This is an absurd concept when it comes to international trade. Even intellectual property is mostly meaningless outside a state. Of course people will evade sanctions; what is the us going to do, invade singapore or malaysia?
> This is an absurd concept when it comes to international trade.
In this case it's just wrong. I don't know what people think "e-waste" recycling actually is or what happens to their "unrepairable" units after they rid themselves of them.
> Even intellectual property is mostly meaningless outside a state.
Interestingly the Dollar is most definitely meaningful outside of our state. I think the assumption becomes, that if this is true, then using it's power to enforce trade sanctions isn't that big a stretch.
> Of course people will evade sanctions
What's less clear if they should expect their government to actively help them in this evasion or not. I think the Chinese citizens are in unique international territory here.
> what is the us going to do, invade singapore or malaysia?
Deny our exports to them. This will cost the political donor class a lot of profits. So this is why it doesn't get done.
None of this is a fait accompli. This is the result of years of intentional corruption of the core systems involved.
Just because something is hard to enforce doesn't mean it's absurd.
Embargoes aren't impossible to enforce against the foreign importer. If a foreign entity is found to have placed orders with false documents, they can be sanctioned, which can be enforced against any of their international operations. It makes it hard for them to do future business in global markets. I would not recommend violating US sanctions no matter where you are.
> Just because something is hard to enforce doesn't mean it's absurd.
Expecting to strangle world markets with intellectual property as your moat is absurd. You can only fight honest competition with dishonest means for so long, and intellectual property is one of the dirtiest tricks in the book.
The companies it "stole" from broke the law in their own country while acquiring the training data; frankly sanction avoidance is lesser and arguably not even their (it's the people in US that smuggle them, nothing breaking china law afaik) crime
When texting took off, it was the easiest (only) way to send instant text based messages between friends wherever you were, even if the phone system is now heavily used by spammers and there are better options.
When Facebook took off, every Myspace page was so full of garbage that they barely loaded on most people's computers, and Facebook was slick and shiny and easy. The real name policy made it super easy to connect with people you met IRL. Even if it's now confusingly slow and FB Messenger can't display your recent chats in the correct order for some reason, it was the easiest most obvious option at the time.
I don't really understand why people use Twitter (at its best it just seems like a worse version of RSS), but the site presumably loaded quickly at some point and was easy to use, even if it's presumably worse now.
And so on. They persist through momentum.
Some things continue to persist, some things get beat out and die. But if you start off more confusing than your alternatives, at least compared to when they started, you won't get picked up in the first place.
> I don't really understand why people use Twitter
The honest answer is that it isn't the content(RSS feeds), but the combat sport nature of the platform. It's the only place where you can tell a billionaire any kind of awful thing you can think of. It's also the only social media that drives important people insane. The wealthier they are, the more insane they'll be driven.
Facebook will drive your meemaw insane with AI generated ads of legless veterans being given a cake.
Twitter will drive the richest man on earth insane. It will drive every journalist at any paper of merit insane by interacting with the insane billionaires. Nearly every journalist who uses twitter enough will develop delusions of grandeur that their brand of psychopathy is the solution to the nation's woes. Since their bosses have also been driven insane via twitter, it's the kind of writing that gets published. This writing will take the insane delusions of the insane billionaires at face value. It will go along with conspiracy and never beg any question that actually needs answering.
Twitter drives them all insane the same way that we used to marvel at the way celebrities got driven insane by fame. The feedback is going straight to their heads and they are losing touch with reality isolated in their little bubbles the same way celebrities get isolated from reality through their wealth.
> It turned out that the strength of the HTML ecosystem was its fault tolerance.
I don't think this was a "strength" of html so much as a necessity to not break the internet. I certainly preferred the formal nature of xhtml to html 5. But, we're stuck with needing to render obviously formally-broken documents.
The benefit accrues to developers, who get more consistent behavior across browsers. In the bad old days, errors that one browser might silently recover from would trigger unspecified recover behavior on other browsers that wasn't consistent.
Office 365 these days is SSO (Include Enterprise cloud apps in the bargain),Cloud Documents, Email, Teams(Telephony and Chat) . Word, Excel and Outlook, what outsiders think of as "office" client side apps, are just a gimme. Heck thats just in brief, most of my customers are in deeper than that. Throw in Cloud Compute, and VDI as experiences that are just that much easier using Azure and 365 than other providers.
Not to mention, the data guarantees around Copilot are super enterprise compatible. Its not that companies want copilot, its that they know if they don't provide a solution, users will desire path into something with dodgy data security. So they provide "The Best" in the IBM sense of protecting the business and their jobs, which is Copilot.
It takes a bit of doing but your end state is, user logs into PC, signs in SSO, they get all their apps (remote and local), their emails, their documents, their collab and neither they or you need to think about it.
Oh and to continue, theres the whole Purview suite which is purpose built to integrate into large business data security incidents. I know of MSPs who wont be seen without Exchanges litigation hold / related tools because they have been saved from prosecution. Defender has not just grown more tentacles its like 3 different complete octopi at this point. Defender for Endpoint is particularly difficult to get away from because it does so damn much in the way of logging and monitoring for very little standup cost.
If you sat down most large orgs and created a list of what they may need to replace if they were getting rid of Office365 + supporting/supported features you would probably find its a lot more work. They are everywhere. Theres a turnkey(ish) microsoft solution that grows out the side of 365s head for every big business problem.
This was the key point I tried to make at the start of this thread: "It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues."
Libre office can mostly replace Word, Excel, PowerPoint. But Office 365 or M365 (or whatever the brand name is today) is a huge suite of cloud collaboration and administration tools, including personal and corporate-level cloud storage, app delivery, integration with enterprise accounts and other corporate tools, email, and many other more niche/obscure things. At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.
> At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.
Yeah, just as we forgot about the "paperless office" metric we seemingly forgot about MS Office file formats. "But can I open that file someone sends me?" hasn't been the central driver in quite a while.
But I guess it's a bit of a moat nonetheless: IT departments just not considering any other cloud solution that would (in addition to the pains of the cloud migration) also require weening employees off Excel/Word/Powerpoint. People don't even ask themselves wether that would (still) be hard or not, it feels like a safe assumption that it will.
The office you are talking about is not what it used to be a few decades ago. I am not into this world but what I know of it is like you are comparing a tool to the whole workshop. No, the tool does not replace the workshop, the tool is a very small part of the workshop.
There are alternatives but when you have bought into the full ecosystem of MS, it will take a lot of work to move.
(Full disclosure: I work with both Linux and Windows at a small company where Office means what you mean with office. They are all using libreoffice but call it office)
I can believe you not hearing about Sharepoint. But not hearing about Onedrive is basically impossible if you have used a Windows machine in the last decade.
Yeah, one may not use it but it's hard to ignore when Office apps suggest you save the document to the cloud as a default. I do avoid it and don't really need any collaboration but I understand that I'm minority. On my home workstation (which is mainly used for video editing) I have only local account so I don't get sucked into more MS services. But at this point you have to actively try to get around the default setup with online account and cloud apps, so it's indeed hard to ignore.
I have never used windows machines for anything but gaming, but I get your point readily. If I had used the windows finder I would have encountered onedrive.
It’s akin to being in the AWS ecosystem and having to switch to Oracle. It’s less so MS Office but rather the SAAS and enterprise security stuff in 365
This is an absurd concept when it comes to international trade. Even intellectual property is mostly meaningless outside a state. Of course people will evade sanctions; what is the us going to do, invade singapore or malaysia?
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