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Comment by roblabla | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Instead of saying “monopoly” just say “enough market lock-in” and people won’t get hung up on the semantics of “monopoly”.

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.

Apple: an imaginary version of you in the minds of it's design team is the customer.

Microsoft: the OEM is the customer.

Google: advertisers are the customer and you are the product.

Linux: its own developers are the customers.

> Microsoft has a monopoly

How so anymore? There are clear paths to NOT use anything Microsoft if you want to. Microsoft even now has Linux offerings its a new era.

> Microsoft even now has Linux offerings its a new era.

If they made a Linux version of Office and ported Direct3D to Linux, I'd be impressed. As such it's just embrace, extend extinguish again.

You mean the monopoly is due to Office and DirectX?

There are plenty of alternatives still. I only use Outlook due to work but I could also get around that through several ways.

Maybe we just have a different definition of monopoly?

Definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly

1 :exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action

2 :exclusive possession or control

    no country has a monopoly on morality or truth —Helen M. Lynd

3 :a commodity controlled by one party

    had a monopoly on flint from their quarries —Barbara A. Leitch

4 :one that has a monopoly

    The government passed laws intended to break up monopolies.

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?

GDocs has been the primary office tool for the past several jobs I've had across the entire staff.

What can it not do that office can do?

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.

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.

My guess is mainly legacy stuff (VBA macros) and .Net/COM based plugins that may be purchased or developed in-house at some businesses.

For something brand new I would imagine Google Sheets can handle the vast majority of use cases.

Those companies need to hire programmers and use a programming language like R.

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 don't think there's any replacement for Excel

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.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spr...

One error cost $6 Billion in the "London Whale"

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.

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.

I would be astonished if switching from Excel to Python or R or something else yielded even a 12% (much less greater than that) error free rate.

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.

Even more: Excel is purely functional programming for the vast majority of functions that people use in Excel.

> 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.

> Again, I have to ask, what sophistication does Excel have that Google spreadsheet does not also offer?

PowerPivot. Database Access (JDBC to a handful of DBs isn't anywhere close to what Excel offers.)

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.

Structured References[1]: Tables whose range can be referenced by name where the range expands as you add rows to the table.

[1] https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Using-structured-re...

It doesn't take 10 minutes for a LaTeX or Word user to get frustrated with docs. What doesn't it do:

1. user defined style definitions

2. citations / bibliography

3. anchoring

There are plugins that can help, but at least where I work using these is often banned to avoid the risk of leaking corp info.

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.

Libre office and google docs more than do it for everyone I know.

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).

That’s not “office” stuff, that’s “microsoft office” stuff. You should in fact use windows if you rely on microsoft tech like that.

That said, a VM works wonders and people aren’t as confused by them as I would have expected!

OpenOffice stopped being supported in 2011. Most distros use LibreOffice.

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.

But the issue here is monopoly. Or do you really think that LaTeX will somehow gain any market share from Microsoft?

How do you open docx and pptx files other people send you with LaTeX and Org mode? ;)

Sending docx and pptx files, expecting the receiver to be able to open them is wrong, not OP's fault.

You might be right in a certain philosophical sense, but you're also cut off from communications with 98% of the business world with that attitude.

You could probably use something like pandoc (http://pandoc.org/) for the docx. Not sure how well it works though.

Not sure what to do about pptx.

> 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).

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).

I think those are information about where the login screen photo is taken.

Are those ads for 3rd party things, or for their own stuff?

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.

>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

In the US maybe (and I doubt even there).

In the rest of the world it's 90% windows machines.

In Europe Windows is down to 83% of desktop class machines http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/europe and in overall "computing devices" including mobile it's down to 47% http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/europe

In certain markets like schools, windows is down to 22% in the US and 65% Worldwide (https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/02/apple-ios-market-share-k-12-e...)

These don't really feel like monopoly numbers like we used to see around the 1995-2005 timeframe when Microsoft were at their most monopolistic.

>In Europe Windows is down to 83% of desktop class machines http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/europe and in overall "computing devices" including mobile it's down to 47% http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/europe*
Yes, speaking of desktop/laptop machines. It's Windows, OS X around 12 or so and the others closer to statistical noise.
Those even the 12% for OS X is in Western/Northern Europe mostly -- anywhere else it's closer to 95% Windows.

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.

Yes, desktop/laptops (as per the parent).

Wikipedia says that Windows accounts for well over 70% of all desktop use[0], I personally wouldn't call that a 3-way split.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

but what profit % do they have?
Android dominates mobile OS usage, but iOS has equal profits if not greater than Android

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.

Microsoft is making billions dollars of profit from Android's devices just with their patents licensing:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/...

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?

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.

1/3 is pretty poor coverage. State it this way: "In order to play 2/3 of available video games, you must have Windows."

Poor coverage? For an operating system that has single digit desktop market share?
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. :)

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.

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.

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.

News flash, desktops aren't anywhere near the most dominant computing platform anymore.

Chromebooks are tiny. Smaller than linux even. It's just MS and apple.

Apple also has an ad network on mobile. And they provide users with some opt-out functionality.
I won't be surprised if this gets challenged for anti-trust.

I thought Apple killed iAds?

> And yet, microsoft started incorporating ads inside of windows 10.
Using daily, only thing I've seen - notification about Edge (which came with the OS). what?

I've seen Office 365 ads in windows explorer

Yes, those were infuriating. Those can easily be disabled, though, via this method: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/turn-off-ads-notifications-exp...

Before disabling the ads, I saw ads for Halo, Cloud Drive, and prompts to install Office 365 on screensavers and interstitials.
If you don't see them, you've likely disabled them.

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.

Candy crush showed up in my windows menu every day for a while.

For me it continually installed unwanted games without my consent. This is with AIRQUOTES “Pro”

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.

Here are examples of the new, damned Edge ads: https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft-window...

OMG. I see you completely got flooded with those ads

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.

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.

No, your not. Try copying the link and opening it in your preferred maps app and browsers.
And what does that have to do with ads?

Wrong? I have it opening in Opera just fine?

https://imgur.com/a/TthvX
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.
[0] https://i.stack.imgur.com/l6JLb.jpg
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/File-...
[2] https://www.digitalcitizen.life/sites/default/files/gdrive/w...
[3] http://securitydaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/windows1...

Again...at least you can turn off suggestions and you'll never see them again.
Apple gives you no choice to even replace certain apps that they desperately want to force onto users!

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.

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