With respect, that's a load of horse crap. This is NOT why so many of your users are upset. They're angry because you've exhibited a long, deliberate pattern of historical abuse: upgrade-style dark patterns, invasive telemetry, advertisements built into Windows, and outright hostility toward users who want to own their OS rather than the other way around. God damn.
People will complain about ads, but when you actually take a look what they are complaining about it is not actually an ad. People just hear a complaint and repeat it without any critical thought.
It's better to instead focus on actual tangible problems and pain points that developers and users are hitting.
https://www.windowslatest.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Sta...
Opera Browser [Promoted]
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https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/file-explo...
Buy OneDrive for $6.99 a month
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Do you think these aren't ads?
The second I would not consider an ad, but an upsell.
Nothing should appear on a user's screen that doesn't add value for what the user is trying to get done. This is really, really simple. If you are Microsoft, and you are thinking about whether something should appear on the screen, you should be thinking "Does this advance the user's goals?". If you are instead thinking "Does this advance Microsoft's goals?", then you are doing it wrong.
The same applies to automagically configuring everything to use the cloud (good for Microsoft, usually bad for the user). And, as a special case of that, requiring the user to use a cloud-based account to log into their own local computer.
The definition of ad you are using is not the common usage. For example if someone asked if ChatGPT had ads they would most likely say no, despite it upselling the subscription.
I do share some of the complains but I feel like people get way too much upset about miniscule stuff.
I would rather have Microsoft fix the bugs and weird behavior of the Windows Explorer. I got used to it now after a year but would absolutely prefer a smooth experience for such a core feature.
I know people always say that macOS purposely don’t target business, and things like this, but at this point.. why not? Honestly? They have the best hardware in the world right now. Catering just to personal use (and these lines are getting blurrier each day with WFH) is just inconvenient.
They just need to make an Apple version of SharePoint and Exchange, and wala.
Now you have a suitable stack for small and medium businesses with simple requirements, like most retail, small lawyers, small accountants, etc
I setup a small business recently and I was able to use a full Apple stack except for Exchange Online Plan 1 (email) and Mosyle (MDM). These are both tech that Apple has (iCloud Mail and Apple Business Manager), it’s just lacking a few critical features.
With enterprise, the users aren’t the ones choosing or even configuring their computers.
I guess because NeXT ultimately failed as a business, he didn't repeat that approach upon returning to Apple?
Apple was also quite dominant in K-12 sales in the pre-internet era.
> "What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go 'yes' or 'no,' and if enough of them say 'yes,' we get to come to work tomorrow. That's how it works. It's really simple. With the enterprise market, it's not so simple. The people that use the products don't decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we're on track or not."
I'm wondering if the success of the iPhone kind of led to that line of thinking since it was primarily a consumer product anyway, it was Apple doubling down on it.
Also makes sense though. "Enterprise" comes with a lot of baggage and support requirements that can really slow your product down and turn into a bloated mess of one-off features for one specific customer's use case. You're no longer making product decisions for what you want the product to be but instead your roadmap is driven by whatever the enterprise customers want.
That’s 99% of the way there and fully within their capability.
Step 1. Use dark patterns to funnel users into using a product or service they don’t want
Step 2. Watch usage kpis go up
Step 3. “Everyone says they hate this, but look at our kpis! Must just be a vocal minority” Move on to next thing
Step 4. Get promoted, move to different team
Ok but
> not wanting to upgrade hardware to get a minor OS change.
Bit of contradiction both in the immediate “need a whole new machine“ and the well known deprecation of 7 year old Macs wrt new OS releases.
I’m sure it’s still better than Windows though (haven’t used Windows for 2 decades except for occasional short lived business mandates)
I think the reality is that they are super confused, don't have a vision, and therefore, no strategy. They are just like a marble bouncing in a pachinko machine.
For example, look at the churn on the UI framework - I think they have gone through three or more frameworks in the last few years.
The constant updates are just huge. I don't think on Linux they use anti-virus software. I'm sure it is nice not losing perf to the AV. I think the windows file system throughput for small files is horrid compared to Linux.
Microsoft executive closes replies after Windows 11 "Agentic OS" backlash
I don't believe this verbiage from any company, least of all any of the big boys. This is just placating PR nonsense.
I mean, what are they going to say? "lol no one cares about users - what are they going to do, use Linux haha?!"
That’s how you know this is bullshit. An exec wants to “reach out” to some rando on the Internet.
If you work at Microsoft you are on an ad free, LTSC variant of Windows that behaves more or less reliably. The IT team handle all the OneDrive stuff for you and make sure that it remains unobtrusive.
Re the second part of my statement, Microsoft only really care about the S500 accounts, the big corporations like, say, Toyota or John Deere. Those guys do not get the ad infested version of Windows. They get something much more elegant and Microsoft outsource any drama by getting favored partners like Accenture and Avanade to deliver it.
You can be a billion dollar corp and not register on Microsoft's radar, being relegated to the "small medium biz" segment. As far as retail users or mom and pop businesses, Microsoft has zero interest in them. These are the people griping on techcrunch and Reddit. They get the ad filled, inscrutably weird versions of Windows.
Nothing is likely to change until Linux gets its act together and delivers a credible threat to Microsoft on the desktop. However it's just as likely that Ubuntu see $$$ and start selling ad space on Ubuntu to "preferred OEM" partners like Dell, whereupon we'll be back to the days of PCs filled with bloatware.
This is the bigger problem. There is a financial incentive to make OS suck for everyone but the biggest enterprise clients. If some linux provider started to fill take significant market share from, windows, it would eventually become as bad and for the same reasons. We need a wide field of competition to keep this from happening. The problem is that with all these competing OS variants, none have the resources and user-base to maintain easy compatibility with all the software and hardware being produced. So they all suck a little bit and in different ways. If one did get big enough to manage this, then they will exploit that market dominance through enshittification. It's a never ending battle.
We are like 35 into using windows. It adds more BS with every release. If I could use windows 7 on modern hardware and games worked like normal I would literally never upgrade. Their updates these days are to just justify new tracking measures and forced logins. It’s Microsoft first, government second and customers a distant third. Everybody internally and externally knows this.
1) attempt to embrace and extend, usually a long-past-its-peak business (they tried to embrace and extend TV channels in 2013 ...)
2) they do this by "integrating" with another product. Anything they have. And making the successful product they have much worse. Zune. Windows. Xbox. Bing. Groove (I actually liked Groove, well the interface). Lumia/Nokia. That last one wasn't even a microsoft product. And now they're working hard at blowing up Windows and Office products.
3) fail, but don't bring the product back to the previous state, and keep trying, keep trying, keep beating the dead horse until they're standing in a hole in the ground in questionable liquids. And while nothing could ever hope to match the speed at which they destroyed Xbox, it's a constantly repeating pattern.
4) Get feedback from the top of Microsoft that Microsoft's valuation is based on this embrace and extend and constant growth and so, no matter how big the disaster, they'll just do it again.
5) goto 1
This, if you look carefully, despite that every Microsoft product that became a success was going into a massively growing, or an outright new market. But none of the markets Microsoft is currently in is growing, except maybe cloud. And I find the fact that they're reluctant with embracing and extending in cloud (e.g. a move like making windows server free) an incredibly bad sign for Microsoft.
Microsoft does not have the proper equipment to embrace and extend anymore, and I don't see much of a target market for them to move into. Microsoft's valuation is based on the idea that they're a monopolist that can "eat" other people's markets, but they haven't eaten someone else's market for a decade now. Admitting this, of course, would take at least half off their stock because at that point you'd have to admit they'd be doing pretty well to have a growth rate of maybe 5%.
This. Here is your main Microsoft engineering failure, using a Basic goto statement in their implementation of a marketing algorithm. Shame!
I hope Valve slays it.
aboardRat4•2mo ago