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Comment by Scramblejams | Hacker News Reader

It’s hard to believe that the loss of goodwill is worth whatever revenue Microsoft’s gaining from this, so I have to assume this is them dipping their toe into a strategy that attempts to make them more relevant to users. Maybe a reaction to the Windows app store’s lack of success? Thoughts?

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Using their products, you can so easily taste how Microsoft is trying to become an "ecosystem", a "lifestyle brand", a "platform", and so on, and to use their OS as the relentless foot in the door for getting there.

To me it's another nail in the coffin of general purpose computing. We've accepted that mobile devices/OSs are not for general purpose computing and expect that they come with a "lifestyle" to hawk, now one of the major general-computing OSs is heading in the same direction.

I think the irony of that statement is from Windows 3.1 and on Windows (25-ish years) was already THE defacto PC platform. I was a pretty big MS fanboy for a long time (and make my living with .NET and their developer tools). But MS's quixotic fetishization of their app store to me looks like dousing the legacy (no pun intended) of their platform with gasoline and lighting it on fire.

Edit: format tweak

They don't want to be just a PC platform anymore. They're looking at Apple's high-end lifestyle brand and trying to get in on some of that. I wish they'd be happy with the organic brand they're building around XBox and Minecraft and all that, but kids and education just don't have the same money or cachet as the upper middle class and up consumer.

And I'm no fanboy but boy am I a fan of .NET. So far it seems like that part of MS is well defended from this grossness, I only hope that holds up.

Excuse the rant.

they are going all wrong at that.

people dont buy apple because of the walled garden or spyware or iphoto bugs that expose your pictures. they buy apple despite all that.

if microsoft can produce better and more innovative hardware, which they already did with the surface line, they could have kept windows xp model of online isolation and not only got the people that want the flashy hardware but also the people that want to actively avoid the online tie-in.

instead they are doing the worst they could. you cant even use oneNote with your surface pen, I kid you not, without login in to a live.com account! and minesweeper is a 100mb app that you have to download from the store, and it have in-app purchases.

FWIW, the new Microsoft games are actively maintained with new content and features on a regular basis, whereas the classic Minesweeper/Solitaire EXEs (which you can easily copy onto a Windows 10 PC) weren't modified beyond bugfixes for somewhere around a decade and a half.

Microsoft Jigsaw is perhaps my grandma's favorite thing ever, and the $20 yearly cost for premium (ad-free) is well-worth it to her.

> FWIW, the new Microsoft games are actively maintained with new content and features on a regular basis, whereas the classic Minesweeper/Solitaire EXEs (which you can easily copy onto a Windows 10 PC) weren't modified beyond bugfixes for somewhere around a decade and a half.

it's not a good thing as they're using the opportunity to infest these programs with ads

Solitaire on Windows now has ads, and don't get me started on the new calculator

...What do you have against the new calculator? I use it really heavily and am a fan. I have to do some stuff with hex, so I drop into some of the additional modes from time to time even. There's no ads in the new calculator for sure.

Adding ads is definitely an irritation, but my point is, they are funding a supported, maintained product with Solitaire. It's more than just Solitaire now. It currently has five different games, not including features like daily challenges and the like. It gets updated reasonably regularly.

Indented text in HN is monospace and respects newlines (no word wrapping). This makes it unreadable on mobile unless the lines are very short.

The generally preferred way to quote on HN is to begin the line with a > and wrap the quote with * if desired.

It's an issue that comes up too often that HN needs to fix, but here we are.

The reason HN does indented text that way is for code. People on HN post code snippets as a fairly regular thing, and having code snippets word wrap (or eat white space) is really confusing.

The problem isn't that HN does that with leading space. The problem is that people use leading space for quotations, which isn't what it's for.

The problem is that there is no markup for quotes, so people try to fill the void with an indent, which gives the most obvious difference to text.

Linux is the only remaining OS for general purpose desktop computing that has a non-negligible market share.

When my old acer laptops hard drive crashed, I tried to get my hands on reinstalling Windows with my OEM license: no go. I installed Linux Mint.

My new laptop with Windows 10 became so slow I also switched to Mint. Couldn't be happier.

This kind of problem is why my conscience is clear when I use KMS cracks. I legitimately own about two or three Win10 licenses, but can't actually use any of them for various reasons.

Life's too short to put up with bureaucratically obstructive licensing schemes.

I bought a super cheap Toshiba laptop for taking notes in college. One of those ~$250 ones. Completely unusable with the included Windows 10, but sailed with ElementaryOS.

I put Fedora on it first, and it was mostly fine but Gnome was too slow for my liking. But then again I was usually taking notes in vim in a terminal, so that probably wouldn't have mattered in real world use.

Microsoft is not, contrary to popular opinion, stupid. MS knew nobody was going to pay $€200+ for an OS anymore.

So they had to find another way to monetize Windows.

Is that why they will soon charge $49 for Windows Pro users to install Win32 apps (i.e. disable S mode)?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/windows-10-s-becomin...

I don't think your link says what you claim. The link says that users of Win S will have to pay $49 to upgrade to Pro. S is store-only mode, meaning it can't run anything that didn't come from the Store, whether it's win32 or otherwise.

Thanks. After another look at the articles linked from that one: the upgrade fee is from Pro S to Pro. There's no more Win S.

Nobody ever paid that really. OEM rates were much lower. The real problem they face is two-fold: 1. People spend more time on phones and less on desktops/laptops, and 2. Computers have pretty much stopped getting faster so people don't replace them as frequently.

Since Microsoft made money from new computer sales and those are less frequent they have to move to a subscription type system.

Is OS X any different? I feel like Microsoft's largely playing catch-up in that regard.

Yes it doesn't install trash like Candy Crush and Farmville, or even Facebook. It does try to ram iCloud down your throat but that's just about acceptable given that it is an Apple product and doesn't spam you.

It sure spams me with password prompts all the god damn time though

It doesn't force restarts to install new "features" you never asked for and can't decline all while creepily reminding you that "don't forget, Windows is a service!"

I think it shows how little value Windows is to Microsoft anymore. Office 365 and Azure are where the money is at for the company now.

I use Win 10 Enterprise at work so I don't have to worry about any of the Candy Crush or FB malware trash on my PC but no way would I buy a consumer Windows based laptop anymore.

I use Windows 10 Enterprise at work and our image team had to specifically remove Candy Crush. It’s actually more annoying than that, the semiannual OS updates cause Candy Crush to be reinstalled.

This is very unprofessional. Sadly iOS suffers a similar fate with Bluetooth.

It, reinstalls Bluetooth?

> Sadly iOS suffers a similar fate with Bluetooth.

What are you talking about?

Updates re-enable Bluetooth regardless of the user's preference [0]. (Or did until newer versions, I haven't updated one in a while.)

[0] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/this-is-why-apple-enables-blue...

Enabling a a core wireless radio feature != installing unwanted software.

True, but I'd classify both as overriding explicit user preferences.

Now if they installed Minecraft that might be ok ;)

Well, they see Apple and Google and Valve getting a 30% cut of everything sold through their platforms, so that's clearly where they want to go. Their first attempt - GFWL - was sufficiently horrible that everyone is wary of them doing it for games.

I'd say Windows is like 4th or 5th on their list of priorities right now. It's all about Azure, nothing else matters.

Which is ironic because doing literally nothing to Windows besides security updates would be better than the "improvements" they've been making.

I agree. I don't think it's evident that this is a bad user experience. They identified that many people would appreciate having Facebook notifications on their desktop, so they preinstalled the app and sent a notification to make people aware of it.

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