this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Had a discussion with a coworker regarding this, and about how seemingly unnecessarily adversarial MS has become with its users. At first you could choose to only have a local account. Then you had to use a magic key sequence and a command to only use a local account. And I think now even that possibility has been removed? And then there's the forced default of us8ng one drive, copilot, cortana, and a bunch of other shit.
And as someone else said: The shit is the point. We concluded that MS realized that it's lagging behind other companies such as Google and Apple when it comes to providing an ecosystem that the user grows dependant on.
And while this strategy could have worked, MS has failed to take three important factors into account:
The OS is not the product anymore. It's just an attempt at getting you to use their other stuff so that they can lock you in. Why do you think you can now use unlicensed windows with no real downsides? 15 years ago your windows install would refuse to do the tiniest thing without a license, because back then, sell8ng licenses was the business plan. Now they're selling services so that they can start selling you.
I wish I could discuss things like this at work in a rational way. When I mentioned the Recall feature early on, he told me that sounded “like some tinfoil hat conspiracy theory stuff”.
I sent him a link to a news article that dumbed it down for him. Don’t know if he read it. Don’t care. But the point is, he is who MS is pandering to - the lowest common denominator, basically. The one who screws it all up for the rest of us and the reason we can’t have nice things.
It sounds like tinfoil hat shit, because it's just that shitty.
Imo this is what has held microsoft back. They never really focused on the user market. All their software is pay-for-me bullshit offering promo prices for user tier education subscriptions that never retain users. Once you're out of school you're gonna cancel office sub, pirate it, or simply use google docs because everyone can use it without paying. Office is for businesses only.
Google lets you use their version of office without asking for any money. They give you storage that integrates with it and doesn't nag you to subscribe or purchase a license to do things and they don't nag you to use it. Their email is actually good, has good spam protection. You can use google mail for small businesses without issue too whereas hotmail or outlook.com look sketchy by comparison.
Microsoft has had so many missteps in their headlong charge believing they are the only game in town. Android has a bigger market share and a lot of people just use their phone as a computer today on a global scale.
In the US, Apple keeps gaining market share. iOS is the #1 operating system here but fairly neck and neck with windows. MacOS is a little under half of Windows too, so combined Apple is a big majority OS wise. Apple isn't charging for updates on any of it's OSes, unlike all of microsoft's. The mobile hardware division makes way more money than laptops and desktops.
On a long enough of a timeline it seems inevitable that microsoft's OS marketshare dominance will evaporate. It looks like only MacOS is here today as a realistic alternative since Linux is a steaming hot mess for end user computing.
I would love to see a fly-on-the-wall, step by step, accurate documentary of exactly the series of meetings and communications that lead to these kinds of decisions.
It's more simple than that. You can only put so much bloat between a user and a command line.