
Your Parents Love You.
Everyone else thinks you're shite!
Microsoft's decided its Cortana speech assistant needs a bit of buffing to survive in a world where Google AI can book restaurants and a parrot can turn the lights off with Alexa*, so the company has acquired a conversational-AI startup called Semantic Machines. The company announced the purchase by saying its goal is …
But the sleaze is still there.
Even without an account, you still get nagged by it, pop-up ads, onedrive installed (and nags), and bing advert covering 25% of your taskbar... not to mention every keystroke on the start menu gets sent back.
So many hoops to jump through to disable it all, and even then you can't be certain... then the slate it wiped clean on the next enforced upgrade.
These days, if you've already suffered through the awful Cortana assistend Win10 installer that just drives you nuts, you probably already want to kill her by the time the installation has finished - it is THAT annoying.
It does make you wonder how many more billions MS will throw at Cortana before conceding defeat though - she deserves to die a death by a thousand cuts.
Well, Microsoft has plenty of cash to burn. It needs its 'me too' moments to stay relevant.
Remember Silverlight? Microsoft always wants to come up with its own proprietary stuff, couldn't even leave Adobe Flash alone.
I'm utterly cynical of Microsoft's acquisitions. Case in point: Linkedin is terrible now.
Nokia was HUMILIATED by Microsoft during the reign of Mad Elop.
Microsoft had actually forced Nokia to make a Windows RT tablet, because since Lumia-Windows Nokia phones were not selling well, let's double down and get Nokia (which had never made a tablet before) to produce something that was selling even worse!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Lumia_2520
@AC - don't be mean to "JJ Carter", who is after all just another AI experiment from Microsoft:
IF ($article-text.contains("Microsoft"))
{
post_reply ("thank you for this two-minutes hate")
/* TODO: can't get this next line to work properly, right now it segfaults every time */
/* post_reply ($well-reasoned-argument-carefully-and-eloquently-rebutting-the-article) */
}
Apparently, we're supposed to see Microsoft as the Emmanuel Goldstein de nos jours.
JJC is less annoying than Cortana, but only just.