It genuinely baffles me that we haven't seen more aggressive antitrust action taken against Microsoft with Windows 11. Trying to lock down what people can install, attempting to force users into using Microsoft accounts with dark patterns, tying Edge and Bing into everything, hijacking browsers and falsely saying things like this...
This feels exactly like the Microsoft of the IE6 era, if not worse.
The US and EU governments really need to come down hard on this, just like the latter did in the IE6 era.
I almost returned (I would have returned it if they didn’t live 900km from the nearest store) the surface I bought them for their accounting.
The build quality is great but I was immediately repulsed by a number of things:
- forcing me to sign in with a Microsoft account
- setting ‘new’ outlook as the default
- ‘new’ outlook wanting to divert all Google workspaces emails (that I have set up for them) through onto outlook servers (….!!!!!)
- a particularly weird one I wasn’t sure I’d be able to overcome when I accidentally set my keyboard to GB-en instead of US-En and couldn’t press enter (surely the walkthrough knows what sort of keyboard it’s got and won’t let you make a stupid choice before you’re even in on the desktop right? Wrong!!!)
I have to use windows machines at one of my workplaces (…a hospital) - it’s really jarring to see ads in the start menu
Pro tip I discovered by accident: If you type in any gibberish account name/email that doesn't exist, it will throw an error and move on with the setup without needing an account. No need to fuck with cmd line registry incantations or rufus.
>I have to use windows machines at one of my workplaces (…a hospital) - it’s really jarring to see ads in the start menu
Was unsure you could remove them! Honestly it feels so weird using Microsoft machines now; I’m very unused to feeling so transparently that I am the product (although Samsung tv s having ads seems pretty bloody rude as well)
I’m trying to imagine being an IC in this situation at Microsoft and having some slimey promo seeking product team come at you with these dark pattern demands.
When Silicon Valley, particularly Apple, successfully got an antitrust case brought against Microsoft, it was because Apple and crew had more lobbyists in DC. Way more. It's not something that Microsoft had really worried about, so they were caught flat footed. After that case, Microsoft learned the lesson, and sent quite a few lobbyists. There will be no action in the US against Microsoft for the same reason there's been no action in the US against Apple. There will be the occasional case against any company in Silicon Valley when they're too overt about it, but they'll get a slap on the wrist and sent on their way to continue doing the same antitrust behavior. No one will ever reasonably suggest splitting them up again.
But considering how much Google uses their position to maintain the monopoly in Search and browsers, it's in our interest to level the playing field. So, despite the annoyances, we are better off in allowing Microsoft to grow market share. I'm a Windows and Edge user (by choice) and I can very easily neither use Edge nor Outlook if I don't want to.
They are both abusing. Allowing both to go as they are does not pick winners or losers. While you are right in theory, in practice it takes years for antitrust trials to go through - and they fail often.
Actually I'd argue that Google started by abusing its search monopoly. But yes, if I had my way both Google and Microsoft would get ripped apart in court. Neither excuses the other.
The EU is very actively pursuing large tech companies over nearly this exact thing already. The EU commission could very easily decide that Microsoft is a gatekeeper (DMA) and cannot engage in this kind of behavior anymore.
It seems like I've heard a lot of the same complaints about Apple. I don't know, I don't use Apple. I'm happy with Windows 11, probably because I know how to work around the b.s.
I’ve used MacOS and Windows both every day for more than a decade.
MacOS does have some “is this a bug or a dark pattern” situations, but it is in no way comparable to how much Microsoft pushes all this. It is more than a magnitude of difference between the two OSs
“Complaint” may be underselling the Apple’s situation with iOS and iPadOS. They are getting forced in to change by the EU already and they are actively being sued by the US Department of Justice.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft comes under fire for windows 11
Buy a new iPhone, get inundated by modal ads to subscribe to the iOS ecosystem like iCloud storage and Apple Music. I like reading news from various sources, but Apple News may as well be broken without a News+ subscription, teasing with the headline and first few lines where I might actually be able to read the article in full from the Google News app unless I've hit my monthly paywall quota.
Apple may not be as blatant as MS, but enshittification by shareholder eventually poops on us all.
In the Release Preview released today [0] PC Manager will be installed by default on devices in China. How long until it is no longer confined to devices just in China?
Because some product manager at Microsoft needs something to show for at his next performance review, and that kind of forced user engagement an easy KPI to game and show off: "Thanks to my leadership and my team's work of setting the default save path in Word to OneDrive, OneDrive users are now up by 500%! Now gib house in Bellevue."
This isn't just a problem isolated to Microsoft but applies to every major publicly listed company out there where you're tasked to justify your existence every year/quarter because Wall Street investors want their "growth" pound of flesh, leading workers to fuck with every product they can to generate the necessary theatrics for a promotion at the expense of everything else.
It's the curse of chasing short term gains at the expense of long term product quality and reputation damage. See Boeing. It's a wonder how Steve Jobs managed to avoid this trap for so long during his tenure.
Again, if it's your employer's decision, then it's your employer's problem that every price of documentation is leaking outside of the company. Is it safe in a cloud? No one can tell for sure. Maybe your employer doesn't care. For any private usage, LibreOffice works best. It's not trying to sneakily upload your private information to Microsoft.
As any LibreOffice user will tell you, LibreOffice is hot wet trash compared to earlier versions of MS Office.
LibreOffice suffers badly from a very dated and unfriendly UI. It's an iconic example of large FOSS applications having terrible UI/UX.
Office is quite simply a better product apart from the connection to Microsoft. Or at least it was, I haven't touched it since Windows 10 launched. Either way, LibreOffice is only barely viable as an alternative.
When Windows 10 came out, I thought Microsoft had turned a corner, releasing a quality OS with minimal BS, maybe one I could live with as a daily driver. They’ve undone all that with Win11. Whatever technical merits it might have are crushed under the avalanche of crap foisted on us by corporate.
Now read the article again, and where it says "windows" replace with Tom's Guide.
It's hard to take an article seriously when it complains about adverts, while at the same time putting an advert between every paragraph.
Yes, the competition for being the default search engine is fierce. And yes there are arguments to be made about the current Google quality, and the addition of Copilot to Bing.
But frankly the article is little more than click-bait about adverts from a site buried in adverts.
The title appears to be inaccurate. The tool suggests the "repair" of resetting the default search engine in Edge back to Bing. Still slimy but it does not appear to have any thoughts about using other browsers. Yet.
This feels exactly like the Microsoft of the IE6 era, if not worse.
The US and EU governments really need to come down hard on this, just like the latter did in the IE6 era.