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Microsoft postpones Windows Recall after major backlash — will launch Copilot+ PCs without headlining AI feature
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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How this usually goes:
Introduce new controversial feature
Backlash
Postpone deployment
Soften public opinion with marketing, rename product, change minor features, etc
Deploy product regardless
Enshittification complete (Until next time!)
You forgot put the option back in a random windows update without prior knowledge
Yup, you’re right. I had a bullet for that originally, but changed it.
You are absolutely correct. All the focus groups and consultancies that were surely involved in something like this and we're supposed to believe the backlash was a surprise?
This is what is happening at Redmond right now:
This is hilarious.
I love the faith, too. Like, of Microsoft, of all people. The "your Xbox is your cable box now" Microsoft. The "Here's mandatory Kinect, the Wii killer" Microsoft. The Windows Me Microsoft. The "Windows 8 is now a touch OS" Microsoft.
I gotta say, you guys really give tech companies the benefit of the doubt. I've seen too much, perhaps.
In that vein, let me propose a more accurate picture: https://img.movieboom.biz/movie/screen/681/19.jpg
The EEE Microsoft...
Unless not attaching one was your punchline, I think you forgot to attach one. :)
No, I did. I can see it.
Welcome to the Fediverse, where me attaching a picture and you seeing the picture are not necessarily the same thing.
Hey, I am an equal opportunity criticiser. Fedia/Kbin/Lemmy suck at this.
I added a text link, at least, but that's already way too far to go for that joke.
Ah thanks. I think you underestimate them, they've proven they are capable of executing even if everything hasn't landed.
But I'm never unhappy about a Spaceballs reference. 🙂
Before I had to try twice for Fedi reasons, I was mostly pushing it for the joke.
But honestly, this is so on brand for MS. They came up with a superficially marketable idea, botched the execution, then botched the marketing even harder. Then Apple came up with the same feature and everybody liked it.
The idea that this is them playing the long game is hilarious. Not only is that not how big software companies work, it is definitely not how MS works. People just want to sound worldly and cynical and instead come across paranoid and delusional. The idea that everybody working on this knew it sucked and they shipped it anyway is extremely plausible.
Can they execute? Sure! But can they also get stuck failing to push back on a bad idea until they end up shipping something nobody likes? Often, objectively. And almost always subjectively because they also consistently suck at branding their stuff, both the good and the bad.
Entire tech industry does this over and over again. The only way to stop dancing along is to switch to Linux instead of praying to Microsoft or Apple corporations.
All hail Linux, the One True King
At some point I'm gonna get bored of reminding people of this.
Hey, remember Timeline?
That's how you know this isn't how it works.
Did MS derive any particular benefit from Timeline? It was a lot more localised as far as I recall. Recall seems geared to give them a lot more data that they could monetise.
Nope, it's the exact opposite. Timeline looked a lot more like Apple's Recall equivalent they're rolling out. It monitored your activity, not just your screen, and then stored the output on the "cloud" so it could be shared across computers.
I don't want either, but if you ask me if I want my screen recorded on-device or my logged activity shared across all machines and stored on MS's servers I'll take Recall any day.
So my point is, Timeline didn't "soften" anything. It went away on the launch of Win11. And nobody was "softened" because when it resurfaced as "Recall" everybody freaked right out immediately all over again. Bad ideas are bad ideas. You can wait for people to get over minor inconveniences or tradeoffs, or just live with whatever percentage of people find something to be a dealbreaker if the value you extract from it is way higher than the business you lose. But a bad idea is a bad idea.
Also my point: people here don't know how to take a win. Recall is gone, I'd expect it to never come back, unless Apple does MS's job for them and when it resurfaces it works exactly like the Apple feature that works exactly like Recall without anybody freaking out about it.
Makes me think of Rewind.ai but you’re referring to how Siri can use context from your screen when you ask it? A feature distant from Recall/Rewind.
Might be missing something.
They just announced an AI integration across the entire OS for iOS, iPadOS and MacOS. Basically they'll log all your activity and feed it to multiple AI models to let you ask for what you want, as they describe it. It mostly looks like Timeline but with AI search and assistant features bolted on to it.
They did a good job of not making it sound as creepy as Recall... but it kinda is.
Gotcha, made a couple posts about their announcements.
Techies - AI skeptics - seem widely impressed (per ArsTechnica and Hacker News and Mastodon posters). Since your description is at odds with my understanding, I will review some more details. Thanks.
Yeah, I've been talking for a few days about how bizarre it is to see the difference in reception to what is conceptually a couple of very similar features. It's nuts how good Apple are at selling this sort of stuff almost with zero correlation to what it is that they're selling.
Which is, I suppose, why nobody will ever bring up having said that the Vision Pro was an iPhone 1.0 moment. They know who they are.
Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit and they aren't that good. Admittedly MS did an amazing job at making this Recall thing seem as unappealing as possible at every step, so... maybe the bar was just that low.
Interesting. Gonna find the source of “they'll log all your activity and feed it to multiple AI models”
Lol, apple is not logging what your doing, the apple AI just has access to that data directly, no need to copy data from apps you already Control. AppleAI is just a Process that has Access to a lot of data, un fact, any data that any app offer through the API Apple Designes. So that means the AppleAI sees only what the dev of the app want the AppleAI to see. Best case, you can set what you want to give appleAI access to in each app.
I want to ask you, where do you see the difference to Spotlight? Spotlight is also a Process that scanns all your data..
For the record, MS also had stated that users can exclude specific applications from Recall and devs can exclude specific screens or content from being recorded.
I'm not sure that "Apple already indexes and has unfettered access to all your granular data" isa good defense, either. That's... worse. Although for what it's worth it does seem like this AI thing is way more intrusive than Spotlight, in that it's not just searching keywords inside files it can parse, it is connecting data from multiple sources to generate context about you, some of which is being processed off-site. I don't think it's as easily expoitable as the 1.0 version of Recall MS described, but if your concern is with an AI or a corporation having access to information, or to compromising information being accessed through easy search by anybody with local access... well, yeah, it's all degrees of bad here.
Didn't you and I already litigate this in a different thread? I'd rather not rehash that.
It is not defence for god sake 😂 I wanted to Point out, that apple has not planned to add somthing like recall to their Systems.
Recall is not the same as copilot!
Racall is not the same as AppleAI.
But AppleAI is pretty much the same as Copilot.
AppleAI does nothiing, if you don‘t use a Feature that sends a promt to it.
Copilot neither.
Only the recall Feature Collecting data that did not exist before that Feature started.
And I think apple has not more data now with appleAI about you than before. If they want your data, iCloud has it all, either you use apple and don‘t care or not. Suddenly stopping to use Apple devices because of AppleAI makes no sense, most likely the same for Microsoft, if recall is opt in.
I don't think that's correct. Recall will not draw any data from any app you don't actively display onscreen. In fact it will not draw any data you don't specifically display on screen. Apple's Recall will know about data that is stored in applications whether you open it or not, as it's been explained, but it will work with specific applications drawing from specific data (and it does also look at your screen, although it's not clear if it does that constantly or on demand).
Just to quote the current Apple Intelligence landing page. This is posted by Apple itself as promo materials:
That sure sounds to me like Siri now looks at you screen, logs your past activity, or at least searches through pre-existing system logs of your activity, and has access to and processes all your information.
Again, Recall and "AppleI" will both draw different sets of data, but they are both drawing new data at the system level. And they're both making context inferences on your data. Sure, the process is different, they each have issues the other doesn't (MS's 1.0 version had glaring security holes and it's too human-readable, Apple's version is sending your data to a server for processing, instead of being all on-device), but it's fundamentally doing the same thing with the same startling access to your data. Both companies insist they're not logging your data anywhere outside your device. To me, that's not enough in either case.
"We listened."
They did. That's how they know this tactic works.
And they will be sure to make every "mistake" people warned them about in stage 2 when they reach stage 5.
5.1 Toggle the customer's opt-out setting back to opt-in every time there's a Windows update.
5.2 Remove the opt-out setting completely.
Holf off the release, half of America is currently in the restroom....