

With Windows 10, Microsoft sells you out - smacktoward
http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/07/with-windows-10-microsoft-sells-you-out/

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baseballmerpeak
Ads in solitaire? That is _too_ far.

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mark_l_watson
To be fair, it only takes a minute to adjust your Windows 10 system settings
to take care of most of the author's concerns. I made the obvious adjustments
for increasing privacy and then a day later went back and shared a bit more
information with Cortana.

This is the same issue that I have with Google Now. It is very convenient to
give up some privacy for an effective digital assistant.

I now use Linux laptops (I have three of them) for much of my computing needs,
but I still give up privacy on purpose when I use Google Now on my Android
phone, perhaps with Microsoft 10, and perhaps with my MacBook.

~~~
hwstar
When you don't pay for it, and it's offered for free by a business out to make
a profit, the problem is almost always the lack of clear and consise
disclosure. There is no [Schumer
Box]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumer_box](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumer_box))
for Windows like there is for credit cards.

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api
I keep beating this horse, so I'll beat it more:

The same thing is happening to the digital world that happened to classical
media.

People want cheap and/or free. It's also incredibly difficult to compete with
cheap/free products. Mix this with the fact that information is "free" \-- it
costs almost nothing to copy -- and all information economies tend to become
deflationary races to the bottom dominated by free and freemium stuff that is
_indirectly funded by other parties_ (like advertisers).

What's wrong with this? I mean, doesn't this mean the information economy is
some kind of wonderful post-scarcity utopia?

The problem is that information isn't actually free.

Let's say you have two files. One is 100k and contains a copy of a novel. The
other is 100k and contains the results if dd if=/dev/urandom. Both files take
up the same amount of space and both are virtually free to copy and
distribute. But the novel took _years and years_ of someone's hard work to
create, while the random numbers took no effort at all outside of a tiny bit
of electricity.

All information is not created equal. Information that requires effort to
produce is not the same as information that doesn't.

This creates a market paradox. The market wants free (or at least cheap), and
free is incredibly tempting to marketers because free undercuts the
competition and goes viral. With free (or freemium) you can get a kind of
exponential growth curve that is incredibly hard to achieve with a paid
product. Yet at the same time you are a liar. The information you're releasing
for free is not free. It cost you something to produce. Like all lies, at some
point you have to answer for this one. How will you keep the ball rolling?

In a networked world, the obvious and convenient answer is to _sell your users
to someone else_.

In cases where your product has a service component with a non-trivial cost
(e.g. Facebook), free is a particularly pernicious lie. Not only does it cost
money to keep producing the product, but it also costs _hard capital_ to
operate the infrastructure. If there's no subscription based revenue model,
you _must_ sell out your users. Either that or you shut down.

This happened in traditional media of course, and it gave us ad-or-propaganda-
fueled television and radio. Outside of a few pay channels, virtually all
broadcast media is financed by advertisers or is operated at a loss by
governments to serve as a propaganda outlet (the same thing really).

This means that -- big surprise -- those financiers have tremendous pull over
what is broadcast. There's a reason you never see genuine challenges to the
conventional corporatist/state-capitalist political system on TV. It's because
the beneficiaries of that system pay for all your TV.

There are exceptions in the software world, like Linux, that have managed to
discover a niche where they can be the permanent beneficiaries of
philanthropy. These exist in the broadcast world too. But they're unicorns.
These niches are rare, hard to construct, and possibly unstable. Ultimately
every business and most other efforts that require constant financing must
serve some master. If free rules the day, they must serve advertisers and
other interests that want to buy you.

It's no coincidence that Apple is trying to take the high road. They're doing
it because they can. Apple is insanely profitable off their own physical
products and their own vertically integrated services, and they have a measure
of lock-in that ensures long term customer loyalty (meaning high lifetime
customer value). They can afford to forego advertising revenue in favor of
customer goodwill, especially since this further cements their lock-in over
those customers in the long term via platform integration.

When I saw that Windows 10 was going to be free, I _knew_ it would be spyware.
Microsoft also has the option of taking the high road, but they've chosen not
to. Instead they've decided to try to become Google or Facebook and "invert
their model," making their products free and therefore making their users into
products.

The free ad-supported model was tolerable for TV and radio because these are
unidirectional. The TV does not watch you. But free ad-supported models in the
Internet age lead to horrific dystopias. If we don't want something worse than
Orwell's worst nightmares, I really think the only solution is to reject free.

Rejecting free alone is not enough -- obviously there are paid products that
are user-hostile. But I think it's at least a necessary if not sufficient
condition. We also have to embrace and reward players that make an effort to
protect their customers' privacy and security -- in other words to treat their
paying customer like customers.

I'm looking forward to the day when customers see "free" and actively reject
the product, assuming that its business model will be user-hostile. I already
see a little bit of this in the web. When free services with absolutely no
revenue model get introduced, I often see skeptical questions about where the
money's going to come from. If the company has no obvious answer, the default
is 'by selling you out.'

