![](https://reddthat.com/pictrs/image/83d2c78c-2d0b-4d3f-8634-f589a0cbbab0.png)
![](https://fry.gs/pictrs/image/c6832070-8625-4688-b9e5-5d519541e092.png)
and do you think there were repercussions before?
For X? Sure, that’s why they’re leaving in the first place - by not complying to the judge’s orders, they’d surely get slapped with fines and such. As a company, it makes sense to leave and avoid being accountable, but given the influence they (sadly) still have in the media, avoiding those repercussions and letting bad actors do their thing, they’re adding gasoline to the burning world.
The fact that Whatsapp is more popular in Brazil than X is beside the point.
Thing is, ME as an idea made sense. Win2K wasn’t targeted to consumers, XP was in the pipeline for that, but they needed an interim version until it was ready. It looked like Win2K, but ostensibly compatible with the Win9x line. They just fucked up the execution on the internals, so it was terribly unstable.
Windows 8 had the opposite problem: it improved on Win7 internals, so it was solid, but had a terrible UI that no one asked for.
One could argue that the reason ME failed was very possibly because it was rushed. Win8, on the other hand, looks very much like designed by comitee with either very misguided designers or marketing people at the helm. Because of that, Win8 feels like a much worse failure to me.