This is simply a rehash/summary of an original article on 404media. Beyond that, you would have to be living under a rock to think that Plex was interested in what their users actually wanted. I ran a Plex server for years until I got fed up with trying to turn off some new self serving misfeature with every new update. It's been clear for years that offering a self hosting media server solution is simply a bridgehead for Plex to seek every more revenue opportunities, even for paying victims customers. I moved to and recommend Jellyfin- comparable user experience (minus the crap), use the same library, apps for all your devices, open source and completely self contained.

"Dear BBC, thanks for the illustrated article on our product. Our advertising and PR manager says it's the best £2 we've spent all year'

So OP has posted this everywhere, even getting it flagged on Hacker News. Article is weak sauce:

I would agree with author that there are many problems with Spotify but concentrating on the artist revenue per stream and then publishing your top hits of the year as YouTube links? Really? Go and find out what the artist share per stream is on YouTube (regular YouTube video) for soundtracks. I'll wait. Hint: there's a reason that soundtracks using unauthorised copyrighted work get muted or taken down rather than revenue being redistributed.

Recommending a paid desktop MacOS music app for local content? There are hundreds of local music players but OK... but none of the criticisms of Spotify were about the client! Foobar2000 (mentioned for mobile playback) supports Spotify streaming...

Article seems to boil down to 'I got tired of Spotify recommendations and I am an aspiring musician at an early stage in my professional career so I am recommending Bandcamp and soap boxing about artist revenue share' . There's a reason that people, some with local music libraries in the TeraByte range listen to Spotify. There's also all the competing services - Apple Music; YouTube; Deezer; Tidal; Amazon; etc...

Recommendation to OP: If you are trying to persuade people on something, then decide what point you want to concentrate on, consider the pro's and cons for your position, and make your point based/reinforced on that. Don't meander around a bunch of inchoate personal gripes and affections that don't really relate to one another or any particular point.

Given the recent Azerbaijan airlines disaster this really is cartoon level evil.

Maybe they unzipped the archive? /S

Cuts both ways however:

It's common to encounter, especially HR Portals, trying to enforce a 'valid' address. Trouble is it's often an American developer and they have no idea about other countries. Here in the UK they like to insist on a 'county ' field for postal address, despite it being over thirty years since postal addresses here even had counties (which didn't match the actual counties but anyway). The drop down list they like to give isn't a list of counties either, it's an out of date list of local authorities, which were never part of anyone's address.

I worked at a place once where we had to use an internally developed form to order supplies. Form checked user name against company active directory (fine) but also checked that surname+first initial was at least 6 characters. No idea why and very resistant to changing it but my surname is 4 characters and a lot of Chinese ones are only 2...

Microsoft were hardly early to the game with Windows phones, compare BlackBerry or Symbian. They had some early successes, for instance against Palm. The big failure was to keep deprecating the existing version of Windows phone, in some cases many months before the ongoing version was available, and deprecating the existing hardware along with it. Look at the whole mango/tango Windows phone 7 /Windows phone 8 debacle

Maybe they do crossover marketing?

Very lightweight article. Let's consider a different marketing angle:

Scene: Deutsche Telekom boardroom

CEO: we want a way to differentiate our devices

CTO: you mean like back in the 00's when we built our crapplets into the firmware for feature phones using our network, made them non uninstallable and permanent default for common operations?

CEO: yes, exactly! We used to have a Deutsche Telekom web browser, a DT messaging app, DT social media app...

CTO: Customers today wouldn't go for that. They want iPhones and Google play store. Look what happened with Huawei.

CEO: we just need to convince them that they don't need any of that... And make sure that they couldn't install third party stuff after market...

CTO: so a phone with no apps then?

CEO: no, a phone with one app that can do everything, that we control.

CTO: how are we going to sell a phone with a single pre installed app and convince customers that it's better than having an app store? How can we convince them it can do everything?

CEO and CTO together: We call it AI interface!

Avoiding snark and concentrating on first party features:

• Domain integration, e.g. ActiveDirectory
• Group policy configuration

You can do these things to an extent bit not as comprehensively and robustly

Realistically you will always need to be able to read documentation for:

• Your language
• Your compiler
• Your platform
• The APIs you're calling

All of this will be in English even if your project is in another human language. Yes there will be translation for some of it available but it will be partial, incomplete, dated, etc. you'll be using English so much anyway and have people from other countries working on the code regardless that you're adding a needless barrier using a different national language.

Look at the French government open source codee for instance. The overall website is in French but the actual repos are covered and mostly seem to be in English

OP: You haven't given any positive rationale- this sounds like idealism

My counterpoints:

I live in the UK. I can get to several other European countries in time to have lunch there and be back home for supper. I have visited several of these countries. In each case I have attempted to speak the local language (I studied French at (high) school for 5 years). In each case, as soon as I open my mouth, locals respond in English with apologies that their English isn't perfect (it's usually fine anyway). As a result it is almost impossible to improve in that language since there is little opportunity.

You are forgetting the 'common language' problem: Let's say you have parties from 2 different countries or states that speak completely different languages. What language do you choose for communications between them? one-on-one you might take turns but what happens when you have 3? 4? or maybe 20-50 like India? What language do you suppose Poland and China communicate in? What language do you use to cover news in science and technology? The other trade languages have largely lost out to English on the world stage.

If you look at the price for a Mac versus a Windows computer, I think it's pretty obvious why people might choose a Windows device. For Linux, you really have to know where to look to buy a laptop that is shipped or warrantied with Linux. People tend to buy Windows computers because that's what's advertised available, familiar and in their price bracket.

Disclaimer: my main laptop is Mac. I have a secondary one running Linux and although I have a work laptop running Windows, that wasn't my choice and I don't have Windows on any personal devices.

Still there today (although undergoing restoration)

I think anyone familiar with the history of the region would disagree with the statement that 'this is the first time that Sweden has sent armed forces into the Baltic sea'.

I've been on Mastodon for over a year and the content simply isn't there. Several of the people that I follow on Twitter have tried moving or duplicating to Mastodon. They've had a fraction of the visibility and engagement from commenters that they would get on Twitter. Invariably after a few months they have essentially given up on it as a primary medium. For me the discoverability is essentially non-existent, which I don't think is helped by the idea of it being based around instance-local communities, which have no meaning when you're looking at something like Twitter.

I had a Plex subscription and switched to Jellyfin. Same reasons as everyone else- it was all about Plex's content and recommendations running on my equipment when the whole point for me was to have something with only my own content.

I'm in the UK. Spotify family subscription is £17.99/month (US$ 22.84). Same price as Netflix premium, although I have Netflix standard at £10.99 (US$ 13.96). Now, I know that they give a high percentage to the record companies, source says 70% but really? What are they doing over there? They seem to have some fundamental problems. With Netflix, my history, watchlist, search results, etc. are consistent across sessions and devices. Spotify can't manage this. Netflix of course produce a significant quantity of original content. Spotify do a few live music sessions. I don't think that the user experience with Spotify has changed significantly in the last 6 years that I have been a customer.

So they're not making money. They're not improving the user experience or meeting the market standard for it. They're not producing original content and they seem unable to comply with local laws. Why have they not been disrupted by one of their competitors?

The core problem is that many movies have the audio mixed for a movie theatre with multiple separately controllable audio channels. You might see this marked as 5.1 ; DTS; etc. In a typical home environment, you only have stereo sound. This means that the multiple audio channels have to be mixed down to two unless there is a separate stereo audio mix channel provided - basically never except commentary tracks. The shitty way to do it is to just take the left and right front channels which are mainly meant for sound effects and not bother to mix in the center channel which covers the dialogue. It's still hard even if you mix in some of the centre channel.

Short version: asshole movie makers mix only for movie theatres, not stereo.

At this point we have practical real world foldable devices. Maybe it is different for other people but I very rarely encounter them in the real world. I cannot help but feel that the feature is essentially a gimmick:

• The fold out screen is a secondary function. The device is invariably expected to be fully usable in folded state. This means that everything has to be usable without this secondary functionality.
• The fold out screen feature is always going to be more expensive, complex, and more prone to failure than a candy bar device with a single screen

The result is going to be that this will be a luxury or novelty feature without a compelling use case that absolutely requires it, perhaps similar to convertible touch screen laptops that can be used as an etsatz tablet.