So I buy a device ... with my own money ... which I supposedly then own, but then I need to ask some corporation permission to use it, and it treats me like a toddler by giving me a 24 hour wait period for the ability to install applications on that device? I'd understand if this "feature" was a part of Parental Controls, but I'm not a child, so this is insulting. I see Google saw how Microsoft likes to spit on its users and wanted a piece of that action. How is this legal?
I never bought into the apple ecosystem for the exact reason of not being able to feel ownership over my own device.
However i also understand the challenges google has. They/vendors are selling consumer devices with a consumer OS on it. Not everybody is tech savvy and a fair bit of people are too easy to trick into installing things.
An alternative could be to offer two versions(perhaps on phone activation). A business like version where a business(and people on HN) get full access. MDM and all. And average Joe mamas version that comes with more guard rails activated.
I can personally live with that 24 hour wait once, if it helps protect the average people from scammers etc.
> Not everybody is tech savvy and a fair bit of people are too easy to trick into installing things.
Almost nobody is tech savvy to understand how LLMs work and how subtly and convincingly they present incorrect facts, yet they are free to use by everyone.
Here, we are talking about the same company providing both of these services - an OS where they are supposedly trying to protect their users, and LLMs where no protections are needed (just censorship).
I can understand that point, but I'd much rather vote for increased education than increased babysitting. Increased education would affect those that need it whereas increased babysitting affects everyone, including those who do not need it, and living in a society where everybody assumes you're a toddler because some people are easily gullible and ignorant is just horrible.
Just look how state works with solving all kind of problems with legislative regulations that, in the end, remove freedom of choice peace by peace. Neither you give responsibility to individuals to learn even from mistakes or take all of it. Of course because of our "safety".
You can always buy a Chinese android phone without a Gstack. Then uhm, well, you will have lots of freedom at least without having to wait 24 hours first.
yes, but we are talking about educating a billion people in developing countries. it's not just some people there, but the majority of the population. it will take a whole generation at least to fix that.
this is not about protecting children with parental controls but about protecting illiterate adults in developing countries who are being exploited by unscrupulous scammers.
yes, it's bad, and i don't like it either, but this is preferable over only allowing verified apps.
This sort of washing away fundamental problems with blanket statements like "oh it's just X, not a big deal", which then always keep adding up to a pretty big deal, is not helpful. Perhaps ignorance is the path to happiness for you, but not everybody wants to bend over to lords at megacorps.
A 24 hour wait like this can sometimes be the result of a security team not knowing what else to do. There are all sorts of weird threat models when you think hard about how devices are used, like partners who have legit access to a phone at a certain point in time.
What's next? I buy a car which I cannot drive in certain locations unless I ask for permission and wait 24h? Daddy Car Dealership please let me drive in this location, pretty please?
drones are already coming with mandatory GPS-based flight restrictions
cars are a funny example (but I know, car analogies are also mandatory!), because cars and driving is a very complex and regulated system, what you can drive, where, license, registration, car & road safety standards, where to park, when, how much to pay, etc...
this is the right answer. google is simply at a loss. they are not doing this to gain control, they are doing this because developing countries are demanding it. and those developing countries are the future markets with a lot of growth potential. so from google perspective they can't afford to ignore those markets, but also from a development perspective it would be unfair to deny those people access to modern technology just because they lack the education to avoid being scammed.
You are essentially a child to them. A child is just someone who has not yet developed the power to survive in a world full of adults. This is why parents guard and protect children, and when that fails society steps in to do it instead.
You are just a child to them. Not powerful enough to stick up for yourself. Ripe for abuse. The difference is society has decided not to step in to protect you from your abusive parents.
Right so by this logic, if I buy an electric car, and they decide to not let me drive on dirt-roads because the software won't allow me to and I need to ask special permission and wait 24h to be able to, that's also totally fine then, right? Do you not see the ridiculousness of this premise?
if you have problem with this vote with your wallet and don't support HW companies doing this or talk to your MEP or other representative to change the current legislation, I'm just telling what's the current status quo, don't kill the messenger
Pretty sure it's just that Windows is horribly broken, privacy-invading, ad-ridden malware disguised as an operating system. I swear it seems like nobody at Microsoft not even once have asked the actual users for what they would like to see in the OS.
The video takes this one step further, and it has nothing to do with being 'out of touch' or something. The speaker is arguing there is a macro trend of pushing us towards agentic interactions instead of the UI components we're used to. Then it can track, tune and control everything we do, thanks to all the telemetry back and forth.
I wish people would engage with the content a bit. It's a huge claim (and scary).
> The speaker is arguing there is a macro trend of pushing us towards agentic interactions instead of the UI components we're used to.
This trend is not even limited to Windows.
We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.
I don't know, I think a simpler explanation for Google's behavior is that monopolies act like monopolies. Combating spam and SEO junk is hard and expensive. Once they became synonymous with web search for most people they gradually cared less and less about product quality. If people will keep using the product no matter how bad the results get and how many ads get jammed in it's hard for a corporation like that to care.
Possibly, but it makes more sense when viewed through the lens of "Google is an advertising company" rather than a search company.
Also, it's not like Google went on autopilot and pursued nothing in recent years. Clearly they've dedicated resources to AI, so it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired, all the while making it appear as a choice the user was making.
Google famously solved the search problem and the spam problem, and technology has only gotten more capable since then. Suggesting that blogspam etc are too difficult to defeat is a tough sell imo.
> it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired
I find that very hard to believe because it implies a level of foresight that we have not observed from Google. The notion that they degraded their own search on purpose for years to funnel people to AI seems very implausible, especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI, and that level of foresight would also imply that they should have beaten OpenAI to the punch instead of reacting to ChatGPT.
> especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI
This would be a calculated financial bet on their part. This kind of risk taking is not limited to SV startups.
I realize companies under late stage capitalism aren't typically known for having foresight past one quarter, but that doesn't mean some of them can't have somebody optimizing for the long-term in a financial sense.
It's seems premature to rule this possibility out entirely.
Occam‘s razor says prefer the simpler explanation.
It is possible that Google as an organization had enough foresight to see that search would eventually be eaten by AI chat bots and so intentionally degraded the experience of search to encourage movement in that direction. And also that Google was too dumb to actually ship their chat bot first and capitalized on their choice to sabotage search.
It seems a lot more likely that the the decline in the quality of search is due to a combination of hyper-optimization for revenue and difficulty combating large scale spam farms.
> We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.
So Google ruined search so they could give their market share to ChatGPT. 4D chess. Maybe 5D even.
If you have some explanation for how doing this makes any sense at all, please share. But I think you’re basically engaging in conspiracy theory by claiming Google intentionally reduced the quality of search to drive AI adoption.
It's not that hard to synthesize how business leadership would both optimize for the present of the pre-AI era while also continually refining their strategy as AI became clearer on the horizon.
You're jumping through hoops when this really isn't that complicated or far fetched in a business sense.
It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.
It is extremely farfetched because it would provide no present or future advantage to Google to do so. If they hypothetically wanted to intentionally degrade their search, they could always do that when they are ready for the switch to AI.
> It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.
It literally does though.
Furthermore, even if you reject that, in practice it could be as simple as Google funneling resources from maintaining search (which is obviously a never ending game of cat-and-mouse between forces of SEO, etc) to AI prospects, which would have the same outcome: neglect leads to degradation and dysfunction, and it makes their new venture more appealing. They obviously have enough capital to play such a game in the short-term and eat whatever loss necessary during the transition.
Google is well known by now for abandoning their products in favor of what they deem to be the Next Thing.
Microsoft has a handful big clients - Dell, Lenovo, HP being the top three. They are the ones that make Windows be the default operating system on everyone's computers and they need to be happy, not the person who buys the computer. When the computer becomes unusable, they'll just get another from the same brands and everyone, except the user, are happy.
Corporations don't run Windows. They run Outlook, Excel, and Teams. Windows and generic PCs (or thin clients and VDIs) is just the cheapest way to achieve that goal.
Corpos definitely run Windows. There are many highly technical people and advanced software that need Windows. Not every company employee is just a pencil pusher or bean counter.
This myopia in tech is so baffling to me. Windows has been around over 40 years and tech people still act like it will go away “any day now” just because they don’t like it.
Corporations will continue using Windows the same way they'll continue using mainframes (at least mainframes are interesting machines). If Dell, HP and Lenovo decide tomorrow to ship all laptops with Fedora by default, very few people will install Windows. Or notice it's a different OS. They'll just think that Windows 12 no longer has ads.
Corporations will continue to corporate. Active Directory is a powerful thing. SharePoint is another dependency that's hard to get rid of, even more so when it becomes the file server where all Office content is stored.
I have been waiting for this day since the move to SFF and thin clients. They've been threatening to do all compute in the cloud... at which point the OS, local or otherwise becomes irrelevant.
In fact, the thin client that drives my desk at [company] runs Linux with the Citrix client to connect to a VDI that exists somewhere in a datacenter we own, because regulations.
> They are the ones that make Windows be the default operating system on everyone's computers
I've got to disagree. Macs are a fantastic option as long as the software needed to do actual work is available. That's the real bottleneck and it's not something Dell, Lenovo, or HP have any power over.
They still ship a lot more computers than Apple. For most of the world, Apple is a niche product. I use it, and I love them, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking corporations will start buying Mac Minis to replace their desktops and thin clients anytime soon.
I am not fooling myself and I do not care what corporations would or would not do - I simply state that the reason there is such a pressure to use Windows is not due to Dell and other providers, but software providers - mainly Microsoft.
That… does not follow. Corporations simply aren't going to start buying Macs for all of their millions of rank-and-file corporate drones. Even if they wanted, and they don't, they're tied to the Windows ecosystem in all sorts of ways, even though the software lives on someone else's computer these days.
Thanks for saying the same thing I have said? Do people even read before they post? Seems like the moment Apple is mentioned some folks just turn on a downvote + disagree autopilot, even when they agree?
Nah. I think the problem is that windows and macOS did everything users wanted them to do about 10-15 years ago. Everything since then has been lipstick on a pig.
If windows were a building, they need to stop tacking on more rooms like it’s a gaudy McMansion. If they really wanna keep working on it, work to make what’s already there more beautiful. Optimise. Reduce the install size. Clean up some of the decades of tech debt. Unify the different generations of UI toolkits. Write documentation. Port security critical parts to rust, where appropriate. Refine, don’t reinvent.
> did everything users wanted them to do about 10-15 years ago.
Certainly not; not by a long shot. Besides, most users don't even understand the potential of software. But why bother improving it if you still make money shipping crap?
I agree, I've been amazed watching people release after release upgrading to newer versions of Windows and office, when what they used them for functionally didnt change. I could never make sense of how people didnt see it for what it is, and accepted the continuous costs.
But hey, I guess that's capitalism, and people are captured by it. If it has a new shine, and everyone else is doing it, let's all jump over the cliff's edge.
In a couple years you won't have to bother with that. The device will connect to the ID chip embedded in your body when you're born. And this will be a one-time hard-wired coupling for that device when it is first turned on.
A bit of a tangent, but your worst case answer here is the culmination of all the secure boot and remote attestation concepts.
What would stop it is a combination of not being able to buy new hardware that will even boot the modified kernel, and not being able to get vintage hardware to connect to any public ISP etc. due to being unable to attest its validated boot chain information, signed by a required modern hardware OEM key.
So you would be stuck in some kind of underworld of vintage folks attempting mesh networking between themselves. Then, because of basic market forces/economics, there will be a dwindling amount of software that is able to run in such environments. It will become the esoteric realm of old-school hobbyists who don't need to run any commercial apps which require ABI/API features of the modern commercial OSs which require this boot chain of the modern commercial hardware, etc.
They might force the Linux kernel to add a value 'age' to the couple username/password. Although in Europe OSS is exempt from age verification obligation.
Microsoft is declaring all users are now corporate drones. All your activity will be tied to your Microsoft account. All your files, images, and regular screenshots of your PC will be sucked into OneDrive. If your mouse has not moved in five minutes a manager will be notified.
Used to be that people who bought the OS were the customer. Now just like everything else these days, they're the product. And the OS still isn't even free.
Plus it's hard to buy a computer without paying the MS tax, unless you build one yourself.
That's an issue I would like to see legislated! In fact, in my country there is a law that prohibits bundled purchases: it's just that the authorities are not tech savvy enough to see it when it pertains to computers and Windows.
I'm being slightly absurd here since you need some sort of firmware to simply start up the computer and install an operating system, but here is my point: to most people, the operating system is part of the computer. The computer is simply an expensive brick without it. On top of that, a lot of the negativity towards bundling Windows originates from Microsoft's past monopolistic practices[1]. We certainly don't hear many people criticizing the bundling of macOS or iOS on Apple products or Android/Chrome OS on Android devices or Chromebooks. (There may be people who want to load alternative operating systems on these devices, but that is different from criticizing the bundling of the OS.)
[1] Is Microsoft forcing hardware vendors to install Windows even a thing these days?
It makes sense, if manufacturer provides support for Linux on the same laptop SKU. But that's very rarely the case. So selling laptop without OS seems like selling half-working product. When you're buying a car, it comes with a lot of software. ECU software, multimedia software (sometimes it's Windows CE) and so on.
I saw laptops selling with FreeDOS but realistically speaking I think that majority of these laptops end up with pirated Windows, so all it provides is increasing level of piracy.
Ideally laptop should provide a choice between Linux and Windows on the first boot. And easy way to buy Windows license if user chooses it.
Compared to a hypothetical world without computers with Linux preinstalled, presumably.
“Plenty” doesn’t really seem like a relative term here, but a statement that there are enough options on the market if someone wants to buy a machine with Linux preinstalled.
Users want a one time payment of $150, for a 50 million LoC software product, and then get 10 years of support.
Everyone here slinging mud, while getting paid out of the SaaS pot. Would windows be a better product if it was user focused but cost $40/mo? From Microsoft's POV it would probably kill numbers.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. What matters is being upfront and transparent. Microsoft could just have said the initial license is just that. If you want updates be prepared to pay.
As a single anecdote - I use Windows daily because I'm a C++ programmer in games and all console frameworks are Windows only. I also have to use MacOS every now and then to do some iOS deployments, and I don't understand how people use it daily - it feels like an operating system designed by someone who doesn't use it themselves.The UI is actually straight up horrible, not to mention window management if you don't have a touchpad - it literally makes me want to throw the stupid thing out of a window.
My point is - we're all comfortable with what we know and use the most. I imagine if I used Macs all the time I'd also think that Windows is stupid.
Not saying it’s actually linked to cancer but it definitely does increase the risk of hemorrhoids, rectal prolapse and bleeding from straining. Which could mean chronic stress at a cellular level repairing damage over the long term.
The amount of people that know how to and also want to replace their operating system is effectively a rounding error in the consumer electronic market in general.
I like Linux and had Linux laptops before, but can’t comprehend why anyone would go as far as replacing MacOS on an Apple laptop. The OS is just fine, there is nothing superior about Linux Desktop environments. And you can easily run Docker containers for work that needs Linux.
I'm really after higher refresh rate than 60, but it seems it would cost me an arm, leg, both kidneys and my newborns to get it at 5k or more resolution.
Given that it has been struck down multiple times now, it's the minority of European Union members. Making a blanket statement of "Europe" (which btw is not the same as EU) is just insulting.
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