Comment by 12_throw_away
4 hours ago
Yep, this is the sort of thing happens when you've deeply internalized that trustworthiness and continuity is not important. Microsoft today is not a serious company, it is not run by serious people, and it is at the forefront of a deeply unserious industry.
It's what happens when you don't have a backup strategy. Even paper works as a backup.
What does "serious" mean in this context?
In this context it would presumably mean not casually deleting your customers' data.
When people say a company is unserious they almost always mean that they're not thinking about, and taking seriously, the work that their customers do. This seems like a classic example of that.
producing an os with a focus on utility to end user would be a start. Even just something that makes some form of effort to give users a return on investment on their hardware. Right now, you unluck massive headroom, battery life, and stability, on a laptop by simple putting linux on it. All that despite windows enjoying better all around driver support from manufacturers.
A serious company would never have allowed its core product to turn into the clown show it currently is, yet here we are, a massive corporation pushes an OS that feels vibe coded, and is largly propped up by what little residual community goodwill/ignorance exsists.
Dependable.
It's just an internet meme phrase. "X is not a serious Y" just means that X is a joke.
It's a dumb phrase and overused in contexts like this.
"Is not serious" is not serious?
Microsoft is serious because the world is full of people with needs who do not know better and Microsoft is still the default to serve those needs.
Something does not have to be useful, benign, consistent, worthwhile, or deserving to exist in order to be serious.
For example: Losing an arm and an eye to a fireworks accident, being grievously assaulted in an alley, or having Microsoft arbitrarily delete all your data, are all very serious things. So, I think it is fair to say Microsoft can still be called serious.
No.
Just because an entity is able to do things with serious consequences, does not mean they are a serious entity.
For other examples, see school shooters in the US.
As long as the legal department is very serious, that might work rather well.