> Like what does it want to be? Is it an OS or an advertisement platform.
It's an OS created for enterprise corporations to support and manage the actions of their employees in a digital world. First and foremost. Most MS products are.
The ad platform is MS trying to find ways to continue growing profits. :D
Nah, few enterprises have asked for any of this trash either. I'm pretty sure that most of them would be perfectly happy with a windows 98 style GUI, that supported modern hardware. They don't want all this churn either, they want something that is stable, doesn't change very fast and doesn't require them to constantly retrain their staff or waste their IT admins time fighting with whatever new options require a new set of group policies.
AKA, the new control panel that has been evolving.. most users are likely locked out of it for anything more advanced than changing the sound volume, its the IT nerds that need to figure out the optimal set of setting and push it out. Which is work that the C*'s would be more than happy to not have to pay IT staff to perform.
I think the point was that the big enterprises pay for licenses that don’t display this garbage. The rest, Microsoft is trying to monetize.
I agree big time. We pay for licenses so none of this crap is shown. However, most businesses get the Windows license that is included with their hardware purchase and this crap is shown to them.
The sad thing is that you'd think the revenue coming from license sales to OEMs would be enough for Microsoft to not resort to these blatant attempts to make Windows an advertising platform, but I guess it's not.
>The sad thing is that you'd think the revenue coming from license sales to OEMs would be enough for Microsoft to not resort to these blatant attempts to make Windows an advertising platform, but I guess it's not.
I'm not defending Microsoft here, but just about everyone else is doing that same thing (and not just tech companies, auto, appliance, consumer electronics manufacturers and many others are doing this), so why wouldn't Microsoft do so as well?
Microsoft isn't the problem per se. Rather it's the lack of effective privacy regulations. GDPR (sadly, I'm not in the EU) is a start, but is still far too weak to reverse the perverse incentives that lead to your coffee maker[0][1] spying on you.
Yes, that example is (I think) an outlier, but I used it to point up just how widespread this sort of thing is.
But we shouldn't let Microsoft off the hook for that reason. We should bash them (and everyone else who does this kind of thing) and do our best to vote with our wallets/feet.
Failing that (for whatever reasons), as others have pointed out, Pro/Enterprise versions of Windows allow you to turn this garbage off.
[1] I'd note that the article linked in [0] has some pretty blatant China bashing^W^W jingoistic undertones. That said, concern over this sort of thing out of China is definitely a concern, but less so (at least to me) than the US/Western corporations that are doing at least as much of this disgusting stuff.
It would take a bit more class within Microsoft these days to realize that and maybe they just aren’t ready to take the step in the right direction yet.
As they say, "That's what you get for thinkin'." My Fortune 250 leaves all this crap on by default. Launching Edge takes THIRTY SECONDS from a cold start on a brand new, nicely spec'd Dell laptop. I'm not clear if that's some sort of crazy "security" BS they've layered in (they're always making things worse), or the thing just phoning home to Microsoft. I keep thinking they must have gotten a big discount for NOT doing the sane thing, and turning this garbage off.
It is somewhat strange then that enterprise linux is not more common, you get stability and configurability.
I mostly put this down to bad salesmanship/C*s tending to be effectively technological cavemen...perhaps there are backroom deals we are not privy to, though.
> It is somewhat strange then that enterprise linux is not more common, you get stability and configurability.
Subjectively, I am under the impression that, in the enterprise desktop space, Linux is a more serious competitor to Windows than mac OS is.
For example in public administration: At one point the city government of Munich had replaced over 12000 desktops from Windows to Linux [1], and you keep seeing ideas to do similar things pop up in political party manifestoes and position papers like [2].
It is also not uncommon for large universities and research facilities to run on Linux.
Meanwhile, an enterprise running hundreds or even thousands of mac OS devices is something I've never heard of.
I think, in the past, enterprises were a bit more locked-in than they were now because they ran Windows software that they custom-developed, or off the rack but very niche and available for Windows only. But with the trend over the last two decades having gone towards writing that kind of software as web-based software, I think that element of lock-in is gradually but steadily decreasing as well.
The problem is that, once this competitive threat against Microsoft reaches critical mass, it's a bit too easy for Microsoft to counter the threat by simply backpaddling on the trash. In the meantime they just want to milk the cash cow as much as they can possibly get away with.
De-trashing an OS is easy. Meanwhile, they are working hard to make sure that Windows is the OS that runs the widest array of software on the widest array of hardware, which is not so easy (anything Windows from ancient to modern, Windows subsystems for Linux and Android). Windows emulation on Linux is also making massive progress, thanks in part to Steam, but I guess that structurally, it will always be easier for Windows to emulate Linux than for Linux to emulate Windows.
> Meanwhile, an enterprise running hundreds or even thousands of mac OS devices is something I've never heard of.
as a former sysadmin in these places, it's not easy to lock down macOS down - and less so to ensure that compliance is being enforced. compliance is huge, far more important than what platform you run on. MS makes this easy, and Linux support is mainly for labs, etc, who get put on a separate network most of the time and locked down.
account management on linux and mac is a nightmare, and just simple to relegate to AD. for all its problem, GPO makes this cakewalk.
I no longer work there, but back in the early 10s IBM were allowing a lot of management and a few engineers to move to macs.
Their thinkpad business had been spun off, the thinkpad exclusivity contract had run out, and IBM were in a "we already give too much money to MS" mood at the time. No idea how far that went.
They also had a RHEL workstation-based distro you could put on your thinkpad (with a few tens of thousands of users on that IIRC), or if you were particularly adventurous, a 'layer' that could be installed on Ubuntu (that had a few thousand users) or Debian(I was one of 22 people doing that at the time!))
>> Meanwhile, an enterprise running hundreds or even thousands of mac OS devices is something I've never heard of.
Your experience doesn't match with reality. There are multiple sources available describing the growth in macOS usage. One that's quoted in news reports, but hidden behind a paywall, is an IDC report from 2021[1].
It describes macOS penetration at ~23% in 2020 up 6% from 2019. The is supported by descriptions of the impact on enterprise end-user computing management teams that historically have only supported Windows. You can even look at the growth of Intune, and the breadth of acquisitions by Microsoft, to see that Microsoft is very likely supporting 1000s of mac devices.
An important element of how we got here is mobile. Windows had made huge investments in configuration management while OS X was an oddball. Managing it required a different set of tools. iOS and Android adoption in many enterprises caused an end run around the end-user computing gatekeepers from 2007-2012 with a proliferation in MDM solutions.
This eventually led to standardization of so-called "modern" configuration management API/interfaces/tools. The door was opened to more Mac adoption through Apple Business Manager while admins had already adopted modern management tools that covered Windows and mobile.
This doesn't discount the challenge with some users needing to use legacy Windows software. Once upon a time this was a strong moat. For years, IT have been under pressure to make this work on mobile (where feasible) which has cut down the blockers on macOS or Linux usage.
Hmmm, I thought they used to have a non-"workstation" desktop oriented flavour too, but maybe that's been discontinued or rolled into the Workstation thing above.
That population is shrinking. Having worked in very large (investment) Banks, other parts of the finance sector, the move is generally to divest from thick clients to web. The whole COVID situation pushed this along even faster with the reliance on diverse VDI solutions, which don't necessarily play very well with crummy in house thick client apps.
High performance, low error-tolerance applications previously only available to Windows are a continuing lock-in, yes - that's part of why gpu drivers are such a big deal.
There have been working comparability layers for the various hard-to-run on anything but Windows software appliances, but a major sticking point has been the GPU support (which keeps the software running well).
I don't think this will be true forever though, graphics drivers continue to make strides in being more open, often to the benefit of the various organizations writing or purchasing the gpus/firmware/drivers.
Windows has always had this churn. Upgrading from NT4 > 2000 > XP > Vista, etc all required a time investment to figure out new features, group policies, creating an image (Autopilot removed this requirement), etc.
Win 11 changing the Settings CPL doesn’t change the overall body of work required.
No, it's good times. Look at MSFT's stock price. Despite the lousy market, they're doing pretty well.
You can whine all you want about the user experience being terrible, but that literally doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how profitable the company is, and the value it provides to shareholders. Nothing else is important.
If customers don't like being bombarded by ads in their OS, they're free to choose something else. Alternatives are available, but most users don't want to bother looking.
This is a very narrow view of what "good" is.
If a company dumps barrels full of toxic DDT in the Pacific Ocean causing widespread pollution, but still make a profit for their shareholders; would you still argue they are a good company?
Same for Windows. They are polluting our visual space. These ads are unwanted and not sought out.
If some company dumps toxic crap in the ocean, you don't have a choice to just go to an alternate universe where companies don't do that. It's a shared resource.
When Microsoft loads their OS with annoying ads, you have a simple choice to use it, or not. You can easily use a different OS if it bothers you so much. I don't see any ads in my OS...
>They are polluting our visual space. These ads are unwanted and not sought out.
You made a choice to buy an OS that has this pollution. That's on you, not Microsoft. MS offered you a crappy OS with ads in it at a certain (presumably low) price, and you accepted their offer. You could have used a different vendor, a free OS, or even a more-expensive version of Windows that doesn't have the ads.
This is nothing like environmental pollution. MS Windows is not a shared resource, it's a product from a private (publicly-held) corporation, offered for sale with the goal of making money for its shareholders.
I’m not expecting any big returns from them, but they certainly beat inflation, when amortized over my investment period. And they don’t seem to be going anywhere soon.
I'm getting heavy flashbacks to Active Desktop and iirc "Active Channels".
Does anyone remember those? Web feeds on/in your desktop. I believe it coincided with the release of IE 4 and their big web integration push.
Active Desktop and MS DHTML was awesome. Insecure as hell for "consumers", but awesome. VBscript/Wscript on/in the desktop as an application was really useful.
Aye, BSD jails have been around for a while, and the chroot jail has been a concept since I've been using *nix OS's.
But there wouldn't have been the hardware, resources, or depth of support available for the end user in the 2000s. There are still non-technical folks I deal w/ at work that don't get what a VM is...
they were not a thing that commodity hardware, but most importantly the target user, was really prepared to run at the time
same as virtual machines were a thing in the early 70s and client-server in the 80s, but not for the target market despite the industry thought so for some time
My assumption is they want to pivot into Windows being really free of charge, with it monetised through advertising. Putting all this junk into the Start menu is testing the waters.
If they must go that route, I sincerely hope they offer a paid SKU in the traditional $100-200 range that dispenses with all of that. It's kinda icky, but if they want to offer a Pro version that's all clean and tidy for money, and a crappy, ad-laden version for free...I don't want to think of all the shitty bargain PCs people will be stuck with, but at least I'll be able to keep building a new PC every 8-10 years with whatever hardware I choose and include a Windows license as part of the parts list.
Make this ad-supported version a budget option for people who can't afford more and won't install Linux if you must hit that market. Just don't ruin the whole thing for those of us who will pay a modest amount for hardware and software compatibility.
It's an OS created for enterprise corporations to support and manage the actions of their employees in a digital world. First and foremost. Most MS products are.
The ad platform is MS trying to find ways to continue growing profits. :D