Did they try having some games I might be interested in? I don’t feel like they need marketing I feel like everyone knows about Xbox, then the fact that they exist. The big problem is that I have no reason to buy one.
At some point have they tried possibly making a decent halo game? Because the recent installments have not been good.
I work with a lot of ex-microsofters, and this sounds about normal. In Microsoft-land you only get funding if you’re profitable - and even then you need to be wildly profitable. They don’t care about being startup costs, or getting to profitability, if you aren’t right now you’re going to have to beg and plead for funding.
Of course then they’re immediately surprised that things aren’t just profitable immediately, and take time to build a userbase, and wonder why they’re constantly behind on the latest tech. God forbid they actually invest in promising tech…
Does it really need it…the entire friggin world knows Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo. Basically anything else isn’t worth the effort or its PC. Advertising is such a joke
if you’re trying to convince people to buy an xbox instead of a playstation, yeah. And keep current xboxers within the ecosystem. post-purchase affirmation is a big component of advertising too.
For software and devices running locally, sure. Much of what MS does these days is cloud based where the bulk of the electricity is being used in a data center somewhere and the customer isn’t (directly) paying for it.
No matter which way you correctly read the headline, it’s false.
You can either read it as Google and microsoft individually consumed more electricity than these 100 countries did (false, it’s Google and microsoft combined)
OR Google and Microsoft combined consimed more than these 100 countries did total.
and how much of that is energy that’s essentially used to run other companies, by way of their cloud services? I imagine that’d be a pretty substantial amount.
To be fair, that level of centralization in the hands of a for-profit corporation is worrisome too. They’ll lure in small businesses and then enshittify.
They’ll lure in small businesses and then enshittify.
I’m not so sure… These “cloud” services are paid services they make a lot of money from, and it’s a huge industry with a very large number of competitors (practically all major hosting services, and even a lot of smaller ones).
Many countries don’t use a lot of electricity, especially those where the grids are spotty or in poor repair, or the overall population is small. Even without the AI garbage, I’d expect large tech-sector companies to use more energy than many countries.
(In other words, the headline for this was really poorly chosen. “Microsoft and Google pour more electricity into AI than 100+ countries use” might have gotten a bit closer to the actuall point, if it’s actually true.)
Microsoft and Google pour more electricity into AI than 100+ countries use" might have gotten a bit closer to the actuall point, if it’s actually true
From what I can tell, the article is talking about total electrical use, not just AI.
Also probably ignoring the fact that some of their data centers have practically the entire roof covered in solar panels, Microsoft is investing in nuclear energy, etc.
Second law of thermodynamics would like to chime in, even with such a perfect nonexistent power source, waste heat is still an issue… which you can radiate to space, which would take tremendous land use to facilitate…
Or we use that land and capital and effort for solar power, which exists and could power practically everything in our lives, minus AI. Sounds like a win to me.
(Also not to mention the necessity to fire up more fossils for this shit to compensate for the current lack of miracle power for their pipe dreams)
And both of these companies build and purchased more renewable energy sources than all 100+ countries combined. Microsoft has committed to be carbon free by 2030, and while I don’t belive in their commitment, they at least seem to be trying contrary to most nations. They even invested in nuclear plants for their power needs.
You can fault both companies for a lot of different reasons, but in terms of carbon emissions due to power usage, they are better than 99.9% of the countries on that list.
They didn’t build it. They buy from local suppliers, power that could have been used by people and companies already there. Now it’s just a lot more, while a serious part of the power consumption goes into debatable purposes like overhyped AI stuff.
Edit: and fwiw, recently Microsoft themselves announced that they are far from their reduction targets roadmap, so not sure where you got the happy flow news from
Green energy that could go to higher priority sectors like decarborning housing, food production and transportation . Carbon free doesn’t mean no ecological impact, of course it’s better than fossil fuel, but it still a lot of ressources extracted and place taken over nature (which is the first cause of biodiversity loss). So ideally we should only destroy so much for essential needs.
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