3 ms·
Ultimately, the only reason we need to look at is late stage capitalism (and I say this as someone who believes in the market economy). Windows was the historic
by short_sells_poo 2y ago
Ultimately, the only reason we need to look at is late stage capitalism (and I say this as someone who believes in the market economy). Windows was the historic money maker at Microsoft, they held all the keys, all the power. The regime is changing however. OSes are more and more commoditised and the money has moved to Cloud and now AI. But there is one rule of the market: you have to post gains every quarter. So what is the Windows team to do? There is no growth to be had anywhere else, so they become increasingly less scrupulous in an effort to squeeze more $$$ out of the product.
This is obviously a race to the bottom. They know, we know it, the market knows it. However, as long as the numbers keep going up, the market will reward this self destructive behaviour and the team will indulge it.
They aren't stupid, they know that these features are annoying, but they'll keep pushing them to find the optimal point between the users being pissed off and profit going up.
The risk is of course that they launch a positive feedback loop of exodus and end up destroying the product in the long term, but in the long term we are all dead and the PMs profiting from these user hostile policies will be long retired...
- the4anoni 2y agoI just miss Windows 7 :(
- irusensei 2y agoI also suspect one of the driving reasons is to inflate reports. Sony is doing a similar thing by requiring PSN accounts on PC games - its to show their share holders that MAU number go up.
- short_sells_poo 2y agoAbsolutely. It's just maximizing some sort of metric that ultimately translates into P&L for the PMs. Everything else is largely irrelevant. If the users bitch and moan, but the PM is getting paid more, they'll be incentivised to keep doing what they are doing. The product may end up dead in 10 years time as the userbase is driven away, but by then everyone responsible is long gone. We can all pontificate about acting differently in their shoes, but I'm honest enough to admit that I wouldn't :D
- Kim_Bruning 2y agoBasically you're saying the incentives are misaligned with what's best for the user. This -however- may yet be a fixable problem wrt corporate governance. (And here some people thought misaligned GAI was the biggest threat to human society. But more mundane misalignment problems can crop up anywhere I guess)
- short_sells_poo 2y agoYeah. I guess you could say that the focus shifted from Windows the OS being the product to the user also becoming the product. Of course, the users never signed up for this. I'm not sure how to prevent these kind of shenanigans, but it simply comes back to sweet adtech dollars I think. The industry is so huge and pervasive now, that regulating it back into submission is going to be very difficult. 10 years ago, regulation could've been passed that simply prevented adtech from ever becoming as normalized and intrusive as it is these days. Doing it now will cause a massive hit to the valuation of the industry, and these kind of moves tend to be unpopular. Who is going to pull off a campaign that erases hundreds of billions of dollars from the US stock market (and thus people's pensions)?