lame Duck' Product for Trump and Biden Bailouts) Again "Discontinued"
Yesterday's report entitled "HoloLens 2 Discontinued: What’s Next for Microsoft AR Glasses?" (in our Daily Links already) has changed to something else, even if the <title> entity maintained the same string. It seems to have changed to "What Comes After HoloLens 2? Exploring Microsoft’s AR/VR Future" (sounds less negative) and we've captured that: (permanent archive)
Didn't we recently see this when Microsoft engaged in dodgy stuff with the British government and headlines were soon modified to not indicate Microsoft had engaged in entryism/corruption? Microsoft censors not only the press but also blogs; in due course it results in self-censorship due to writers' fear/hesitation. We should know because several Microsofters currently threaten us, but we do not buckle or capitulate to pressure.
Anyway, the above news has much at stake. Remember that "Microsoft's $22,000,000,000 Bailout from President Biden is Now at Risk" (August), as confirmed only weeks later. It ain't gonna happen! There was pushback.
As Ryan puts it, "Biden was trying to buy a bunch of these things with Defense money and the military said they had no use for them. God knows it's hardly unheard of for the government to buy entire warehouses of things just to "support industry" and then never use it. The Defense budget is something where you can spend whatever you want, on whatever you want, and nobody ever looks at it, or asks why something costs 10 times more than the contractor said it would. They still blame pilots for all the glitches and malfunctions the F-35 has, and it's caused several of them to crash. Including at least one where they were scrambling to try to retrieve it before the Chinese did. It's almost comical how much of the Defense budget is wasted."
"Elon Musk claims he wants to cut $2 trillion from government spending, but after mandatory spending, there's Defense and then there's Non-Defense Discretionary, and all of the Non-Defense budget is $1.7 trillion. Then there's debt interest, which is up to almost $900 billion [or more] a year now, and cannot be cut without defaulting on debt. This is like some sort of credit card sickness gone massively out of control, only on a scale of a country with 330 million people."
Ryan adds: "The last thing we need is more of these lemon socialism bills like TARP, "Chips and Science" (while Intel is busy firing everyone [1, 2] and setting up a working group with AMD, and might need a merger). The farm subsidies have always been bad, with government warehouses full of cheese and butter. Part of the reason the debt is out of control is the government tries to stimulate everything all at once, and it mostly leads to destruction of potential and debt. The government picking winners and losers is the reason why we have Intel where it is, and the reason why GM is firing everyone and will probably need another bankruptcy soon. The Biden administration forced them to make EVs that nobody could afford and which rotted on dealership lots. I was talking to 3 different dealers. A Chevy, a Buick, and a GMC/Cadillac dealer, and they all told me the same thing. Three different owners. They can't sell the damned things, nobody wants them. They ended up using them for company cars because they didn't want to take a loss of almost half of what the MSRP was supposed to be. There's probably some good things coming now that the Republicans are in control. It won't be all bad. One of the good things is they're going to kill these EV mandates. The whole point of setting impossible gas mileage standards is to de facto ban anything but electric cars so there's no choice in the market and customers have to figure out how to deal with all of the expensive breakdowns and cold days where it won't even charge because there's nothing else to buy. They've messed everything up with marketplace distortion."
Anyway, about Microsoft...
Our formal position (unrelated the above, which comes from IRC) is that Microsoft cannot keep a dying unit that makes almost no sales alive just for mere prospects of a bailout (which falls through because even the military turns it down). █