3 ms·
To be fair hardware sales have slowed down quite a lot because nowadays even a 10-year-old computer is fine for most people. Since it is pretty hard to sell OS
by seec 3y ago
To be fair hardware sales have slowed down quite a lot because nowadays even a 10-year-old computer is fine for most people. Since it is pretty hard to sell OS software without new hardware this is their solution to this "problem".
Their primary competitor, Apple, chose the route of programmed obsolescence for the hardware bundled to their OS software and also extreme price hikes for a given hardware performance level.
So, I don't know, pick your poison, I guess. I think it's easy to shit on Microsoft, but still most people prefer their shenanigans to Apple ones from what I see, because at least it's a lot easier on the wallet at the end of the day.
As an historical Apple user, I somewhat prefer this behavior because at least I can work around it. You don't have to use Outlook and all of the Windows "ads" can be turned off, especially if you are willing to pay a bit for a "pro" version.
On the other hand, good luck working around Apple extortionate pricing on soldered SSD and RAM. Privacy may be valuable, but that's only true if you are rich enough in the end...
- freeAgent 3y agoMicrosoft isn’t exactly struggling to turn a profit, though. They have reached the stage of market maturity (and capture) where their primary focus is on milking their “legacy” products like Windows and Office for cash.
- seec 3y agoI know, I'm not saying the bullshit they are trying to pull is good. But you have to look at the market as a whole, Apple makes even more profit while providing much less "services" to the world and their incentives are even more perverse (sell more hardware at higher price). Microsoft always ends up looking like the bad guy, but considering how many people depend on them for easy cheap access to computing (including a lot of government/institutions) it could be much worse. In fact, my point is that if it was Apple, we would be in big trouble we even less money in the bank while they would try to impose even more restrictions on their products to extract even more cash. At this point you realize that some shenanigans with ads are really not that big of a deal...