Grok has been integrated into Tesla vehicles, and I've had several voice interactions with it recently. Initially, I thought it was just a gimmick, but the voice interactions are great and quite responsive. I've found myself using it multiple times to get updates on the news or quick questions about topics I'm interested in.
I wish there was a "power user" mode in Windows that you could activate and you'd get the ability to have classic themes (my MS themselves), classic Control Panel, no constant nudging, no weather/Xbox/Solitaire apps, etc...
THe settings siutation is so annoying, there are still so many options locked away inside control panel and the new settings app has a few that dont exist in control panel, its so fragmented.
They tried that during the Chicago development and discarded the idea due to multiple problems with how humans work.
Two different UIs meant that you had to learn them separately, you didn't have a slow ramp from one to the other, one familiar with one could get stuck on the other with no knowledge of how to get back, divided efforts between the two, etc.
Not quite what you are asking for, but closer to Win95 shipping with progman.exe which could allow someone to cosplay Win3.11 while running Win95.
And yet they seem to have lost all that knowledge from Win8 onwards. WinForms, WPF, UWP, WinUI, MAUI... All of these with their own metaphores, design language, and they all feel half-baked, full of bugs.
It worked for China because they were in position of power. The US wasn't established in China and they needed Chinese users to grow their global user base and influence. Meanwhile, China had the wealth and power to say no and instead fund and develop their own homegrown tech equivalents.
Europe doesn't have that same level of power. If tomorrow morning you banned Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Salesforce in Europe, you'd destroy their economy.
What Europe needs to do is create the conditions for tech companies to emerge that could truly compete against US big tech. As long as European will prefer working for US corporation, there's no chance for Europe to compete. Simple as that.
I don't get your argument. Those companies provide overpriced crap to go along with domain specific code that is either open source or written by a more specialized company. If companies suddenly had to make intelligent choices and people would get fired for buying IBM, a bunch if companies would show up with better integrations than these since worse just isn't possible.
If a rush to get anything non-US were the priority the market of converting Chinese solutions would already deliver better solutions.. US tech (of this office sort) looks a lot like US steel plants a couple decades after other nations built replacements, that's why it is comical that Europe is not only using it but often using the very worst of it.
The P2P aspect of Skype was really interesting. I remember there were even physical handsets you could buy that had Skype built-in, which I thought were cool. I remember seeing business cards with Skype username on them also. That's how popular the thing was!
It's honestly baffling how we're still relying on old PSTN/phone numbers to reach people in 2025.
To me, that kind of product is what sets Apple apart from other companies in the industry. There's an optimism and playfulnes to that design that is refreshing.
Apple always made things for the users. Microsoft always made things to sell to corporations. Dell always did the same, and their consumer offerings were always a shallow and shitty shell over their corporate ones (and this is STILL true! The alienware towers are generally just an ugly veneer on top of an optiflex case/motherboard LOL).
While that all maybe true. All my Apple kit is dead from a decade or more ago except for the G4 Mac Mini (which is useless btw). The Dell and Thinkpads I have all still work and work quite well and are easy to repair. Repairing Apple stuff is always a nightmare and always more expensive.
The reality is most people are well served by either Windows and/or macOS.
Both platforms have received billions of dollars in developpment by MS and Apple over the years and both have an extremely rich and mature app ecosystems. For most people, there's no real need or desire to use anything else.
That's it.
It's not an issue of drivers, games or app compatibility. If there were serious demand for Linux on the desktop, there would be good money to be made there and these issues would get fixed pronto.
