I agree, the good thing about Apple and Microsoft is I know what they want to sell me.
Apple want me to buy relatively expensive devices on a regular basis and ideally a cloud subscription.
Microsoft want me to buy subscriptions to their cloud services and ideally devices running their OS.
In both cases the value for them is fairly clear and they have limited incentives to do anything that might jepordise those revenue flows.
Companies like Google who (IIRC) get over 90% of their revenue from advertising, need to make money by selling information about me to 3rd parties for advert targeting, which I'm not so keen on.
Personally I prefer to pay someone for a product/service directly.
And yet, microsoft started incorporating ads inside of windows 10. The business models helps, but if you can both sell a product and get ad revenue, why wouldn't you ?
In apple's case, they have a fairly small but dedicated marketshare that cares deeply about those issue. That's why I trust them to not sabotage their product. Microsoft has a monopoly, they don't need to care.
Too late to edit, but that's really what I meant. It's true that windows isn't a monopoly in the truest sense, but it feels like one because of the huge marketshare and vendor lock-in they have.
> There are clear paths to NOT use anything Microsoft if you want to.
For a lot of people there isn't.
Take my dad for example. He sells weight scales for retail (think butchers, greengrocers, cheese shops, etc). Those scales are pretty much embedded PC's nowadays, they connect to the internet and can be remotely accessed to update product prices, promotions, get the daily sales numbers but also things like changing the logos and text on the receipt and a million other things.
The manufacturers of those scales sell a piece of software to do that, but it's always a 100% Windows app, held together with all kinds of (outdated) MS technology like Visual FoxPro. Often they have licenses that require hardware dongles, have bizarre drivers to communicate with the hardware and it feels like it's al held together with spit and ducktape.
There is no Linux or OSS alternative, the protocols aren't even published and no one cares to reverse engineer them as the market is just tiny, and the target audience has no overlap with the techies that are interested in Linux and the like.
And that's just one example, there are tons of crappy, outdated, proprietary apps like that out there. Apps with tiny user bases no one cares about so no OSS options will ever emerge.
But all of that is not a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination.
It speaks less of Microsoft and more of the vendors who find no need to change their ways. Yes it really is all held together with spit and tape, but nothing has forced them to change from it.
It's a monopoly for those users * innumerable_similar_niches.
Which translates into a pretty large part of the small business market that doesn't have any de facto choice.
And WINE et al. aren't a scalable solution because invariably these things depend on odd Windows quirks and/or are generally terrible from a code/standards quality perspective. And there's functionally no way to address that because the historical-Windows-in-fact API is "every odd behavior every release of Windows has had over the years."
Your example may be a monopoly (if there are no alternatives then Microsoft has a monopoly in that market, whether they actively pursued on or not, just as the first entry in a market has a monopoly until other entrants appear), but when talking about operating systems in general, Microsoft hasn't had close to a monopoly in a while. They still have significant market penetration and the majority of desktops, but credible alternatives exist in most cases, and more and more people are using them (thus the importance and interest in this MacOS release).
I haven’t used OpenOffice much? But it feels much less polished than Office or iWork. I guess there’s Google Docs, but even that’s limited compared to even iWork. Is there anything actually decent that can be used for “Office” stuff on Linux?
Unfortunately they don't (and probably can't) do it for everyone. What is needed is bug level compatibility with msoffice (including visual basic) and seemless interoperability (including add ons). Not only is this an insanely difficult target - it is also a moving and potentially hostile one to interoperate with. I've massive respect for the libreoffice developers but I don't envy them the task of msoffice interoperability.
Office 2003 and Office 2007 upwards don't have bug level compat. it's even worse if you used special things in your .doc files the chances are/were high to render them different between the older and the newer versions. basically nobody cared as soon as a lot of people moved to ooxml.
Also Office 2003 and LibreOffice4/5 have way more in common than Office 2003 has with 2010/2013/2016.
Bare in mind I've been often on the other side of this discussion....
None of this really matters - if you tell someone word ate a word document then they are sympathetic whereas if you tell them libreoffice ate a word document the reaction is much less favourable. I do not like this.
My solution - I just refuse to use any office software.
well just wanted to say that the conversion between ribbon caused a lot of people problems.
especially the older personal really dislikes office 2007+ upwards.
basically I barely use any office software and I'm on mac where Microsoft Office is basically bloat software. And for my needs, LibreOffice/The Mac stuff or just a text editor is most of the time's more than enough.
Outlook is actually a pretty good product on Windows, however on Mac it is as good/bad as the built-in mail app. (actually it share's a lot with it, i.e. account's go over apple exchange integration and search uses spotlight and so on).
LaTeX and Org mode are much better and more usable than either Office or OpenOffice for me. I haven't needed to do more than copy-paste into Office documents for the last 4 years. Of course, that's not at all relevant for general market share, but there are viable alternatives depending on how technical you are and your exact needs/restrictions/use-cases.
Within large organizations, I don't think there's any replacement for Excel.
Google docs are great as a Word replacement, but Google's spreadsheet offering is a spreadsheet. Excel is an extremely sophisticated development environment.
That would be great. People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming. Get people with R or Python and Pandas, or some other statistical program. (88% of Excel Spreadsheets contain human errors) These are human error. Use a program not an Excel sheet.
Excel is programming. It's just not the kind you do or like. The number of programming things people have done in Excel and Access is astounding, as is the number of people who've learned to program without realizing it as a result of using those tools.
Could they be better? Sure. But don't knock it as not "programming" on that basis -- PHP is also bad.
I've read a lot of crappy code written by physicists (my past self included) who lack training and/or don't care about code quality. While I hate proprietary, monolithic programs, I'm not sure replacing them with R would lead to saner results or fewer errors. I would certainly prefer python and org mode to excel and word, thought.
Although it's a nice thought, the benefit of excel is it's comparatively low barrier-to-entry, ubiquity and transparency (in terms of other people being able to understand how a calculation was derived).
It's not realistic to expect everyone in a company to learn python, and I'm not convinced that replacing shitty excel documents with shitty code would introduce less errors.
Also the concept of 'minimum viable product' in excel is typically adding a couple of columns and adding titles to them. To develop something for others to use in python will take much longer.
> People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming.
I'm sorry that the democratization of computing hurts you so, but Excel has done more for normal people who just need to push numbers around than perhaps any device since the pocket calculator. And it has exposed more people to functional programming than anything else has, ever.
Again, I have to ask, what sophistication does Excel have that Google spreadsheet does not also offer?
COM and VBA scripting?
Access database sourcing?
Google spreadsheets even has analogies to this functionality (albeit in Google flavors).
It's certainly not the formula and pivot table capabilities which Google spreadsheets has pretty good parity with. At one point in time you could argue that excel handled larger files better, but more recent versions of Google Spreadsheet seem to handle larger files pretty well.
All the strong arguments for keeping excel usually boil down to "well, we built this giant thing using proprietary MS scripting/plugins/db access that we're too entrenched in it so it won't work on Google (and should probably be done in an actual programming language anyways)"
I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features. As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets. You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.
> I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features.
PowerPivot is a sophisticated set of features.
> As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets.
Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent.
> You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.
You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.
> Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent.
The distinction isn't artificial: you can build upon excel as if it's a programming platform, but that doesn't make excel itself more powerful - all you've done is built yourself into a proprietary tech stack. With enough time you could do the same thing in Google sheets with Google's proprietary scripting interface. Comparing the two apps at baseline there is no difference in sophisticated features. PowerPivot is a plugin.
> You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.
Yeah, actually it does - you just won't be solving everything with an xls file and you might actually be using a more appropriate tool for the problem, but I guarantee Google has an equivalent offering.
I hear this argument a lot and I still don't buy it. I use more advanced functionality than 90% of my coleagues and I don't find google spreadsheet stops me in any way.
Tell me something excel can do that Google spreadsheet can't.
If you're using excel as a programming interface it's going to be hard to dig out of that. Of course, one could argue that excel was never a good place for that sort of thing in the first place.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you're a LaTeX user, your needs are specialized beyond what the average office worker needs out of a word processor. Point taken though.
Really ugly ads, too. There's just like 2 or three random cut-off strings of text randomly sprinkled around my login screen on my SP3, with little searchglass icons next to them. They're always totally incoherent and I'm not even sure how I would interact with them if I wanted to (clicking does nothing).
Both. Maybe, more their stuff. Comes installed with nagware for Office and Skype. Advertises their and third party cloud storage. Advertisements on screensaver. All can be disabled/removed. The ad I saw on screensaver was for a video game. Maybe Microsoft was the publisher or something but they definitely weren’t the creator.
What markets is it that you feel Microsoft have a monopoly in?
Desktop/Laptops is now a 3-way split between MS, Apple and Google with chromebooks.
Mobile is a split between Apple and Google with MS out of it.
Cloud is Amazon out in front with MS in second place.
Office is the one area where MS could be considered to have a monopoly but even there I think cloud players are gaining ground and also (AFAIK) there's no advertising in paid for versions of MS Office.
I only have a Windows PC for gaming. I'd gladly switch to Linux if all games were also available there. (I tried wine and stuff like that ages ago, but that was just a pain.) Windows has effectively a monopoly on gaming PCs.
One third of the games I've purchased on Steam are available on Linux.
I guess the perception of whether or not Microsoft effectively has a monopoly in the gaming PC market segment really centers around the games you play.
Poor coverage exactly because it has single digit desktop market share. There's not enough market, therefore it doesn't get enough product. The end result is that if you want a broad choice in games, you need Windows.
Fortunately there's been a lot of great games coming out for Linux too recently, mostly thanks to cross-system frameworks like Unity, I assume. And that's great, but not really enough to threaten Windows' position in the PC game market.
I understand where you're coming from, but the market share doesn't really figure into my argument of coverage. If the idea is "should I adopt or not," and I like gaming, then the % coverage is a highly important statistic. I can still step back and say "well isn't that nice, Linux has 1/3 of games ported and only 500 people use it! Good for them!" Won't change the fact that I need to use windows if I want to play all games.
Windows also has a monopoly on enterprise and government PCs. There aren't too many 100k-employee organisations out there whose desktop SOE is non-Windows.
If you take only desktop (which is what I was thinking about), windows is waaaaaaaaaay dominating the game. Chromebook might as well not exist (I haven't seen one, ever. I'm in europe though), so the only contender is Mac. But with all the lock-in and momentum Windows has, sure it might not be a monopoly in the technical sense, but it sure as heck feels like one.
How is Android profit calculated? Does it include the value of the data collected with it? How do you calculate iOS profits? Can you separate the value of the hardware from the software?
You just mean desktop computers right? Because browser share polling shows that windows use is way down across the world, at least to browse the web. The most popular alas inChina, for example, is by far Android.
They also have suggested apps in the Store live tile, and on the top of the programs menu. Some of those are not directly from MS, but again at least half are at the moment (Minecraft, etc).
Easy to turn off the live tiles and the suggested apps, and you can very quickly type to find any app so many people probably don't even look at the programs menu.
Windows 10 has been frustrating, I could understand them doing this with Basic but you have to pay a hefty premium for the Pro version and you still get this crap.
This is the most petty complaint about Windows that I've heard because every consumer-oriented OS has these type of "advertisements".
Heck, on iOS not only am I forced to look at apps that I don't want, I am also forced to use them! On the Macintosh OS, whenever I want to see what updates are available, I have to first look at the featured apps in their store. Even Ubuntu installs a shit-load of crappy programs that I don't want.
At least in Windows, you can disable them and pretty much never see them again. I've been on Windows 10 for years now and I think that I saw a Candy Crush launcher tile appear once and then it was gone forever.
Every OS has this ? I mean, this is literally windows putting ads on the equivalent of the IOS launcher. No OS does that !
I don't really care about the built-in crapware (well, I do, but let's save this for another debate). That the OS actively fights for the user's attention is ridiculous. I don't really mind "ads" for their built-in products. The Edge popup[0] was almost cute, the OneDrive explorer ad[1] was understandable. But this[2] or this[3] ? That's just corporate greed at its finest. Sorry.
I did turn off suggestions when I got my win10 PC last year. Went through a couple of articles online, hit a variety of settings... and I still get ads on that box. It's only my gaming machine, so I just gave up on blocking them.
A part is removable, the rest you can hide. The ones you cannot remove are usually the ones the iOS SDK's are built on top of like Map Views or Web Views.
Try clicking a hyperlink from Messages. You’re forced to use Safari. Try clicking an address in your contacts. You’re forced to use Apple Maps. Try replacing either one of them. You cannot.
True for Apple, not for Microsoft. Windows 10 is stuffed with tracking and telemetry and puts ads in front of you (screen saver, start menu, etc). They are absolutely NOT famous for respecting your privacy or wishes.
Does it collect personally-identifiable Information? Suppose, for sake of discussion, they collect something inoocuous, like whether you prefer to maximise windows. Say a single bit of information. True or false. Would you still be opposed to the telemetry? I’m trying to understand if the objection is about specific data being collected, or to the idea at all.
Right, no one would care about telemetry if you could turn it off. MS could have it turned on by default, even. I'm sure the amount of data they would miss would be minuscule in comparison to the amount of negative press they've received about this topic.
Why do you feel that way? Do you feel tracking whether you prefer to maximise windows is a privacy violation? Or is the objection that your IP address is included when the telemetry is uploaded to Microsoft?
I'm not opposed to it because its MS or because I fear for my privacy. As a purchaser of a product, I don't want to enlist my compute resources to collect information that is of value to the seller - for free. I have already paid my dues, so to speak. Of course, in theory,I could benefit from the telemetry. But that should be my choice, and at the bare minimum, I should have some assurance that any telemetry information I provide, isn't used to simply make me purchase a new product, but to improve the existing product.
Anyway, how many UWP apps are you running? Do you think every Win32 desktop app is now magically tracking you? Nope.
So, let's compare how many UWP apps that you actually want to run (I don't use any of them) and see if they're tracking you as much as all the mobile apps you're running. There's no contest here.
You are able to turn it down to "Basic" using the GUI, and if you are using the enterprise edition thru corporate volume licensing you can turn it down further to "Security" with admin tools.
There is no way to turn it off completely, and since its cranked up by default, that is where it will stay for the majority of installations.
As an anecdote, even Microsoft employees I've spoken with think it's overreaching and underhanded.
Incorrect. There are in fact three ways to completely disable it. You can get the Enterprise edition [0] or modify your registry configuration [1] or by a third party tool [2].
Even if you don't want to do any of those for some reason, reading about the Basic level of telemetry - it's nothing. At least it's nothing that I care about.
I’m a single-person sole proprietorship, and I have two seats of Windows Enterprise with Software Assurance as part of an Open Business agreement; “volume” doesn’t imply “high-volume”.
Bringing this back to the the story, one is assigned to a Mac Pro, where, per Microsoft’s bizarre licensing terms, it qualifies as an “upgrade” to the bundled copy of OS X (upon which I run it under VMware, permissible via further licensing gyrations).
Last time I asked, Enterprise SKUs were only available if I took 50+ licenses. Being a single person sole proprietor like yourself, that was obviously non-starter.
Another option was Action Pack, where I would get 10 licenses for a very nice price, with a bunch of other products, but that would be only usable for development or testing, not for production (i.e. not for daily use while running the company).
The problem with Windows tracking is not that apps track you (here the solution would be easy: just don't use the apps), but that the system itself snitches on you.
Are you starting an app or search for document, using the windows shell? Your phrase goes to Bing. That's much harder to avoid than just not using an app.
I did disable Cortana (it doesn't even work in the language version I want to use), but according to the firewall, it still tries to connects to bing.com.
They can track network connections or system calls for Win32. Also which DLLs the apps use. Any DLLs provided by MS can be instrumented and track any information that goes through them.
If Microsoft let me buy Windows without that, I would have paid for it. Alas, If I spend $200 on Windows 10, I get the same tracking landmines than the person who spent 0 a few years ago.
A free version with ads and telemetry isn't free, it's just monetized differently. And the vast majority of the cost of developing it is either sunk or defrayed by the paid versions.
The default exists because not everyone has the same reaction to the telemetry as you. For those who do, they have some means of bypassing that (for now).
And yet, Apple has been pushing me in a direction I don't want to go with their recent OS X versions. I paid a lot of money for my mackbook and was quite happy with Lion, but was recently forced to upgrade because apparently Lion is way too out of date.
So now I'm on Sierra, and I absolutely hate it. I thought it'd mostly just be uglier, but it bugs me with updates I don't want or need but am not allowed to ignore. And I hate their in-your-face notifications blocking an important part of my screen. (How about at the bottom next to the dock? Or in the menu bar? Just not over an active working window.)
More or less hopelessly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem here, but I totally agree with you. The non-stop annoying notifications was one of the main bullet points that I listed when leaving Windows 10 years ago, and now they've finally found me again..
Here's the funny thing about that notifications preference pane: I can tweak the way any kind of notification is displayed, except for updates. There the only options are: update now or pretend to update now.
"Hey, have you tried Safari? It's pretty great. Why don't you give it a try?"
"Umm, hey there...me again. You still haven't tried Safari? What's wrong? Want me to launch it for you?"
"Ok, this is getting a little awkward. We worked pretty hard making Safari, and you won't even try it? I'm trying to not be insulted here, but you're not making it easy."
"Listen motherfucker. You know that Keychain thing that you don't really pay much attention to. Well, I control that. If you want to see your Gmail password again, try motherfucking Safari. Clicky clicky, you lazy fuck."
My favorite is the, "a keynote upgrade is available" on each launch. Only to find out after clicking its "only after you update your OS!" (I'm was on mavericks)
And the "please use iCloud..."
On cars we used to call them "guilt buttons" for plastic shaped like buttons on the dashboard for options you didn't purchase.
I don't use Safari, I use Chrome normally but Firefox sometimes. Never seen notifications like that, to be honest. Like the sibling comment, I wonder what the criteria for that nagging is. Maybe it's A/B testing, and you fell in the unlucky category?
Notifications at the top-right, covering the top-right of whichever window is active. Fortunately most of them can be dismissed, but those concerning updates cannot, which is extremely annoying. I've once already accidentally triggered a 15 minute update, which can be extremely inconvenient when it happens at the wrong time.
I've found a way to get rid of the update notifications, though: click "details", which opens the app store with a list of your pending updates. As long as you leave that open, the notification won't reappear.
You can hide the notifications until you want to open notification center to see what they are by turning on Do Not Disturb in the settings. (Set it to be active on a timed basis, from say "7:01AM to 7:00am" to cover a full 24 hour spread.)
I really wish this wasn't on by default, or at least it prompted you to change this on install. Auto-downloading updates cost a month of valuable internet as it blew through the ISP's data cap in a single day.
To be fair, if you're on a laptop or are just regularly using full-screen apps, top-right notifications are going to cover a chunk of your screen which you might be using. Of course, so would notifications absolutely-anywhere in that situation.
"86.5% of Alphabet’s revenue still comes from their advertising business, which is driven by searches in web browsers"
That's a hell of a lot.
I wonder how quickly their other revenue sources are growing? A ton of companies are using Google products in a paid capacity. They're really very good.
Google doesn't sell user information. Also, Microsoft also has a search engine and ad business that do the exact same thing and just because it isn't successful that doesn't allow you to give them a free pass. Additionally, they preinstall third party bloatware on their OS and send tremendous amounts of telemetry back to their servers.
Google absolutely sells access to "digested" user information. While your first sentence is technically correct since they don't directly give anyone the data, it is misleading at best. Google is in the business of selling selective eyeballs to advertisers, and has been a pioneer in using user data to try and target those add impressions.
Google doesn't sell access to user information either, digested or not. I think it's misleading to say they do, "digestedly", or indirectly, or whatever.
Google sells advertisers a promise to show their ads for razors to males 18-30 years old who have ever searched for 'razors' or 'shaving' or 'beard' or 'shaving cream'.
Maybe they also look through your Google photos to find faces with beards... or check your email for references to beards or amazon orders with razors... and to show extra ads to people who live in the Portland area
Some people are more okay with the facts (top paragraph) and the possibly exaggerated version (previous paragraph) and others.
Google charges clients for the ability to have their ads seen by the demographic of users they want to target. Under no circumstances does Google sell user data in any form and it's disingenuous to try and make people believe that they do.
Microsoft does not preinstall third party bloatware, that's OEMs running on thin margins. There have been Microsoft efforts to share with OEMs the effect of bloatware on boot times and incentivizing boot time reduction.
Yes they do. My Windows 10 upgrade, which was from Microsoft, came with Candy Crush [1] and some third party PDF annotation app. They also added ads in their OS [2] to try and upsell you.
Just because you don't want to pay directly doesn't mean it's not valuable. Value is hard to judge and people will definitely start to care if it all stopped.
I've never thought about it this way. I was wanting to transition to using all Google products and services from Apple but might just further invest in Apple and start using their cloud service as opposed to Google's.
> Microsoft want me to buy subscriptions to their cloud services and ideally devices running their OS.
Microsoft pretty clearly wants 100% telemetry about everything you do on your computer - to the point where they will explicitly override user settings to the contrary - so you are underestimating the scope of their motivation
"Personally I prefer to pay someone for a product/service directly." This wont work in our part of the world where access to tech is more important than ethics to a lot of people.
Apple want me to buy relatively expensive devices on a regular basis and ideally a cloud subscription.
Microsoft want me to buy subscriptions to their cloud services and ideally devices running their OS.
In both cases the value for them is fairly clear and they have limited incentives to do anything that might jepordise those revenue flows.
Companies like Google who (IIRC) get over 90% of their revenue from advertising, need to make money by selling information about me to 3rd parties for advert targeting, which I'm not so keen on.
Personally I prefer to pay someone for a product/service directly.