Annotated 38-1
Carol the corporate Kool-Aid-consuming cultist.
Tight scene. Covers a lot of what she’s no doubt had to deal with in the days since HR became a recluse, and it seeds some exposition of Hurricane Studios’ current fortunes into organic dialogue with lively conflict.
The name for this extra gave Flo the giggles.
Other cover ideas we dismissed were a seat in the Heads of Houses standing empty, several such seats removed from the Hall and stacked up like so much firewood, and Persson’s hand protruding from a rockpile, signaling his mortal remains could be found under a cave-in (engineered to cover up his assassination). We went another route with Persson, but my overall point here is that as dramatic as the Sepia part of this story will be, it won’t be the main action of the chapter. And wouldn’t knowing that frustrate HR anew?
Flo has it right. Microsoft was the epitome of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Threatening their competition before buying them out.
I had to use Windows a lot over the years, but my opinion of MS has hardly changed. Open source software is the future. Firefox and Apache won that battle.
Though the battlefield keeps shifting.
I’m writing this on a Linux machine, from Firefox, and while I very much prefer open software, that battleground is barely relevant anymore. It’s no longer about software, it’s about services. MS has embraced Linux to the extend necessary to get system administrators on their side (Win 10 now supports ssh, and Teams runs on Linux), and I’m seeing Windows take over the former bastion of Linux that is the academic world, while the fact that Android is based on Linux matters little to the fact that it ties people to Google.
Try running your own mail server these days and see if you can still communicate with gmail addresses, or use any non-mainstream open source e-mail client to fetch your gmail mails, or replace Outlook with Thunderbird — these days it’s all about platforms, locking users in and milking them for data. If you can use free software to do that, you can even pretend to be on the “good side”!
Heck, even MS has an open-source version of Visual Studio, and I bet it’s working out great for them because it’s displacing other IDEs at an alarming rate, despite being increasingly stuffed with telemetry. It’s still a trap because they absolutely will pull up the drawbridge once there’s sufficiently few alternatives left.
All I can say is – this ^^^
Yeah if you think this still depicts the Microsoft of the current day… you really haven’t been paying attention at all.
Interesting page considering how many game companies today have been bought up by MS. At the time, guess it tells the reader that Hurricane is visible shacking with HR pouring the companies resources into his… pet project. Today where game companies being consolidated by larger companies is quite common (too common but that’s also me showing my age) it tells the readers something else; Carol can care less what makes good business right now, she is working towards… a higher purpose. (Yeah, MS business practices suck but HR has a damn dungeon)
I’m gonna be honest. I always had a hard time believing this one. Microsoft isn’t (and never has been) like other tech companies with all of its eggs in one basket. Even if Hurricane has outsold everyone in the gaming market, that’s small potatoes to Microsoft. It seems unbelievable to me that a gaming company had the money to buy a behemoth like Microsoft.
It should seem unbelievable. It is! And even Carol doesn’t really believe it! Her “we should be buying you” is half bluff, half expression of her faith in HR’s true vision…but on the very first frame of the next page, she gives a more realistic assessment of the matter (“Microsoft’s breathing down our necks, boss”).
They could plausibly buy Microsoft’s gaming division, which Fudderton here is probably representing specifically. At least if Microsoft corporate were convinced it weren’t either profitable enough and/or benefiting their larger corporate aims.