7 ms·

I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. If they really wanted to emulate Apple, they wouldn't fill their OS with trash in every co

I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. If they really wanted to emulate Apple, they wouldn't fill their OS with trash in every corner. This also extends to the default landing page of Edge. This is the worst form of bullvard, it is a tiny bit better than directly advocating for penis enlargement on the internet. But not by much at all. There should be no ads on the OS level. Especially when they want their OS to operate in the enterprise...

guilamu 4y ago
There most certainly won't be any ads in the LTSC version of Windows 11 (coming this year... probably).
- crimsontech 4y ago
  How do you get a single user license for LTSC though?
  - guilamu 4y ago
    Here: https://m.urcdkey.com/windows-10-enterprise-ltsc-2019-cd-key-global_2317-20.html https://m.urcdkey.com/windows-10-enterprise-ltsc-2019-cd-key...
pengaru 4y ago
> I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. I think the sad reality is a huge portion of the American population actually likes being fed commercial/branded b.s. Just look how common it is for folks to voluntarily affix things like Monster energy drink logos on their vehicles... The culture has no class, monster trucks dude.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  I think you could do a better job of trying to empathise with people who are not like yourself and who do not conform to the norms of your social class.
  - jmartin2683 4y ago
    Monster-drinking, giant truck-driving redneck here for some perspective: We have no class. It’s kind of the brand.
    - wffurr 4y ago
      You may not have class but you are a member of a class and regardless don't deserve shovelware and ads in your start menu.
      - SgtBastard 4y ago
        Deserve? Perhaps not. But respond favourably to, in sufficient numbers, that it remains profitable for the shovelling class? You betcha.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    "I think you could do a better job of trying to empathise with people who are not like yourself and who do not conform to the norms of your social class." This statement is extremely ironic. You are scolding someone about not empathizing more. Do you see it?
    - mattsahr 4y ago
      I think if you empathized more with the scolder, you would see that they DID empathize with the shovel-eating-class-hater, and realized, via empathy-bond, that person was not empathizing downstream enough. But... I totally empathize with you.
    - JohnBooty 4y ago
      Interesting mental gymnastics. Calling for more empathy is... the same as not having empathy?
      - javajosh 4y ago
        Calling for more empathy has nothing to do with empathy. It has to do with status.
- themadturk 4y ago
  That's because we've lived in an advertising-saturated environment our whole lives. TV (where all pre-streaming shows were designed around ad breaks), radio, newspapers, magazines, and finally online. Americans are used to it, there's a certain comfort-level in it. My primary reason for blocking internet ads is that they physically get in the way of reading; the security/performance concerns are genuine but secondary in my quest to get those damn ads out of my way.
- pmarreck 4y ago
  My kid likes monster trucks. I live in one of the wealthiest areas of Long Island. Tastes vary; thus the only thing IMHO that is defensibly low-class is something objectively a bad or unethical choice, like dishonesty. You're going to get into hot water ascribing specific tastes to class; I just read the other day that some of the most exclusive residences in Vegas have clientele with bizarrely specific yet very basic food preferences.
  - viridian 4y ago
    I would advise not normalizing the sort of narrative pushed by the person you are replying to by ceding ground with relation to bad behavior. A lack of class, as pengaru uses it, doesn't seem to be a useful concept, and muddies the water of what people mean when talking about class based hierarchies. The reason I would argue it's not a useful concept is that class in this context refers to one's social signaling outputs in a national monoculture that hasn't been the predominate way people in the US have interacted with culture for decades.
    - pmarreck 4y ago
      Great observation and thank you for making that point
whstl 4y ago
I think it's just different groups in the Windows team pushing for different things. One portion wants to move in an Apple-like direction, while another group wants to increase "engagement", have metrics and add shovelware to get another revenue stream. The obvious reality of course is that #1 won't make Apple users migrate to Windows because of #2. And both #1 and #2 will alienate diehard Windows users.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  But the problem is an executive team that seems to agree with the engagement group.
benrutter 4y ago
> I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. There's genuinely no economic incentive for them not to sell their own OS down the river at this point. Mac has established itself as a only-on-mac-hardware market, which rules it out as an option for the majority of corporate and educational settings, and while I wish the year-of-the-linux-desktop was actually coming, most coorporations just aren't set up to / don't understand how to manage OSs without the fallback of a company guaranteeing support. I see a lot of people celebrating Windows 95 as a high point, and it isn't really a surprise - that was one of the last times that Windows had to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS share.
- luma 4y ago
  > I see a lot of people celebrating Windows 95 as a high point, and it isn't really a surprise - that was one of the last times that Windows had to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS share. That might also have been around the last time when people expected to pay for a new operating system. The other thing Apple has done is to lower the cost of OS upgrades to the point where selling the OS itself has become economically difficult. Apple simply offsets that with insane margins on the hardware, MS doesn't have that option.
  - Kolja 4y ago
    I think you are off by at least a decade, MacOS X licenses cost low triple digits (cheaper if upgrading) well into the oughts.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  > I see a lot of people celebrating Windows 95 as a high point, and it isn't really a surprise - that was one of the last times that Windows had to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS share. I think it has a lot more to do with nostalgia goggles. Windows 95 still had a lot of the same cruft on install. It really wanted you to sign up for an MSN dial-up account to use the bundled IE to browse MSN.com as your home page "of choice". Another bundled app suggested a subscription service to get and send Faxes. (Windows was always like this. It seems far more "extreme" now, but the roots are deep and old. A lot of regular Windows users don't even notice what Windows 11 is doing because the frog has been boiling in that pot for so long.) Don't forget was Windows 95 that became the anti-trust scandal because a lot of people felt at the time that Microsoft didn't have to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS. (Same as it ever was.)
catach 4y ago
Apple is probably Apple because individuals in management believe that maintaining "good taste" is in their professional interest, above goals like boosting a quarter's revenue through any means possible. That's not a simple switch you can flip on in an organization. Especially if you lack a culture that has a consensus view of what good taste even is.
- izacus 4y ago
  On the other hand, I've been seeing ads across my Apple products as well (both macOS and iOS) so it's not like they're above enshittening their products for more revenue. They're just a bit behind the curve.
  - whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    Taste was definitely more important to them in the past but since the "services" deluge you can see its started to deteriorate in ways that would be unthinkable 10-15 years ago. The amount of times I've had to click through an Apple Music offer to play the music on my device a year is getting absurd. Like really, you have outstanding hardware, great margins is it really worth deteriorating the experience in the hopes people will sign up to one of more of the 20 or so subscription services you now sell. They've even resorted to car industry-like subscribing to use hardware features on the chunky watch. End of the day its inevitable unless you have a product CEO at the helm with a strong vision, Apple no longer has that so the money graph will always win at the expense of experience.
chongli 4y ago
Comparing Microsoft and Apple seems appropriate because they both develop operating systems that compete in the consumer market. It’s really not. Apple is a hardware company that develops an operating system and services to add value to their hardware. They make nearly all of their money from hardware. For the longest time, Microsoft didn’t really make any hardware at all, apart from some peripherals like keyboards and mice. Now they have Xbox and Surface, but they’re still predominantly a software and services company. The biggest reason they’re trashing up their OS with advertising and other crap these days is that they now make a lot less money from Windows licenses than they used to. Long gone are the days when people lined up at the stores for their chance to snag a copy of Windows 95 on CD!
- re-thc 4y ago
  > Long gone are the days when people lined up at the stores for their chance to snag a copy of Windows 95 on CD! I preferred them served on floppy disks. 5 inches too!
- cubefox 4y ago
  They now no longer make most their money from Windows, but from "Microsoft 365", a SAAS cloud version of Microsoft Office. Since they have no real competition in this area, they can basically do whatever they want. Littering Windows with ads, buying Activision, investing in OpenAI...
- mostlysimilar 4y ago
  > Long gone are the days when people lined up at the stores for their chance to snag a copy of Windows 95 on CD! Maybe if they made a better operating system that wouldn't be the case.
- elihu 4y ago
  I think the main positive impact Microsoft had on the tech industry that they don't get enough credit for is that they allowed a competitive market for hardware to exist. (This was in part because IBM didn't insist that DOS be exclusive to IBM devices.) Hardware wasn't their business, so from their point of view, the more suppliers the better. We had fierce competition between manufacturers and they /mostly/ competed on a level playing field (with some notable exceptions that involved antitrust lawsuits). Eventually the hardware free-for-all created an environment where Linux could also flourish which has undermined Windows to an extent. At this point Apple has a structural advantage over Microsoft in that Apple doesn't need to monetize their operating system to be profitable, as they're funded by hardware sales. That frees them up to provide a better user experience because they don't have to find way to make money off of their users. Not many companies are in a similar position, where they can recover software development expenses solely through hardware sales. There are a handful that could in theory, but they seem to lack the willingness.
contravariant 4y ago
To be fair to Microsoft this was a Lenovo laptop. Though why Microsoft continues to do business with a company that thought it was a good idea to install a root certificate (with a publicly known private key) onto every single laptop they sold so they could MITM some ads into websites is beyond me.
- xmcqdpt2 4y ago
  I have a Microsoft computer (a Surface Laptop) and it's not that bad. There are dumb news stories in the search menu and it pleadingly tries to stop you from using Firefox, but then the interface is pretty clean.
  - another2another 4y ago
    >There are dumb news stories in the search menu I'm sorry, what ?! >and it pleadingly tries to stop you from using Firefox, But you gotta realise, for an OS, this is already too much.. I naively expect my OS to help me organise my files and provide a platform to run applications. And that's about it. The weird thing is Microsoft seems to be acting as if they're competing madly against some competitor and must keep up the updates and new features and be constantly changing things to keep peoples' attention. But I'm sure this hasn't been the case for quite a while now.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    >it pleadingly tries to stop you from using Firefox I actually have never experienced this. What I HAVE seen is that if you accidentally open a not-firefox browser, it asks whether you want to make it the default.
  - themadturk 4y ago
    Back in around 2014 or 2015, when my wife and I bought Surface Pro 3s (Windows 8), Microsoft sold them at their stores more or less "clean" -- none of the shovelware crap a lot of non-Microsoft hardware was sold with (I don't remember the branding for that anymore). I remember how shocked I was to see Candy Crush on the Start Menu when I upgraded to Windows 10.
mikro2nd 4y ago
They don't want to emulate Apple. They want to emulate Google. Hence "trash in every corner".
chrisweekly 4y ago
This. I'm forced to use Windows at my current gig, and I'm gobsmacked by the presence of baked-in cheap consumer marketing, and celebrity news, front and center in this supposedly professional environment. I've been able to suppress or route around ~all of it, but it's kind of ridiculous that I have to mitigate it in the first place.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Enterprise images and settings should make it easy to squash that -- what is IT doing?
  - blep_ 4y ago
    At a previous job, I made a joke about expensing a $thousands Windows Server license and installing it on my laptop to get a relatively clean system. One of the sysadmins responded with something like "lol" followed by a screenshot of an Xbox app on a production server.
    - flangola7 4y ago
      That just seems like a needless vulnerability. Don't have more code installed than necessary.
pcollinsmokonut 4y ago
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste." — Steve Jobs
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  That was then, this is now. Now, there's definitely more than one problem with Microsoft.
Clubber 4y ago
>I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. If they really wanted to emulate Apple, they wouldn't fill their OS with trash in every corner. One of the benefits of entrenched monopoly power is you don't have to care about quality.
dspillett 4y ago
> I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. If they could just drop it right now, both desktop and server, without causing a major explosion, I'm pretty sure they would. The hassle of dealing with hardware compatibility and vendors can't be worth the small amount that get per licence these days, why not let Apple and Open Source deal with that collection of end-user grief? Server-side & similar they don't care what OS you use, or are heading that way, as long as you host it on Azure. If you use any OS directly at all: function-level based hosting being a commonly pushed option ATM. SQL Server claims Linux to be a first-class host OS IIRC. Desktop support directly is still a bit Windows-oriented and that might not change, but the browser-based alternatives are coming on in leaps which makes user OS less important (and pulls more users towards Azure lock-in via OneDrive and syncing office app files between users). It used to be that Windows, Office, and SQL Server were their cash cows and everything else was intended to funnel people towards them (or, at least, pull them away from other options). Now that triumvirate is Azure, Office, and SQL Server. In both cases with VisualStudio as a distant forth.
- photonbeam 4y ago
  What stops MS from raising OEM windows licensing prices 3x
  - dspillett 4y ago
    Those bulk licences are very cheap – the change would make them surprisingly little (a lot to you or I, but not in the grand scheme of MS finances!) and the backlash would be loud because OEMs would push that change 100% to the end user. Politicians would be all over it too: it would be a great point to distract voters away from other matters with, the donations they'd need to make elsewhere to distract enough of those politicians might eat a fair chunk of any extra income! The backlash wouldn't just affect that market: competitors would be quick to throw out “if they can do that to Windows, they can do it to your Office/VisualStudio/Azure/other subscription too”. That, and while there is a push to get other apps stable and feature complete online or otherwise on other-OS options, they are not close enough to any such goal that trying to kill their own OS that way is desirable enough to make it worth the risk yet. This is what I mean by “if they could they would”. To be more specific: “if they could without it pushing people away from their other products as well”. Also, the big EOM contracts will have some pricing guarantees within they. All others things permitting, they still couldn't make such a change quickly.

guilamu 4y ago

There most certainly won't be any ads in the LTSC version of Windows 11 (coming this year... probably).

crimsontech 4y ago
How do you get a single user license for LTSC though?
- guilamu 4y ago
  Here: https://m.urcdkey.com/windows-10-enterprise-ltsc-2019-cd-key-global_2317-20.html https://m.urcdkey.com/windows-10-enterprise-ltsc-2019-cd-key...

pengaru 4y ago

> I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. I think the sad reality is a huge portion of the American population actually likes being fed commercial/branded b.s. Just look how common it is for folks to voluntarily affix things like Monster energy drink logos on their vehicles... The culture has no class, monster trucks dude.

dan-robertson 4y ago
I think you could do a better job of trying to empathise with people who are not like yourself and who do not conform to the norms of your social class.
- jmartin2683 4y ago
  Monster-drinking, giant truck-driving redneck here for some perspective: We have no class. It’s kind of the brand.
  - wffurr 4y ago
    You may not have class but you are a member of a class and regardless don't deserve shovelware and ads in your start menu.
    - SgtBastard 4y ago
      Deserve? Perhaps not. But respond favourably to, in sufficient numbers, that it remains profitable for the shovelling class? You betcha.
- javajosh 4y ago
  "I think you could do a better job of trying to empathise with people who are not like yourself and who do not conform to the norms of your social class." This statement is extremely ironic. You are scolding someone about not empathizing more. Do you see it?
  - mattsahr 4y ago
    I think if you empathized more with the scolder, you would see that they DID empathize with the shovel-eating-class-hater, and realized, via empathy-bond, that person was not empathizing downstream enough. But... I totally empathize with you.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    Interesting mental gymnastics. Calling for more empathy is... the same as not having empathy?
    - javajosh 4y ago
      Calling for more empathy has nothing to do with empathy. It has to do with status.
themadturk 4y ago
That's because we've lived in an advertising-saturated environment our whole lives. TV (where all pre-streaming shows were designed around ad breaks), radio, newspapers, magazines, and finally online. Americans are used to it, there's a certain comfort-level in it. My primary reason for blocking internet ads is that they physically get in the way of reading; the security/performance concerns are genuine but secondary in my quest to get those damn ads out of my way.
pmarreck 4y ago
My kid likes monster trucks. I live in one of the wealthiest areas of Long Island. Tastes vary; thus the only thing IMHO that is defensibly low-class is something objectively a bad or unethical choice, like dishonesty. You're going to get into hot water ascribing specific tastes to class; I just read the other day that some of the most exclusive residences in Vegas have clientele with bizarrely specific yet very basic food preferences.
- viridian 4y ago
  I would advise not normalizing the sort of narrative pushed by the person you are replying to by ceding ground with relation to bad behavior. A lack of class, as pengaru uses it, doesn't seem to be a useful concept, and muddies the water of what people mean when talking about class based hierarchies. The reason I would argue it's not a useful concept is that class in this context refers to one's social signaling outputs in a national monoculture that hasn't been the predominate way people in the US have interacted with culture for decades.
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    Great observation and thank you for making that point

whstl 4y ago

I think it's just different groups in the Windows team pushing for different things. One portion wants to move in an Apple-like direction, while another group wants to increase "engagement", have metrics and add shovelware to get another revenue stream. The obvious reality of course is that #1 won't make Apple users migrate to Windows because of #2. And both #1 and #2 will alienate diehard Windows users.

mrguyorama 4y ago
But the problem is an executive team that seems to agree with the engagement group.

benrutter 4y ago

> I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. There's genuinely no economic incentive for them not to sell their own OS down the river at this point. Mac has established itself as a only-on-mac-hardware market, which rules it out as an option for the majority of corporate and educational settings, and while I wish the year-of-the-linux-desktop was actually coming, most coorporations just aren't set up to / don't understand how to manage OSs without the fallback of a company guaranteeing support. I see a lot of people celebrating Windows 95 as a high point, and it isn't really a surprise - that was one of the last times that Windows had to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS share.

luma 4y ago
> I see a lot of people celebrating Windows 95 as a high point, and it isn't really a surprise - that was one of the last times that Windows had to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS share. That might also have been around the last time when people expected to pay for a new operating system. The other thing Apple has done is to lower the cost of OS upgrades to the point where selling the OS itself has become economically difficult. Apple simply offsets that with insane margins on the hardware, MS doesn't have that option.
- Kolja 4y ago
  I think you are off by at least a decade, MacOS X licenses cost low triple digits (cheaper if upgrading) well into the oughts.
WorldMaker 4y ago
> I see a lot of people celebrating Windows 95 as a high point, and it isn't really a surprise - that was one of the last times that Windows had to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS share. I think it has a lot more to do with nostalgia goggles. Windows 95 still had a lot of the same cruft on install. It really wanted you to sign up for an MSN dial-up account to use the bundled IE to browse MSN.com as your home page "of choice". Another bundled app suggested a subscription service to get and send Faxes. (Windows was always like this. It seems far more "extreme" now, but the roots are deep and old. A lot of regular Windows users don't even notice what Windows 11 is doing because the frog has been boiling in that pot for so long.) Don't forget was Windows 95 that became the anti-trust scandal because a lot of people felt at the time that Microsoft didn't have to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS. (Same as it ever was.)

catach 4y ago

Apple is probably Apple because individuals in management believe that maintaining "good taste" is in their professional interest, above goals like boosting a quarter's revenue through any means possible. That's not a simple switch you can flip on in an organization. Especially if you lack a culture that has a consensus view of what good taste even is.

izacus 4y ago
On the other hand, I've been seeing ads across my Apple products as well (both macOS and iOS) so it's not like they're above enshittening their products for more revenue. They're just a bit behind the curve.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Taste was definitely more important to them in the past but since the "services" deluge you can see its started to deteriorate in ways that would be unthinkable 10-15 years ago. The amount of times I've had to click through an Apple Music offer to play the music on my device a year is getting absurd. Like really, you have outstanding hardware, great margins is it really worth deteriorating the experience in the hopes people will sign up to one of more of the 20 or so subscription services you now sell. They've even resorted to car industry-like subscribing to use hardware features on the chunky watch. End of the day its inevitable unless you have a product CEO at the helm with a strong vision, Apple no longer has that so the money graph will always win at the expense of experience.

chongli 4y ago

Comparing Microsoft and Apple seems appropriate because they both develop operating systems that compete in the consumer market. It’s really not. Apple is a hardware company that develops an operating system and services to add value to their hardware. They make nearly all of their money from hardware. For the longest time, Microsoft didn’t really make any hardware at all, apart from some peripherals like keyboards and mice. Now they have Xbox and Surface, but they’re still predominantly a software and services company. The biggest reason they’re trashing up their OS with advertising and other crap these days is that they now make a lot less money from Windows licenses than they used to. Long gone are the days when people lined up at the stores for their chance to snag a copy of Windows 95 on CD!

re-thc 4y ago
> Long gone are the days when people lined up at the stores for their chance to snag a copy of Windows 95 on CD! I preferred them served on floppy disks. 5 inches too!
cubefox 4y ago
They now no longer make most their money from Windows, but from "Microsoft 365", a SAAS cloud version of Microsoft Office. Since they have no real competition in this area, they can basically do whatever they want. Littering Windows with ads, buying Activision, investing in OpenAI...
mostlysimilar 4y ago
> Long gone are the days when people lined up at the stores for their chance to snag a copy of Windows 95 on CD! Maybe if they made a better operating system that wouldn't be the case.
elihu 4y ago
I think the main positive impact Microsoft had on the tech industry that they don't get enough credit for is that they allowed a competitive market for hardware to exist. (This was in part because IBM didn't insist that DOS be exclusive to IBM devices.) Hardware wasn't their business, so from their point of view, the more suppliers the better. We had fierce competition between manufacturers and they /mostly/ competed on a level playing field (with some notable exceptions that involved antitrust lawsuits). Eventually the hardware free-for-all created an environment where Linux could also flourish which has undermined Windows to an extent. At this point Apple has a structural advantage over Microsoft in that Apple doesn't need to monetize their operating system to be profitable, as they're funded by hardware sales. That frees them up to provide a better user experience because they don't have to find way to make money off of their users. Not many companies are in a similar position, where they can recover software development expenses solely through hardware sales. There are a handful that could in theory, but they seem to lack the willingness.

contravariant 4y ago

To be fair to Microsoft this was a Lenovo laptop. Though why Microsoft continues to do business with a company that thought it was a good idea to install a root certificate (with a publicly known private key) onto every single laptop they sold so they could MITM some ads into websites is beyond me.

xmcqdpt2 4y ago
I have a Microsoft computer (a Surface Laptop) and it's not that bad. There are dumb news stories in the search menu and it pleadingly tries to stop you from using Firefox, but then the interface is pretty clean.
- another2another 4y ago
  >There are dumb news stories in the search menu I'm sorry, what ?! >and it pleadingly tries to stop you from using Firefox, But you gotta realise, for an OS, this is already too much.. I naively expect my OS to help me organise my files and provide a platform to run applications. And that's about it. The weird thing is Microsoft seems to be acting as if they're competing madly against some competitor and must keep up the updates and new features and be constantly changing things to keep peoples' attention. But I'm sure this hasn't been the case for quite a while now.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  >it pleadingly tries to stop you from using Firefox I actually have never experienced this. What I HAVE seen is that if you accidentally open a not-firefox browser, it asks whether you want to make it the default.
- themadturk 4y ago
  Back in around 2014 or 2015, when my wife and I bought Surface Pro 3s (Windows 8), Microsoft sold them at their stores more or less "clean" -- none of the shovelware crap a lot of non-Microsoft hardware was sold with (I don't remember the branding for that anymore). I remember how shocked I was to see Candy Crush on the Start Menu when I upgraded to Windows 10.

mikro2nd 4y ago

They don't want to emulate Apple. They want to emulate Google. Hence "trash in every corner".

chrisweekly 4y ago

This. I'm forced to use Windows at my current gig, and I'm gobsmacked by the presence of baked-in cheap consumer marketing, and celebrity news, front and center in this supposedly professional environment. I've been able to suppress or route around ~all of it, but it's kind of ridiculous that I have to mitigate it in the first place.

red-iron-pine 4y ago
Enterprise images and settings should make it easy to squash that -- what is IT doing?
- blep_ 4y ago
  At a previous job, I made a joke about expensing a $thousands Windows Server license and installing it on my laptop to get a relatively clean system. One of the sysadmins responded with something like "lol" followed by a screenshot of an Xbox app on a production server.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    That just seems like a needless vulnerability. Don't have more code installed than necessary.

pcollinsmokonut 4y ago

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste." — Steve Jobs

hammyhavoc 4y ago
That was then, this is now. Now, there's definitely more than one problem with Microsoft.

Clubber 4y ago

>I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. If they really wanted to emulate Apple, they wouldn't fill their OS with trash in every corner. One of the benefits of entrenched monopoly power is you don't have to care about quality.

dspillett 4y ago

> I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. If they could just drop it right now, both desktop and server, without causing a major explosion, I'm pretty sure they would. The hassle of dealing with hardware compatibility and vendors can't be worth the small amount that get per licence these days, why not let Apple and Open Source deal with that collection of end-user grief? Server-side & similar they don't care what OS you use, or are heading that way, as long as you host it on Azure. If you use any OS directly at all: function-level based hosting being a commonly pushed option ATM. SQL Server claims Linux to be a first-class host OS IIRC. Desktop support directly is still a bit Windows-oriented and that might not change, but the browser-based alternatives are coming on in leaps which makes user OS less important (and pulls more users towards Azure lock-in via OneDrive and syncing office app files between users). It used to be that Windows, Office, and SQL Server were their cash cows and everything else was intended to funnel people towards them (or, at least, pull them away from other options). Now that triumvirate is Azure, Office, and SQL Server. In both cases with VisualStudio as a distant forth.

photonbeam 4y ago
What stops MS from raising OEM windows licensing prices 3x
- dspillett 4y ago
  Those bulk licences are very cheap – the change would make them surprisingly little (a lot to you or I, but not in the grand scheme of MS finances!) and the backlash would be loud because OEMs would push that change 100% to the end user. Politicians would be all over it too: it would be a great point to distract voters away from other matters with, the donations they'd need to make elsewhere to distract enough of those politicians might eat a fair chunk of any extra income! The backlash wouldn't just affect that market: competitors would be quick to throw out “if they can do that to Windows, they can do it to your Office/VisualStudio/Azure/other subscription too”. That, and while there is a push to get other apps stable and feature complete online or otherwise on other-OS options, they are not close enough to any such goal that trying to kill their own OS that way is desirable enough to make it worth the risk yet. This is what I mean by “if they could they would”. To be more specific: “if they could without it pushing people away from their other products as well”. Also, the big EOM contracts will have some pricing guarantees within they. All others things permitting, they still couldn't make such a change quickly.