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Comment by lghh | Hacker News Reader

Why Google over MS? 5-10 years ago I'd agree, but not as much now. They are trying to be a cloud service company funded by enterprise and there's nothing inherently wrong with that as far as I can see. I'd also put Amazon below MS due to labor abuses that are not as prevalent at MS.

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Okay, I think you're right. I'll edit my post. But it's super complex. MS has done extremely bad perverse dark-patterns with Windows 10 and has extended the level of ads-built-in beyond what was happening before. They seem to be trying to be as bad as Google and are just worse at it. And they don't seem to do as much redeeming things.

Yeah you're right. Ranking big, faceless, multinational corporations on who does the most bad when they all do lots of it is really hard. MS does have a lot of dark pattern garbage going on.

MS charges for their product, which means the users are not the product. Agreed.

It's often repeated, but this is a silly slogan. It's not either-or. Subscription magazines have ads. There is nothing preventing a business from making money from users and ads, and if anything, a subscription makes it easier to know who your users are, so the ads are more valuable to advertisers.

Some business models require this; most newspapers wouldn't be in business without both subscription and ad sales.

Windows 10 is apparently a case in point: it's not free and it has ads.

Or, they sell both the license and the users by having an install base that has trouble switching. Remember windows 10 ads? https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/3/17/14956540/mic...

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