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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates.

Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.

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> Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates.

You mean they don't put ads in the windows home menu or hundred of spywares in the OS ?

Or that they don't have ads in bings, skype or outlook ?

> Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.

Or maybe you mean they don't lock in with proprietary formats, avoiding to publish the specs and when they then do don't follow it like with Office ? Hopefully this has been compensated by the fantastic Windows Update experience and good behavior.

I'm not an FB, Apple or Google fan. In fact I don't have an FB account, I voluntarily don't buy Apple products and refused a job interview with Google.

But let's not forget the numerous bad deeds of MS. That's how we never solve the problems we have: we let people misbehave and after a while, they are all forgiven. It's the same with politics, bad bosses, abusive spouses, etc.

Don't let people forget.

I mean every company has problems... Microsoft just seems to be generally headed in a better direction vs worse which seems way more common.

We're not wedded to these big tech companies. I don't know why we need to forgive them at all. Let's talk about smaller companies making interesting products that haven't betrayed our trust, like System76, Lulzbot, or Purism. There's a whole world of hardware and software out there.

We don't need to forgive them, I personally just don't have the energy to remain angry at a company that has CLEARLY changed direction significantly.

All of you are of course free to remain pissed off at anyone or anything you want. Just be mindful of why you're mad, and make sure once in a while that it's still worth being angry about.

First of all, I've never seen an ad in my start menu. You can disable live tiles.

Second, anonymous telemetry is not spyware.

After perhaps the fourth time I disabled Cortana and cleaned up mysteriously re-enabled bloatware on the Start menu, I started getting the same "I don't own this device" feeling I've had for years with smartphones. It's obviously less egregious than e.g. Facebook, but it's also a more fundamental element of the stack where I'm less willing to tolerate bad behavior.

If it was simply a matter of doing a bunch of cleanup one, I'd get over it. But between buggy, user-unfriendly update features and instantly-out-of-date instructions on what I need to turn off, it's uncomfortably reminiscent of Android's issues.

>Second, anonymous telemetry is not spyware.

On this note: if you opt-out of telemetry, don't complain when your power-user features stop being catered to.

where is my jump list from task bar! "omg m$ sucks"

> Second, anonymous telemetry is not spyware.

I think there is plenty of room for legitimate disagreement on this point so long as it's not optional and/or fully disclosed.

Maybe but it's not their main source of revenue like with Google and Facebook. So they don't have to go crazy doing unethical stuff in that area (privacy) which is what people tend to care most about these days.

"They are not as bad as they could be" is not an argument.

Don't worry, in a few years we won't even be able to make that argument: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/nadella-microsoft-wi...

I'm not making any argument in their favor. I'm talking about the ads discussion.

>Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates.

I really hate Windows 10 automatically turning off all my privacy setting each time it updates, and re-installing ads for candy crush and other junk on my start menu after I'd explicitly removed it. Windows 10 tracks damn near everything you do and sends it back to Microsoft.

The answer is to use Microsoft apps on an Apple machine (or Linux if you're that kind of person)

What are the caveats of running Wine to get Windows apps?

http://go/wiki/Wine_(software)#Other_versions_of_Wine

You don't need Wine to run majority of MSFT apps on macOS these days. The whole Office suite has native apps, as well as VS Code.

It's even easier to simply not use Microsoft apps.

I consider Windows 10 to be a privacy nightmare, and I don't use it outside of work (where it's necessary because it's one of our target platforms).

However, and this is big to me, Microsoft doesn't pretend that Windows 10 isn't doing what it's doing. That means, even though I don't consider Windows suitable for my own use, that doesn't reduce the amount of trust I have in them as a company.

> Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.

How times have changed. It wasn't long ago that many of us (myself included) were saying virtually the same thing about Microsoft's product.

> How times have changed.

Including people at the top running things. Interesting (to me) how the sales guy CEO's having been changed led the companies in different directions afterwards.

Ironically I recall a minority pointing out Apple would be even worse than Microsoft if they were in Microsoft's place given their controllingness - Microsoft was fine with third party manufacturers as opposed to suing to stop "Hackintoshes". There never was an equivalent for Microsoft.

Microsoft was in the position of the Hackintoshes, though. It was IBM in Apple's position, and IBM did sue.

A software company (MS) and a hardware company (Apple) definitely make different choices!

Isn't MS making hardware now?

Sure, though not enough to really be called a hardware company.

The comparison was between MS in the 90s and Apple now, as I understood it. At the time they might have been making peripherals, maybe? But not computers.

Yeah, I don't recall any MS-branded computers back in the 90s. They were making mice and keyboards, but that's about it. And they have always been happy to sell a copy of Windows to anyone that wanted to run it (and had compatible hardware, which was already commoditized back in the 90s).

I remember seeing news reports about the Black Friday-esque runs on stores at midnight the day of the Windows 95 release (while I was sitting smug at home because we had been running prerelease builds at home for months due to my dad's software company being a member of MSDN [or whatever the equivalent was at the time]).

Microsoft tries to block Hackinwindows:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)#Microsoft

> Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates.

Microsoft has many business models and one of them is based on advertisements, example : LinkedIn.

Sure, but Microsoft is not exactly looking to brag about the fact that it owns LinkedIn. There's zero mention of Microsoft on the LinkedIn website.

My hunch is that LinkedIn derives a substantial (perhaps the majority) of revenue from premium memberships sold to recruiters.

The recruiters and amount of spam (those two overlap heavily in the Venn diagram) are what drove me to delete my LinkedIn account.

Windows 10 business model for consumers is also based on ads and tracking/surveillance.

> Microsoft has many business models and one of them is based on advertisements, example : LinkedIn.

LinkedIn make bank from selling Sales Navigator. Ads are a tiny proportion of their revenue.

I was surprised to see this is true about their advertising! While dated, their 2016 disclosures showed ads making up only 18% of revenue ($109mm)[1]. Which was only about 10% of the $1.6bn that Bing pulled in around that time[2].

Having managed ad campaigns on LinkedIn, that's both surprising and not. They have a horrifically high cost per click compared to other channels, but the results in B2B verticals were usually enough to warrant putting up with it. So it's surprising it was only pulling in around $100mm. But then, their self-service component didn't allow for accessing all of their inventory, and none of my clients wanted to go in with the commitments necessary for the high-touch placements. So that may have dampened demand a good bit.

That said, Sales Navigator (and premium subscriptions) is an equally small portion of revenue. 65% of their money came from their "talent solutions" recruiting features.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120214/how-does-lin...

[2] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/313837/micros...

Yes, it is always a reality check from the feel good vscode/wsl/Nadella lovefest when they foist some unwanted telemetry or ads in various parts of Windows, that they are a beast with many heads.

Bing is their major ad business, not Linkedin which makes its money mostly from subscriptions and jobs.

Microsoft got a bad rep because of its nefarious behavior in the 90s. It has killed many concurrent. It has fought against linux, java, netscape, ...

It has tried to replace win32 many times creating a mess for developers. How do silverlight experts feel ?

Recently, Microsoft has changed. visual studio code is excellent and OSS. WSL is getting very good.

> horrible apple store experience

Care to elaborate? I've never had a negative experience making purchases or getting devices repaired at the Apple store.

Compared to HTC, which left me without my brand new phone for two months while they shipped my $800 One M8 back and forth with a different defect every time it came back to me.

I think you're looking for 'bad rap' instead of 'bad rep', by the way.

Apple only has a "bad rep" for tech lock-in and right to repair among the small "less space than the Nomad. No wireless." inward looking, geek crowd.

I don't know if that is true anymore. One of my friends who is very much non-technical but has been an iPhone user since 2009 and Mac user for almost as long just asked me for a recommendation on an android phone a few weeks ago. He specifically cited the battery issues, and after having keyboard problems had done some googling for alternatives. Repairability was specifically mentioned, since he has had to have screens replaced on phones.

There has been a fair amount of negative press, this is filtering to 'normal' people, not just Lewis rossman's viewers

Well. We have more than anecdotes. We have retention rates.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/11/apple-narrows-ios...

Another reason Apple gets a bad rep is the often obnoxious behaviour of a group of people who defend the brand's every step and misstep with an almost religious fervour.

Have you heard of a guy name Richard Stallman?

I don't think he uses Apple products so in that respect he is unlikely to fit the category. He has been implicated in giving Apple a bad rap in other ways though.

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