4 ms·

Wow. Very, very nice! If anyone from MS is listening: All you need to do to potentially convert me from a Mac user is to address some of the privacy/security

by api 11y ago

Wow. Very, very nice! If anyone from MS is listening: All you need to do to potentially convert me from a Mac user is to address some of the privacy/security and "user exploitation" concerns around Windows 10. When I heard that Windows 10 would serve ads to users, just hearing that blacklisted it for me. Anything that serves ads is a low-end bargain-basement crap product, period. You are pegging your entire ecosystem as discount bin trash with those moves. I don't mind paying for good stuff, but I won't even use that kind of crap for free. Apple would never serve me ads on my login screen. I'm also very concerned about the total lack of user control over telemetry and phone-home features in Windows. Mac also has this problem, but less. You could leapfrog Mac by making this stuff visible and configurable to the user in an easy way via some kind of control panel. There is an opportunity to do better than Apple here. It's not that I would turn it all off. I'm not a total paranoid in that respect. But I want to see what it is, what it is doing, and have the ability to control my privacy/security "envelope." Obviously if I am doing anything security critical like... oh... I dunno... developing software to be distributed to millions of endpoint devices... then I care a lot about security. Security is not just for huge "enterprise" customers. (Privacy equals security equals privacy, since privacy invasion exposes information that can be used to violate security.) Honestly, the fact of the matter is that Microsoft has a significantly weaker reputation for security and privacy than Apple. That makes me more concerned about MS software phoning home than Apple software. This is a major problem and you have to do something about it, and in the 21st century that means actually fixing the problem rather than relying on PR to con people into thinking you've fixed the problem. The sorts of power users you are trying to convert with all this dev outreach stuff are not morons and they will see through any shallow commitment to security or privacy instantly. Pure PR plays in these areas will make you look worse, not better. That is all.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
Same situation for me. I like everything about the way Microsoft is currently going except in terms of privacy, and it's a massive dealbrealer. Windows 10 has a lot of strengths but I'll never willingly use it until the privacy controls allow for all the 'phone home' features to be turned off. I just hope either Microsoft sorts it out before Windows 7 is no longer supported or an open source platform is polished enough to take its place.
- api 11y ago
  It's enough to give me the impression that MS and other tech companies (Google, Apple, Facebook) are leveraging superiority in certain areas (with user experience and UI being chief among these) to try to ram privacy invasions and other very undesirable features down the market's throat. Why? Some suspect a government push behind the scenes, but personally I think the answer is simpler and more economic: that data is extremely valuable to advertisers and advertisers are willing to pay a lot for ultra-fine-grained targeting services. Sure governments can piggy-back on all this to implement panopticon type surveillance, but the primary driver is demand for user data in the private sector. The new business model of the tech industry is: give away free stuff and use it to productize the user. Maybe MS is extending this model to developers. (Facebook too with things like wit.ai.) OSS can't compete. The problem with the OSS ecosystem is this: a product that works is only 10% done. The other 90% is making it work well and making it easy to use. It's not done until I can use it in minutes, not hours or days, and that takes a lot of painful work. An example hit home for me today: Today I was evaluating Microsoft LUIS and wit.ai and I realized that for simpler use cases a lot of what they do could be done with OSS like the Stanford Parser. The problem is that to make those work I'd spend at least a few days just getting that ball of twine up and running, let alone figuring out how to represent my app's intents and entities and such and actually get to something useful. But with LUIS or wit.ai I can do it in minutes to hours and have a ready to go app. It's incredible. I can get natural language command and control in minutes!. The catch? Facebook or Microsoft get to mine every single bit of data I send and get a strong degree of lock-in. There are OSS alternatives but they'd take days, weeks, or months to integrate... therefore they do not exist.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    With regards to Microsoft's business model when it comes to Windows, you could be right about the advertising angle, but I believe some people would pay a premium to not have the advertising in their OS. If Microsoft offered the enterprise version of Windows 10 to the general public at a premium price then at least individuals who cared about privacy would have a valid upgrade option.

by api 11y ago

ZenoArrow 11y ago

Same situation for me. I like everything about the way Microsoft is currently going except in terms of privacy, and it's a massive dealbrealer. Windows 10 has a lot of strengths but I'll never willingly use it until the privacy controls allow for all the 'phone home' features to be turned off. I just hope either Microsoft sorts it out before Windows 7 is no longer supported or an open source platform is polished enough to take its place.

api 11y ago
It's enough to give me the impression that MS and other tech companies (Google, Apple, Facebook) are leveraging superiority in certain areas (with user experience and UI being chief among these) to try to ram privacy invasions and other very undesirable features down the market's throat. Why? Some suspect a government push behind the scenes, but personally I think the answer is simpler and more economic: that data is extremely valuable to advertisers and advertisers are willing to pay a lot for ultra-fine-grained targeting services. Sure governments can piggy-back on all this to implement panopticon type surveillance, but the primary driver is demand for user data in the private sector. The new business model of the tech industry is: give away free stuff and use it to productize the user. Maybe MS is extending this model to developers. (Facebook too with things like wit.ai.) OSS can't compete. The problem with the OSS ecosystem is this: a product that works is only 10% done. The other 90% is making it work well and making it easy to use. It's not done until I can use it in minutes, not hours or days, and that takes a lot of painful work. An example hit home for me today: Today I was evaluating Microsoft LUIS and wit.ai and I realized that for simpler use cases a lot of what they do could be done with OSS like the Stanford Parser. The problem is that to make those work I'd spend at least a few days just getting that ball of twine up and running, let alone figuring out how to represent my app's intents and entities and such and actually get to something useful. But with LUIS or wit.ai I can do it in minutes to hours and have a ready to go app. It's incredible. I can get natural language command and control in minutes!. The catch? Facebook or Microsoft get to mine every single bit of data I send and get a strong degree of lock-in. There are OSS alternatives but they'd take days, weeks, or months to integrate... therefore they do not exist.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  With regards to Microsoft's business model when it comes to Windows, you could be right about the advertising angle, but I believe some people would pay a premium to not have the advertising in their OS. If Microsoft offered the enterprise version of Windows 10 to the general public at a premium price then at least individuals who cared about privacy would have a valid upgrade option.