Recommendations and App Promotions sound an awful lot like ads to me. Showing me things I didn’t ask for that you wish to sell me…that’s called advertising and I don’t care what dumb name you call it, they’re still ads. Show me only what I actually want to see - the stuff I explicitly choose to pin to my personalized Start menu.
And this feature was implemented into an OS you have to pay for. 💀💀💀
lol, I have never once paid for any of the copies of windows I’ve used over the years
Yes, you have. It’s just part of the price for the PC you buy.
While you’re not wrong, it’s also possible that they simply used cracked versions.
Exactly this.
Wrong. It’s a cracked version installed into a mishmash of parts.
So you’ve never once in your life bought a laptop or prebuilt PC, used or otherwise? Because if you have then you’ve paid the Windows Tax.
No
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new pre built come with the free version of Windows.
No, they come with a version of Windows included, which you paid for with part of the purchase price.
And again, the version of window that comes on prebuilts and laptops isn’t free, the cost is rolled into the price of the device.
The user you replied to probably build his pc from parts and thus not paid indirectly to Microsoft.
I can’t see the message they replied to because the creator deleted it but I’m not getting what you’re saying and people are upvoting you so there must be something I’m missing. Are you guys buying pc parts with pre-installed OS on them? If it’s used than you’re using the original OS you received the part with?
He said he took pictures of old xp keys in second hand shops and upgraded them.
I’ve also never bought a windows license, i still use my education licenses after university a decade ago. I have not heard of pc parts with an OEM license attached, thats why I believe you can have used windows all your life without ever paying something to microsoft.
I don’t buy a shitty prebuilt with windows installed. I pirate that shit and install it on janky PC parts smashed together
irm https://massgrave.dev/get | iex
Microsoft: “We’re sorry, this is all just a misunderstanding. We thought you were too stupid to notice.”
Hahaha. This one got me.
So, Microsoft recognized and responded to all the complaints by removing the feature that people were objecting to.
Resulting headline: “Microsoft is trying to hide the evidence that they were thinking of doing that thing we hated! Hate them harder!”
Do people want companies to just ignore complaints completely because there’s no way to satisfy anyone anyway?
ehh… I think you’re missing the part where Microsoft is actively exploiting its customer base throughout its entire product catalogue - the likelihood that this is an actual win is no.
They’re tasked with infinitely growing their stock price. That is a suicide job. Working big tech in the USA sucks right now because there’s no concept of just maintaining and maintaining something well, unless you’re Valve and steam
You could always start suing the US government for allowing shareholder primacy in the first place. Stakeholder primacy is the way to go and everyone knows that. Everyone besides corporate knuckleheads.
This is my first time hearing stakeholder primacy as a term. Can you elaborate on what the grounds you’d sue the stakeholders on? Ie what is the legal premise that you’re proposing you can hold them accountable for?
I never said you sue the stakeholders. They could sue the government for allowing this shit in the first place.
Stakeholder primacy is just the opposition of shareholder primacy essentially. Stakeholders are the employees, the community/society around the company like the town or city it is in. As in they have obligation to care for that.
Do they legally have an obligation to care for that? I’m still not understanding what would make this even remotely likely to succeed.
This explains it well. Shareholder primacy isnt that old even. Stakeholder primacy used to be the norm and according to this article should also be the future goal.
So yes, this works very well and has so in the past. The current model of infinite growth is unsustainable both physically and environmentally.
Nothing. It’s a pretty fantasy. Best I think we can hope for is a few monopolies busted up so some little guys can break into the market. That’ll buy us about 20 years until those little guys have become the new Googles and Microsofts and Apples, and then we start over. We need to entirely rewrite how we do antitrust assessments to account for both vertical and horizontal monopolistic behaviors (a vertical monopoly is a company that controls the entire supply chain where a horizontal one controls the market and customer base. Historically, the US has been more concerned with horizontal monopolies.) It’d be great if we could come up with a better measure of consumer choice that we currently use. If you have the choice between 2 ISPs but they both charge the same amount for the same service, you don’t really have a choice there…at least not a meaningful one.
People want companies to stop trying to exploit them in every little way.
We can be satisfied by respecting us and treating us as customers, even when advertisers are throwing money at them.
And that’s what Microsoft has apparently done in this case, yet it’s being spun negatively anyway.
Because they didn’t come out saying they won’t enable ads. They just quietly renamed the toggle to say something else, and that is shady AF. Why are you trying to spin it positively?
Give it a few more months and ads will be back. They dropped us in boiling water and expected us to just accept it. Microsoft will just slowly boil us next time.
It’s not about the current state of their OS, it is about the corporate attitude to users.
Microsoft are treating users not as valued customers purchasing a product, but as a resource to be manipulated and sold off to the cheapest bidder.
They may have backflipped on actual ads in the Start Menu, purely due to user backlash, but they still have game/app/bullshit recommendations and reinstalled garbage, unless you are a windows sysadmin and know jo to use a Profile Editor.
They don’t deserve praise for not doing something bad. They deserve praise when they do something good that they weren’t forced to do.
They didn’t do this from goodwill, but because it was predicted to hurt the bottom line. They’ll do it again as soon as it’s forgotten about. This isn’t the last you’ve heard from this.
Too late. I’ve already switched all four of my home PCs to Linux Mint.
Likewise. Debian, installed Steam, updated my graphics driver, and everything runs smoothly. I’m surprised how well Linux gaming has come along!
Gramps needed his excel icon - on the monitor I might add - or else. Debloat and activation scripts got him his windows 7 and office 2007 experience back, he was very appreciative of my “hack”, merely for the same experience he paid for back some 15 years.
He doesn’t know what a “Linux” is, but I am greatful that people are still invested enough to make utilities to return back to a more user centric experience in windows - even if I certainly don’t care to go back
wipes out evidence
I am certain it can be re-enabled with regedit
Oh man, I was a bit worried. I paid for top dollar equipment for my rig and I would hate for my system to not sweat with a malnourished start menu.
It’s the first move to making it normalized. It’s the “toes in the water” stage of advertising in your OS.
Why does this article use the term “real ads” every time instead of just “ads”? Is this just weird or does it have a technical meaning?
Well, if those were “legitimate” ads the OS would have ways of shutting those down.
That aside, anyone thinking that’s the last time they’ll try that shit is oblivous. It will come back, because why not. Only solution is to finally stop using Windows if you can, or at least dual boot.
As long as you aren’t beholden to specific software, it is becoming increasingly pleasant to use the Linux ecosystem.
Frankly, I never understood why businesses were invested in the office suite anyway. Considering there are so many good open source alternatives.
The only pain point in it’s getting a little better is graphic design.
Frankly, I never understood why businesses were invested in the office suite anyway.
Then you’ve never worked in an environment of many people, where nothing compares to office, and you can be confident the file you send will look the same on the other end. This is crucial.
Considering there are so many good open source alternatives.
Oh really? Let me see some tables in Open Office Calc. Oh, yea, the devs flat out said they will not support tables in Calc because it’s “bad practice”, and you should use a database app instead.
Sorry, it takes me seconds to setup a table in Excel, and I can do all kinds of sorting, filtering, etc with trivial effort. I’m not setting up a DB everytime I need to ad-hoc sort/filter 20 rows. There are constant annoyances like this with these open source office apps. Counterintuitive ways of doing things (or not being able to do things at all).
Nothing out there compares to Office. Considering the licensing costs for enterprise (where you can have 50,000+ users), if they could eliminate that cost without incurring massive productivity losses, don’t you think they would?
Plus you have millions (if not billions) of docs, templates, processes (where automation exports their data into Office apps e.g. Word or Excel), for users or business management to use, perhaps in other apps or systems. Whose going to pay to reproduce all that work in another system?
Plus historically, Office 4 (in about 1997) had tight integration - nothing else came anywhere close. And that’s been the case ever since. I know when I copy data from any office app that it will properly support OLE - OneNote will embed an excel sheet (or publisher/word doc) just fine. Try that with Calc, and you get some weird behaviour.
I’m glad to see the competition, but it’s got a long way to go to make inroads against office.
Frankly, I never understood why businesses were invested in the office suite anyway.
When MS Office really took off back in the Office 97 days there weren’t any good alternatives and now MS Office is so embedded that it’s almost impossible to dislodge.
I understand completely. It’s what people are used to and tech illiterate people don’t want to learn “we actually use a different software here”. These are people who already struggle with excel.
Personally if I were to start a business I’d use open source where practical, but I’d be struggling there because it’d be an engineering company and neither autocad nor solidworks is available on linux. It would be a decision on par with and probably in conflict with my commitment to running any such company as a co-op.
And this is kinda where we run into the problem, Microsoft won. The anti trust it needed to lose was it being able to demand to be the only option as a pre installed OS decades ago.
Because a paid program must be better than something a buch of hobos cobbled together for free!
Ii get that reference and hate you for reminding me of it.
Of course it will come back, soon as Win10 EoL
Dunno, but within the context, Microsoft claimed only ads for Microsoft products. Now, whether those products are predatory mobile games for example, well that’s technically within the said terms. It’s basically a matter of scope and wordplay.
Microsoft is dead to me.
Maybe if after a disastrous enough reception of Windows 11 they might make a Windows 12 that actually cares about being more palatable to the users, like they did with Windows 7 following the disaster that was Vista.
But I think they’ll most probably only move to meet us halfway like they did with Windows 10 following the other disaster that was 8. Where they replaced a major irritant with another and then slowly stacked more and more irritants with updates thereafter. They are too addicted to the revenue from data harvesting to give it up.
Lol
I think you expected too much out of them
The sad part is that all of this is all self-inflicted in the name of “growth” for the shareholders. They absolutely could take 7, modernize it, call it “12” and release it as a lightweight, fast and more privacy-respecting OS. It would probably be far cheaper to make as well.
But that’s not what the Corporate elements of the company want. They see the OS as a platform to force feed to the users features that they can market as “lucrative” to the shareholders. Nobody else wants that. I predict that Windows 12 will have some sort of baked in “AI” that you can’t get rid of as a bare minimum.
But this is none of my concern. They’ve finally pushed me over the hump and now I’m 100% sold to Linux. It has gotten so much more approachable than it used to be. Especially with Mint.
Better to just wipe out Windows entirely and be done with it.
They aren’t ads. They are “App Promotions”.
W11 is such a great example of how out-of-touch Microsoft’s management and shareholders are. Its market share is tiny compared to W10 and is actively decreasing and they think pulling stunts like this is going to be beneficial in some way. Like even if you follow the usual routine of enshittification, they’ve missed the entire part where they expand their userbase first before making things worse.
MS needs a leadership shakeup so badly.
Meh, I despise this bullshit too, but it only affects home users, and their bread and butter is corporate, which they own.
I’d say a minor misstep, that they can easily recover from (and I say this grudgingly, because this crap really pisses me off).
