

Crapware – Satya Nadella needs to sort this crap out. It's not good for Windows. - hoodoof

One of the reasons to buy a Mac is that a Mac is a Mac is a Mac. OSX is always the same.<p>Windows resellers however &quot;improve&quot; Windows buy loading all sorts of garbage.<p>Satya Nadella is fixing alot of stuff.  One more thing for him to fix is to ensure that Windows is not modified and that the Windows experience is not tarnished by any sort of crapware - including but not limited to spyware like SuperFish.
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quesera
I'm confident that many PC manufacturers would be happy to remove the crapware
themselves, if they could find customers who would pay extra to offset the
revenue they'd lose.

Their margins are so thin that crapware keeps them in business. And since the
hardware and (windows) software is commoditized, they compete with very few
points of differentiation.

Build quality, fit and finish, battery life? Those customers go to Apple, by
and large. And never come back.

And this is why Apple will never license OSX. Why they'll never sell it to you
to run on a hackintosh or a non-Apple host VM. They literally cannot afford
to.

Consumer Windows will never escape the swamp unless Nadella changes the
licensing restrictions, thereby raising the price of all Windows machines
across the board. I really hope this happens -- but I'm not sure he's brave
enough. There might also be legal fallout.

Windows _Signature Edition_ (seriously?!) is available today, if you are
willing to go out of your way, but it is not a mass-market product.

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smacktoward
_> I'm confident that many PC manufacturers would be happy to remove the
crapware themselves, if they could find customers who would pay extra to
offset the revenue they'd lose._

Which is exactly why only Microsoft can solve the problem. When it's up to the
OEMs, if even one OEM chooses to keep the crapware, they can undercut the
others on price and eat their lunch. So the others are forced by market
pressure to bundle crapware too, in order to get their prices down to the same
level. If any one OEM tried to break the cycle, they'd just get clobbered by
the market for having higher prices. It's a classic race-to-the-bottom
scenario.

The only thing that can break the cycle is if the choice is taken away from
the OEMs entirely. Then no one bad OEM can start the cycle over again. But
only Microsoft (well, Microsoft or the government) is in a position to do
that.

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insoluble
This concern is presumably one of the main reasons why Microsoft introduced
"Windows Refresh" in Windows 8 and higher. One problem is that not everyone is
aware of this new feature.

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RankingMember
I don't disagree that it's a good idea, but Apple has an advantage here in
that they make their OS for their own hardware, and therefore don't have to
pay an extra dime for each copy. Hardware manufacturers have to recoup license
fees. It's a similar situation in the smartphone market. I don't doubt that
most would prefer "pure Android" if given the choice.

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yzzxy
Good luck. That crapware is often there, as I understand it, to offset the
cost of an OEM Windows licence. So unless he wants to give it Windows out for
free, he'd basically be telling PC manufacturers to delete their profit
margin.

With the number of business model changes MS is making this could be possible,
I honestly don't know the state of the company well enough to judge if that's
ridiculous.

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api
Bonus points for doing it by fixing OS permission models instead of just
implementing walled gardens through mandatory code signing.

Not likely though. The latter is far, far easier.

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PhantomGremlin
Didn't I see a comment in another related thread that said that, for antitrust
reasons, Microsoft wasn't able to prevent OEMs from modifying Windows?

Recall that Microsoft tried to keep OEMs from preloading Netscape and
consequently got sued by the US government. There's no way Microsoft wants to
reopen that can of demons.

