Adtech veteran here. This is week old news, and was expected by the industry for awhile ever since ATT failed to integrate Appnexus properly.
Not sure why this thread has turned into so many off-topic complaints about Microsoft but this acquisition itself makes perfect sense. The duopoly of Google and Facebook has weakened with the changing landscape of mobile devices, tracking protection, and data regulation. Amazon is quickly building their ad business along with Apple and this gives Microsoft a solid leap forward to leverage their growing media inventory and onboard existing clients with a fully functioning demand and supply-side platform.
Microsoft's evolution into adtech is the natural evolution of industrial capitalism.
In the 19th century, mercantile giants evolved into banks, because after expanding to the limits of their trading turf, that's how they'd get secure, predictable Return On Capital (ROC).
In the 20th century, industrial giants evolved into fintech services, because after expanding to the limits of their markets that's how they'd get ROC.
In the 21st century, the largest software companies seek to evolve into adtech for the same reason.
Some of the largest software companies have always been adtech companies. Google getting into cloud computing is similar to Microsoft expanding into advertising. Software/hardware/internet services all collide into similar end offerings for these megacaps.
> Microsoft's evolution into adtech is the natural evolution of industrial capitalism.
How is advertising synonymous with capitalism? If it were communism or socialism we'd likely just call advertising propaganda, but is there a real difference?
To be clear, even if Microsoft was born in a reality where America was Democratic Socialist, wouldn't they be doing the same thing just a slightly different purpose?
Advertising is becoming a bigger share of the global economy. At the same time, the big players are making up a bigger share of the ad market.
It's not absurd to envision a world in the next 30 years in which advertising is >33% of global GDP - and maybe 2-5 companies control >50% of that market.
The math doesn't work. The money to advertise comes from you buying the product. If they pay you enough to actually buy it then the cost of advertising is equal to the price of the product and they make no revenue.
Advertising pays for a lot, but it also doesn't pay that much.
You can never say if something is a bubble until after it pops.
On the other hand, I think there's a convincing argument that people are having more and more of their needs and basic wants met. And if you're in the business of selling things - you need to synthesize wants in your customers.
Only 200 years ago, basically everyone on the planet was a peasant. Only 70 years ago, even middle class people in the US and Europe had a laughably low standard of living by today's measures.
Now, in ~60% of the world (the developed world incl. China) - only a couple percent of the population is a dirt poor.
In many ways, it takes more effort to sell people a seventh computer than their first. In other ways, repeat customers are your easiest sales. Still, you usually need to market even to your repeats...
Still, in order to grow - you can't just sell your existing customers the same thing every year. You need to constantly sell them more...
Agreed. Rather than "grow" I'd prefer to look at organizational success through time in terms of evolution.
That being said, there are tons of companies out there that are huge and do no advertising. Word of mouth, relevance to reality, and quality of product win out over the long term.
They make software to run advertising operations for big agencies and advertisers.
It manages ad campaigns, audiences, billing and finances, workflows, optimization, comps, etc. It integrates with major ad platforms which run the actual ads, and collects performance data from APIs and reports, and puts it all together in a single place for analysis.
People are complaining because they don't want adtech in everything. It has nothing to do with it being old news - it's news until the industry is leashed. Microsoft joining in isn't things getting better, it's things getting worse because it confirms a lot of suspicions people have.
what's adtech in everything? a friend of mine is a salesman for billboard ads. people see it every day if they happens to drive by one of the billboard ad that he sold. does that count as adtech?
Maybe. Does the billboard get in your pocket and follow you around, keeping track of your location? Does it parse your email for metadata? Does it insert itself in between your news feed because you happen to be in its target group? Does it ask you to accept its Terms and Conditions of Billboard Use and its Privacy Policy?
Other than people making money off of them, I know of no one who is excited by the existence of billboards. In fact, they are usually a source of complaints. (There was some use for them pre-cell phones to find restaurants/gas/lodging during road trips.)
But even there, most people object to the personalized ads and the tech that measures it. People don't seem upset about ads in print magazines (that are tied only into the consumed content) or ads in podcasts.
Why? Windows 11 as an advertising business wasn't nasty enough for Microsoft?
I installed it on one of my sparingly used machines and it's as blatant as it gets. The Edge push, all the installed crapware, the telemetry and God knows what else - either way it didn't feel like I was running my own OS - instead it felt like I was running a rented one at a Kinkos.
The telemetry is an interesting reminder; I wonder how difficult it would be to modify/reverse-engineer W11 to spit out garbage telemetry? Gigabytes and gigabytes of the stuff, just give MS the same garbage they give us.
I really don't know how to feel about watching Microsoft degrade into yet another shady ad company. On one hand, they were never good. On the other, it is still somehow a loss to transform from an engineering company with evil business practices, to an ad company with evil business practices.
Also, can't help but feel bad for whatever engineers have remained there. OS development is rough in a world where people are apparently only willing to pay for Apple's offering.
If Microsoft pushes people to Linux, I'm pretty sure it would be their Linux (WSL + strings attached), nothing that would benefit the true Linux community in any way.
WSL is hot garbage and shares most of the problems cygwin has of the impedance mismatch between the hosted programs being shunted off into their own badly implemented filesystem, and that of the host.
Worse than Windows 10? That already seemed pretty bad when I kept having to uninstall candy crush and somehow it kept coming back, and literal ads in the start menu.
I think that might be a great reason why! To make windows a unified advertising identifier.
ATT (and verizon tried too) got these ad platforms because they wanted to unite their 1st party user device data to an advertising graph.
They tried to enable targeting individuals (on harder to 1:1 target devices too). But they never seemed to actually merge the two 'pipes' together that well.
Because google & apple have blocked more targeted advertising for everyone but themselves, creating a competing platform that doesn't rely on 3p cookies or IDFA etc would be really valuable.
FB direct response ads are totally dead for us. Apple & google killed it. We use Xandr and they do have some broad demo 1p targeting segments, device expansion, but it's nothing like FB. Still have to use a 3rd party to load 1:1 lists, at least we do.
Google already has a huge login base on the web. In addition, AFAIK google includes a uuid in chrome that only google properties can read - I have never found info on if they use that for ad targeting, or correct my memory if i'm wrong on that?
Microsoft could create something like that. They would probably have to expand IE use or do something shady in between chrome and the web.
Maybe if they want to get into streaming too - blurg.
OR a better idea imho would be a microsoft smart tv, MSFT SSP + exclusive to xandr inventory included. There is some gaming advertising too that could be thought out and expanded. Maybe bundle xbox inside a tv, sell it at a loss to stream ads.
Seems like the current trend in software. We used to have a perpetual licensing system as the dominant way of buying software, with some upgrades / unlimited upgrades, somewhat like a warranty system. Then lots of online services started on the subscription model, justifiably because they were providing online services. Everyone got jealous and greedy, and seeing that sweet sweet recurring revenue that others were making, switched to that model that actually doesn't make much sense, even for software that you're installing on your computer, adding marginal online services like storage you don't care about as a justification. Now that everything is subscription based and market is saturated, the only ways to increase revenue are either to upsell existing subscriptions, or add new revenue streams.
MSFT was already xandr's biggest customer. they ran dedicated hardware just for MSFT, and already handled most of their ads for msn and Xbox. they were already deeply linked companies.
This is one area I give MS a pass. Google engaged in aggressive Chrome pushing for years, people seem to forget now that it’s so ubiquitous they don’t really need to anymore. It’s good someone is fighting back. Especially since, while I much prefer Firefox, Edge is actually decent.
The issue with edge is the underlying browser engine is still chromium. The only reason I use Firefox over something like brave or edge is because I’m trying to advocate against a monopoly chromium browser engine.
"[...] To help these students on their learning journey, we are excited to announce that Microsoft Math Solver will be available as a preview feature starting with Microsoft Edge 91 stable. Microsoft Math Solver allows a student to snap a picture of a math problem – be it handwritten or printed – and get an instant solution with step-by-step instructions to help them learn how to reach the solution on their own."
Built-in vertical tabs? Tab Collections? If you like Chrome as a browser, and don't really care about Google, isn't that better to use the built-in one? "It's not IE11" is value for anyone using "the browser which comes with Windows".
IMO the type of person probably using IE11 out of force of habit, probably also wouldn't notice too much if you switched them to something else by just redoing the icons.
A distressing amount of "I don't use the Internet, I just check my emails" in my old university IT support days.
Microsoft is on an interesting trajectory of late, but it also seems like there is some bifurcation as to what they're doing. On one hand they are trying to embrace Linux and pushing development tools forward, but on the other they are just making every slimy big tech type decision they can. I have my own personal axe to grind with them as they tricked my completely non tech savvy mother in law to upgrade her Surface to windows 11 and guess what? The freaking network driver doesn't work so it is now effectively bricked for her use case. She didnt want windows 11 and Im guessing just clicked all the highlighted options to "keep her computer up to date and safe". I found out the issue when we were in a location that only had slow satellite internet so she cant use her computer until she gets back to civilization and I can reload windows 10. Microsoft has created a tech support nightmare for me.
Seriously if any MS folks are reading this- you really have pretty much erased any goodwill I had towards you, but I suppose the ad revenue means you dont care.
Unless you're trying to partition all actions into "good" and "bad", it's more like octofurcation or dodecafurcation. Microsoft is not a homogenous monolith...what does it even mean to split something that's already split apart?
Here's an old org chart which shows Microsoft trifurcated:
But realistically, each of 5 divisions - Windows, Office, Server & Tools, Online Services, and Entertainment & Devices (the above chart may have been made before the latter two existed) - has a president that's trying to make their division successful, even at the expense of goodwill earned by other divisions. Yes, Server & Tools has been knocking it out of the park for you and I recently with regards to developer enthusiasm, but they're a long ways away from Entertainment & Devices. Each of those divisions actually has another ~25 VPs and hundreds of Directors each trying to climb the ladder faster than the others.
To put it bluntly, Windows is jealous of all the post-sale revenue that Entertainment & Devices gets, and all the telemetry that online services gets, and has shoved as much as possible of both into Windows 11.
I must admit Windows just doesn't know what they are supposed to do.
UWP, .NET Native and C++/CX just tanked due to their mismanagement, and having burned the few believers with what are now about 5 rewrites since Windows 8 was introduced plus having dropped the .NET Native and C++/CX toolchains.
Forget about.WinUI 3.0, it is so messed up that Windows 11 still needs to rely on UWP and WinUI 2.x, despite being "deprecated".
Then we have tons of GUI tooling PMs, each selling their own stack, and every couple of months the faces on community calls keep changing.
There are surely some big fires happening in. Redmond and they keep carrying water buckets hoping to make it right.
Specially since it appears the lack of love between WinDev and DevDiv never went away.
The forces that won over Longhorn have managed to completely mess up WinRT and aren't doing any better with the Project Reunion endeavours.
Anyone that is bored during the season festivities can browse the GitHub issues for WinUI, AppSDK, cppwinrt and a bunch of other ones connected to them.
It makes me think of the disaster of the Linux desktop and X Windows.
The first thing you notice about Linux is all the different widget sets that clash with each other such as Motif, Lesstif, tk, gtk, qt, fltk, wxWidgets and many more. They all seem to be in a competition to look worse than all of the competitors. They also seem to share the belief that "font metrics don't matter" and be completely indifferent if labels burst out of their space.
Microsoft has gone through almost as many widget sets for Windows. Muggles don't notice, but if you are a dev or learn to be observant you might realize that you are using 8 different widget sets in a given day. Microsoft has so often seemed to be 90 or 180 degrees behind phase with the rest of the world: I remember that awful time in the early 00's that theming widget sets was a fad and the program that ran your scanner was in a competition with similar programs to look uglier than the others, such as
Then they came out with WPF which had wonderful support for theming but everybody was burned out from theming and nobody used it.
At least in Windows Vista Microsoft made the transition to the GPU first WDDM rendering model. In linux every decade is going to be the decade of Wayland but it will never actually happen, which is sad.
I have to agree, despite my occasional pro-Windows comments.
Here are two more nice pieces, despite VS being a WPF application, the team that owns the installer decided it was a great idea to rewrite it in Electron.
And C++/WinRT tooling is so back to the 90's that even using MFC feels more fun. Apparently no one in WinDev can afford C++ Builder or Qt licenses to get how pre-historic they live.
So we get Forms, WPF, WinUI/UWP and WinUI/Win32, MAUI and then Blazor not happy with WebAssembly also tries to sell itself as Electron replacement on top of all those stacks via WebWidgets.
Clearly the cat has left the house and the mice don't know what to do.
For anyone starting on C++/WinRT today without major Windows background, I would just recommend them to read a book on ATL from early 2000, most of the tooling is the same, this is how "modern" it feels like.
That said I think Windows is still the market leader and better than the others. I don't know much about the story of MacOS but I doubt it's that different. I have a mac right next to me, my wife uses it to read her email, I use it to test web sites on Safari, and I can't say it is any better than the Windows machine I use.
The finder is OK but many of the built-in apps like iTunes are "absolute p00p" and seem to drive away good competitive software.
I currently work at Microsoft, and all I can say is that I actually have so much respect for CEOs lately. It takes a huge amount of foresight and understanding of human nature to move a company this size in the right direction, because you’re trying to incentivize all these divisions to behave the way you intend. As I’ve become more experienced I’ve learned that company culture is way more important than I thought when I first graduated college.
I used to have a great relationship with Microsoft. I gave them money, they gave me software and went away (patches aside). Now they want to monitor me and advertise to me. It's fairly sad. And certainly not what I would call the right direction.
Every now and then when I get silly thoughts about Microsoft as such (as opposed to just very specific divisions) being "on the right direction", I recall that LinkedIn is under MS ownership.
It’s not that LinkedIn is bad; it’s a trackfire if dark patterns and has been getting worse since acquisition.
This is a great point- I dramatically oversimplified what is going on. I do wonder how this is discussed internally. Since I started working as a dev back in the late 90s I feel like a lot of the optimism I had from tech improving our lives has largely been erased. Its probably just me getting old and pessimistic though :).
> a lot of the optimism I had from tech improving our lives has largely been erased
It can do both, and we should strive to both prevent it from degrading our lives, and make it improve them. That's the original purpose of our computers. This should drive us. It drives me. I'd say this is critically important.
Please try to do the right things, whoever reads this. Computer scientists are powerful and impactful. Please reflect on how and what you (and whoever pays you) spend your time on, how it impacts society and human beings (and beyond) and make sure your are at ease with what you come up with, whatever the scale of the impact is. Don't lie to yourself. This paragraph should not be painful to read.
My wife’s surface book 3 auto-updated to windows 11. She complained to me that games were running slowly and it turned out that the nvidia driver wasn’t installed anymore so she was stuck using the intel graphics card.
It was an easy fix for me, but it would have been nearly impossible for a non-tech-savvy person to figure out. You would think that Microsoft would do a better job of testing their own OS on their own hardware.
Something similar happened with my father. He upgraded his laptop to w11 and now his microphone is incredibly finicky and will only capture his voice making if he's sitting exactly in front of the middle of the computer. This makes the mic useless for my father's base use case : have video calls where both he and my mother speak on the same computer. They now have to turn the computer around to fact the person who's speaking. The same computer with the same mic worked perfectly fine with w10.
Microsoft is giving the Linux heads a job in porting Linux environments to windows to deincentivize using Linux desktop and servers. It's in direct competition with redhat. Absorb and destroy.
At this point I would absolutely welcome that. Microsoft is actually pretty good with long term service and support of enterprise tech, and compared to Oracle they’re almost benevolent.
Honestly I have found that the iPad is great for older folks for this reason. Not to be an Apple shill, but I've found that things like bricked devices after an update don't happen basically ever.
I wish Apple would spend more time working on this use case. I'd really like a stripped-down, somewhat locked-down interface that could be remotely managed. It would be the greatest thing for elderly people with dementia. My Dad loved his iPad but was frequently frustrated when he strayed off into some screen, configuration setting, or mode he didn't understand.
For many professional digital artists and designers, however, the iPad is far more convenient that the traditional Wacom tablet connected to a desktop or laptop.
Which Surface does she have? I've upgraded a few Surface tablets to 11 and have yet to experience the network drivers fail to work afterwards. Maybe it could also be that I waited a few months after it was out to upgrade and they already had a fix for that issue.
I installed a fresh iso of Windows 10 Pro on my mom's desktop the other day. The experience has changed for the same operating system over the last five years. It felt like I was installing a huge piece of malware. When it pegged the cpu at 100% installing one drive (after I told it not to) I just pulled the plug and installed fedora (which I had recently evaluated for myself). Try installing and running fedora for a few minutes. Blows Windows 10/11 out of the water. I knew that if I sent her machine back with Windows 10 it would be a support nightmare.
I dont know that its hyperbolic to be irritated that MS couldnt get an upgrade right on their own hardware, especially when it was installed by the use of dark patterns.
The hyperbolic part is assuming that each of their 100K employees, and just as many vendors, are complicit in and guilty for whatever bug has allegedly affected OP's mom's computer.
"Seriously if any MS folks are reading this- you really have pretty much erased any goodwill I had towards you"
The tradeoff for various groups and projects benefiting from being Microsoft is that they also suffer the issues of being Microsoft. If Microsoft as a whole gets praise for something then it's only fair that they get blame/dislike/etc. too.
As someone who worked for appnexus/xandr for years, this move makes sense.
MSFT was already xandr's largest customer, and handled most of their MSN and Xbox supply.
I'm happy for Everyone still there. this is a much better home than AT&T.
I swore that since Nadella took over the helm that Microsoft was becoming a good force for the industry. There were so many positive moves. Linux, open source, Github improvements. Now I can see that it's all still classic "evil Microsoft" under the hood.
They're taking over our industry with Github/VSCode in the cloud. Microsoft payments injection in Edge taxes web commerce, and with their default browser shenanigans they're generally treating the web as something they own. They're monitoring and recording your Windows files and secrets and uploading them for analysis. Github Co-pilot is training on GPL code and aims to eventually replace us. Xbox has the worst DRM that requires always-online to play games you own. LinkedIn - there's never been much good to say here.
Wait what’s this about monitoring and record By files and secrets?
Also I think you might be mistaken about the Xbox DRM, they mentioned they’d be requiring always online prior to the launch of the Xbox one but as far as I know they never followed through after all the backlash they received.
I think echelon is referring to the "Automatic Sample Submission" option that is enabled by default in Windows Defender. It will upload exes and dlls without asking. It can also upload documents, but it should prompt the user first.
Windows telemetry is also a black box, but they admit to collecting some browsing history.
All big tech companies have a problem: once you are on top, growth is hard to do by innovating and having a superior, more useful product. It's easier to acquire other businesses and find ways to leverage your existing customer base. MS has been great for the last couple of years because they were doing the hard thing and innovating (playing nice with open source, VS Code, etc...). Eventually, though it's easier, and lower risk to just leverage the customer base.
Why Microsoft is pushing for its weakest link - the advertising business?
They missed the mobile train, hardly anyone uses Bing (even DuckDuckGo, which is based on their API, seems to be stagnant in terms of the daily query growth).
Because it requires low investment and has high margins. Building a device or ecosystem to sell is a lot costlier and riskier than using the data of all the people using your operating system to try and grab part of google’s advertising share.
How does this type of acquisition happen? How does the division of Microsoft that wanted this business determine that instead of trying to build it themselves, they should approach their potential competitor and ask to purchase it from them? I can understand most M&A, because at least one of the companies involved will be a whole organisation, but in this case a piece of Microsoft must have identified that they wanted to purchase a piece of AT&T. That seems really interesting.
Fundamentally it's just difficult to maintain the modern internet without advertising. You have content creators busting their backs with millions of hours of video and content for free, and hosted for free. Obviously there needs to be a way for all of that to be paid for.
Whether due to income equality, laziness, greed or something else, the vast majority of people aren't going to engage in micro transactions.
The answer isn't microtransactions. Even if you solve the payment problem, Microtransactions involves huge amounts of new friction and creating an entirely new selling process and method.
I think the answer is in federation and mutually owned infrastructure.
People are comfortable paying Netflix/Hulu/Crunchyroll $10-15 per month. They don't have to worry about "do I want to watch this episode enough to spend 45 cents for it?" or "do I need to make and manage a whole new account just to watch a different show?" The fact the money eventually gets divvied up to content creators is handwaved away behind the scenes.
Federation gives other creators the opportunity to sell a similar one-stop-shopping experience you that. I could imagine, say, a subscription where I'd get through the paywall not just on my local newspaper, but the dozens of other papers that might print one or two articles a month that I care about. Or a Patreon-style service where you unlocked everyone for a flat fee, and they use analytics to determine how much of the fee goes to each creator each month.
The problem is that most of the content is living on third-party platforms. An OnlyFans or YouTube, for example, could offer a subscription around that model, but they'd just vaccuum up most of the revenue generated for themselves. The creators have to own the platform themselves to prevent that sort of diversion.
It solves the "how do we make non-ad-supported content palatable for consumers." Federation ensures that there's a big enough pool of content that you won't say "I don't know if this is worth $20 per month" or "I'll subscribe for one month and binge-consume everything, then cancel."
Yes, it involves customized billing and account infrastructure, but if you set things up properly, the cost of the infrastructure should be less than the revenue it provides. If the federated content creators, in turn, fund a "captive" development and maintenance team to supply things at cost, it may well be cheaper than leasing off-the-shelf solutions.
My point is that only large content producers would even entertain such a thing to begin with, and among those the largest will just spin-off and do their own thing.
If you're a YouTuber why would you even deal with any of that vs. just continuing to upload on YouTube?
Interesting how when MS is on ad market justifications like this pop up all the time on HN. Meanwhile, quarter of HN is nothing but a jihad against Google for its advertising business.
Yes, there are two groups: pro-MS and anti-Google. And maybe there is a large overlap between these groups. Not some privacy warriors as many of these anti-Google jihadists claim or pretend to be.
I do wonder sometimes just how close microsoft are going to get to att in the service of azure. the network cloud deal. the xandr deal. each deal makes att more important to microsoft leadership as their flagship client. i wonder idly if there is a sweet spot beyond which it actively scares away the other mega telcos to aws.
The tech big companies are getting too big for their own good. Their core business is not large enough to satisfy the growth demands so they have to branch out into other sectors. Give it a few years and Apple, MS, Google and others will basically offer the same products and services. I really wish they would get broken up so one division doesn't have to do shady things to satisfy the needs of other divisions.
They kinda already do at this point. It’s inevitable that they would do this considering that they’re business is powered by the same fuel: software developers.
Honestly I think this is a good way to create more competition in the advertising space which is currently dominated by Google and Facebook.
At some point some “smart” executives are going to decide it’s better to cooperate rather than compete… that’s when consumers get exploited. Which is why the threat of regulation is important.
"Honestly I think this is a good way to create more competition in the advertising space which is currently dominated by Google and Facebook."
I don't think it's a good thing that another trillion dollar company is trying to get a share of the advertising business. It would be much better if we had more small and focused companies.
I agree that it would be better if we had smaller companies. But smaller companies can’t compete with Google/FB in the current market. We either need to create regulations to change the market… or hope that other companies with similar deep pools of technical talent and know how compete with the Big Names.
"Apple is the only one making money on selling hardware."
MS is selling Surface. Google is selling Pixel. They aren't necessarily successful but they are trying. The only outlier is Facebook which doesn't try to sell hardware or services.
> Microsoft’s shared vision of empowering a free and open web and championing an open industry alternative via a global advertising marketplace makes it a great fit for Xandr.
> Microsoft can accelerate the delivery of its digital advertising and retail media solutions, shaping tomorrow’s digital ad marketplace into one that respects consumer privacy preferences, understands publishers’ relationships with consumers and helps advertisers meet their goals.
How do they write crap like this with a straight face?
I use Linux Mint. I don't think there's much if anything that makes Linux mint harder for a non-tech user. I think it's already the better option.
But for non-tech users, I think buying a device with one OS and then wiping it to install a different OS is scary. Or doing anything that sounds risky to their daily laptop. So, where is the non-scary option for them to start with Linux? The laptops with Linux pre-installed, they aren't well known (or cheap).
I'm a software engineer and have many software engineering friends and acquaintances and still even in this group of people who are almost all at least comfortable with Linux hardly any use it for anything except work or learning.
It's roughly a 50/50 split for the rest between Windows and macOS.
So how can it be remotely plausible that Linux will become a mainstream desktop/laptop OS?
Non IT workers also seem to favour a combo of phones and tablets too only using laptops for work not caring what it runs.
I agree, but I've found it's more people doing what everyone else is doing, vs any real downside. I was screen sharing with someone recently who said 'thats cool, but I thought you used linux..'. They just thought linux was a terminal black screen I guess. Anyhow I showed them how I get around, work, some cool features, and they were sold enough to dual boot it.
I guess Desktop Linux's biggest hurdle is that most people have no idea it even exists, and there's zero advertising.
> So how can it be remotely plausible that Linux will become a mainstream desktop/laptop OS?
Because of time and inevitable changes happening to everything over time.
Remember when Windows was nothing and everyone was using something else? Remember when macOS was nothing and everyone was using something else? Same thing can happen with Linux, or some other operating system. Sure, might take 10, 50, 100 years, but eventually, Windows and macOS (and probably Linux) will be relics of the past.
I think platforms have gotten to a complexity where starting from a clean state isn't as easy anymore. Just look at fuschia, I know it's been in "early" development since at least 2013 and there's not much to show for it.
Things get A LOT more complicated when you add localisation, accessibility, UI and all the other things we take for granted.
It's still a long way off - have a look at the recent Linus Tech Tips challenge where he and Luke had to daily drive Linux for a month.
They're technical people, and yes, LTT is hammed up a bit (I call it the Top Gear of Tech), but the number of issues they ran into that you just don't on Windows (in most cases) was illuminating.
I have no troubles running a Linux home server, but I don't have time to fiddle around so my gaming desktop is Windows, and for work it's MacOS.
In my experience, Linux, Windows, and MacOS all have their own separate warts. When switching between desktops, you will be supremely frustrated dealing with issues you Just Didn't Have™ on your old OS. Stick with it for long enough before switching back, and you'll be just as frustrated with the annoyances you'd gotten used to working around and forgotten about in your old system.
1) Luke didn't have any real problems and continues to use Linux now after the challenge because he likes it more.
2) Linus is the guy in a horror movie who suggests the group split up. He doesn't represent the average tech user, he represents the average tech user wannabe.
I have switched to Linux completely for my own stuff but I honestly would be reluctant to recommend this to non-tech users. There are a lot of problems when you run Linux on a laptop like battery life , suspend/wake problems and others. A lot of consumer software isn't available on Linux either. With Apple you get pretty nice integration between phone and desktop/laptop. Sort of possible on Linux but requires tech skills and hard work.
Desktop Linux is great for Grandma who only needs a web browser and it's great for greybeards who remember what config file to edit, but anyone in between is going to be doing a LOT of pasting incantations they don't understand into terminal windows.
> but anyone in between is going to be doing a LOT of pasting incantations they don't understand into terminal windows.
This thinking is really obsolete and couching everything as grandma or graybeards is really ageist, anyway. Last I looked, you have to do this on Mac more often than I'd like. On Windows, it's open up CMD as administrator and paste this command or download and install this little app and run it (that does God knows what as administrator).
As someone who doesn't own a Windows machine and only uses Macs for work, this feels like an outdated perspective. It's been many years since using desktop Linux has required magical terminal incantations (for me at least).
If it says Nvidia, don't touch it. Otherwise, everything seems to just work, and things at least don't get broken arbitrarily by companies whose goals don't match mine. Even all the games I've tried have run solidly with Steam's Proton support.
Maybe I've become numb to them, but I just don't see these painful interactions that get referenced, and don't see why their bogeyman would be worth giving up your freedom to use your machine.
I'm a retired software developer. I have my computer and my non-techie wife's computer running Linux Mint. For me, doing some hobby coding, yes, I paste some incantations, but for her, I don't have to do anything. A clean install just works fine as is.
The whataboutism on Google is not really even worth responding to but pointing on another evil company is also abusing open source .... ok. Google has been openly hostile GPL for decades.
As to the other 2 projects, I am not sure how this refutes my statements, which is Microsoft linux contributions are about making their commercial offerings better, and are not useful to anyone outside of those Commercial Offering (Azure and WSL)
So how does pointing to Azure RTOS, and Azure Sphere refute that claim?
the benefits are for executive management and their investors, not users. Users's ad impressions and profiles are a product for management; more so for Teams.
Xandr seems to be one of those worthless businesses that gets passed around like a football between larger businesses just to make the balance sheets of the larger businesses incomprehensible. Right up there with Pivotal.
Not sure why this thread has turned into so many off-topic complaints about Microsoft but this acquisition itself makes perfect sense. The duopoly of Google and Facebook has weakened with the changing landscape of mobile devices, tracking protection, and data regulation. Amazon is quickly building their ad business along with Apple and this gives Microsoft a solid leap forward to leverage their growing media inventory and onboard existing clients with a fully functioning demand and supply-side platform.