The gaming community was rocked today when the news broke that Microsoft acquires Activision Blizzard. Assuming this deal actually goes through, and the DOJ doesn’t intervene with another antirust investigation, how does this affect me? I’m quite vocal about my distrust and distaste for anything Microsoft. This news makes my toes curl.
However, Activision Blizzard hasn’t exactly been a paragon of virtue. While Microsoft has their faults, their employees are not running around groping co-workers. I have respect for a company that provides some innovation, but I cannot respect a company that exhibits such disgusting behavior.
Maybe This Is The Right Change
Activision Blizzard has been struggling for over 6 months now to repair the damage caused by the scandal. During that time the community suffered and many players, including several of my friends, have left the game. After every step forward, new information is found, and we go two steps backwards. Perhaps this is the dramatic change that needs to happen to rectify the sins of the past.
I’ll admit, I was feeling dead inside when the news broke. My wife had an interesting way to explain it though. It’s like when Disney bought Star Wars. At the beginning I had mixed emotions, but now I’m overjoyed. I hope Microsoft makes the right changes to repair the community and bring the game back to life. I imagine Microsoft will be cleaning house of all the people that should have already been fired.
I’ll admit, the gaming division is the lesser evil at Microsoft. As long as it’s XBox that runs the show, I will be cautiously optimistic. My biggest concern is if Microsoft can’t fix the damage. World of Warcraft is the longest running title at Blizzard but its been hemorrhaging players and money for a while. If Microsoft cannot stop the bleeding, WoW might be the first to go.
I’m hoping for the best.
Please share some of your thoughts.
I’m going a completely different direction for the August Top Five. Technology. It’s pretty well known among my peers that I am Microsoft’s biggest critic. While I do make a living using their technology that doesn’t mean I drank the proverbial kool-aid. Granted even Apple and Google have had their technical slip-ups but their list isn’t quite as embarrassing as Microsoft’s. The lesson Microsoft seems to fail to learn is that just because someone else is already doing it doesn’t mean they can do it better. X-Box is about the ONLY success story. I digress. Here are my top 5 epic Microsoft fails.
This Tech Talk is going to be a little different than prior posts in this category. I’m not going to talk about a new gadget, technology milestone or the latest news headline. I want to know what it takes to achieve lateral career development. You can advance your career along two axes. The common route is vertical by getting a promotion, perhaps a title change and some underlings. You can also advance your career along the horizontal axis (i.e. laterally). This is most often accomplished via some form of training. When you improve a skill set or acquire new skill sets, you are a better asset.
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do
I thought about making this a Tech Talk topic but I want those posts to be more informational and less opinionated. I’m also going to preface this post by saying that I did give Edge an honest try so I feel I’m being unbiased but I will admit, I probably wasn’t as open minded as I could have been when I was using Edge. I’m not going to berate Microsoft either for trying to “force” you to use Edge by making it your default browser upon upgrading. Despite Mozilla’s attempt at a flame war, if you paid attention to the install you could easily prevent that from happening and I’m not going to fault Microsoft for trying to change your default browser. They want people to try Edge and setting it as the default makes good business sense but they were wise to give you the option to switch it off.
Ok, enough giving Edge the benefit of the doubt because, as the title of this post suggests, I don’t have many nice things to say about Edge. In fact I straight up don’t like it. It doesn’t feel like a modern browser (which I’ve mentioned before). It’s so plain and boring. It has terrible space utilization (like all the blank space when you click/tap on the settings menu). Initially it does feel like it performs as well as Chrome but once you toggle all the suggested privacy settings it definitely feels slower (and its recommended that you turn off those privacy settings).
I could get so much more accomplished if I only had minions!
