3 ms·
This isn't a 'new low'. Microsoft has always taken advantage of its monopoly position to take control. This is no different from the Netscape/Internet Explorer
by simonblack 6y ago
This isn't a 'new low'. Microsoft has always taken advantage of its monopoly position to take control.
This is no different from the Netscape/Internet Explorer shenanigans of the 1990s. Trouble is, the new generation of computer users don't know MSFT's previous history so they are "shocked!".
For the rest of us, it's just Microsoft being a dick as usual.
- young_unixer 6y agoTaking advantage of their monopoly is not the bad part IMO. The bad part is doing it in such an tasteless way, i.e. making the product suck. It wouldn't bother me if they overpriced their stuff like Apple does or bought every competitor like Facebook does, etc. It only bothers me when they make their product unusable like they've done with Windows.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Taking advantage of their monopoly is not the bad part IMO. The bad part is doing it in such an tasteless way, i.e. making the product suck. They aren’t separate issues. Monopoly is the absence of effective competition (a place people go when you make things worse, whether in cost or UX or otherwise). That's what makes them free to do it “so tastelessly”.
- tomnipotent 6y agoYou still consider Microsoft of 2020 a monopoly?
- d1zzy 6y agoIt is very much still a monopoly for operating systems on personal computers (desktop and laptop). It's just that mobile phones have eaten a lot of the personal computer market so their overall power over people's lives has decreased because of that but it's still very significant.
- tomnipotent 6y agoWhat other supporting evidence besides "still has 70% market share"?. That alone doesn't qualify it as a monopoly.
- freeone3000 6y agoblink Yes it does. That's the defining characteristic.
- tomnipotent 6y agoExcept it's not. It includes high barriers for entry into the market, a single seller, pricing without competition, and other things. Microsoft was considered a monopoly not because of its marketshare, but because of its underlying practices.
- dragonwriter 6y agoThere's still little meaningful meaningful competition in the enterprise desktop/laptop OS market; the scope of the monopoly is smaller, but, yeah, they still have a space where they exercise pricing power without people migrating to alternatives.
- chrisco255 6y agoYeah, but those other monopolies in tech? Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter, they get a pass. I would argue these 5 have more power over the tech sector than MS these days.
- 013a 6y agoThe thing for me is, so much of Microsoft has shown serious improvements over the past decade. You've got Azure's push in the cloud championing (at least some) truly open source community-driven projects like Kubernetes (rather than Amazon's ECS), you've got Office unveiling their new Fluid document format as open source day 1, you've got WSL2, Xbox under Phil Spencer making a huge push to find more equitable ways to satisfy both gamers' desire for more games and developers' need for revenue with Game Pass, the push to bridge console generations with Smart Delivery, the push to bridge console and PC with unified digital licensing... And then they do things like this. The Windows core team feels to me like a clandestine shadow organization in Microsoft whose location is unknown even to Nadella. Of course, that's not what's happening, and its startling to me that no one has cracked down on them for this shitty behavior. Its not representative of how Microsoft, by and large, operates today. It is representative of how they used to operate.
- dannyr 6y agoMicrosoft has shown improvements over the past decade because it's not a monopoly anymore and has lost to Apple and Google. Wait til they become dominant again and they'll be back to their old ways.
- snarfy 6y agoWhat makes me sad is it's not even necessary. I have complete confidence Microsoft can turn chromium into a better Chrome than Google can. It would be easy - integrate a real ad blocker. It's something Google would never do but makes no difference to Microsoft.
- dylz 6y agoWhat do you mean makes no difference? Microsoft runs Yahoo/Bing Ad Network, an Adsense competitor, plus serves ads and telemetry all over.
- wtetzner 6y agoNot to mention Google has been shoving Chrome down our throats for a long time too.
- d1zzy 6y agoI think it's quite some difference between seeing an ad for a browser on a site (but still requiring that the user clicks on it, downloads, installs it and uses it) and getting it deployed automatically as part of the normal Windows update procedure without the user doing anything. This it's not comparable to the Chrome ads on Google properties but it is comparable to Android coming with Chrome if you want.
- mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE 6y agoYes, it's not quite the same. One time update vs everyday bombarding with ads and popups and making it so that large percentage of WWW sites doesn't work with anything but Chrome.
- MikusR 6y agoChrome was bundled and auto installed with Flash, Adobe reader, Picasa and countless other software.
- userbinator 6y agoI don't remember Microsoft ever being this obnoxiously in-your-face. Force-feeding users full-screen adverts is a new low of the Win10 era. The similar screens that get shown when installing updates are just as creepy, to the point that I've heard of others mistaking them for a ransomware infection: http://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/a9PQep0_700b.jpg http://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/a9PQep0_700b.jpg I seriously do not understand the group of people at MS who think doing such things were an excellent idea.
- blibble 6y agothis is the company that "upgraded" you to Windows 10 even though if you explictly closed the dialog nagging you to upgrade nothing they do surprises me these days
- simonblack 6y agoI don't remember Microsoft ever being this obnoxiously in-your-face. You probably weren't old enough to see this blatant behaviour in the 1990s.
- userbinator 6y agoI started programming with MS-DOS, so no.