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Comment by panpanna | Hacker News Reader

First of all, I don't understand why Microsoft is doing this. They are making more from online services than they ever made from selling windows licences so it's not like they need the few cents advertising generates. Probably the windows group trying to up their own numbers, not noting they are hurting the company as whole.

With that said, I don't consider all things author disabled as "ads". Some are just annoying attempts to get people to explore w10 and the included software.

What I consider ads are:

1. The stupid preinstalled games and apps that fill your start screen upon your first boot.

2. The preinstalled Microsoft games (these contain actual ads)

3. The third party app suggestions.

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> First of all, I don't understand why Microsoft is doing this. They are making more from online services than they ever made from selling windows licences so it's not like they need the few cents advertising generates. Probably the windows group trying to up their own numbers, not noting they are hurting the company as whole.

Maybe you know more than me, but I think it's possible that your assumptions aren't right.

Do you remember the Ask toolbar that everyone hated Oracle putting into the Java installer on Windows? I think it was even opt-in rather than opt-out, and it was just in the installer pretty unobtrusively. I heard recently that this earned more money than all of Java licensing at the time, and supported the hundreds of people working full time on Java.

For reference: Drive by installation of adware/malware is very lucrative. The going rate is around $1 per install.

One perfect example is Google Chrome, that used to pay the usual price per new install. That's why Chrome got bundled into the installer of every software and their mother, and got so many users so quickly.

I recently got a new "Microsoft Ergonomic Desktop" keyboard. It has a the "Office key" which if you press launches an ad to buy Microsoft Office. AFAICT there is no official way to disable it!!! and at least for me it was easy to hit by mistake.

Apple isn't as bad but I run into ads for Apple Music on my iPhone unintentionally in a similar fashion. Meaning have no intent of ever subscribing to Apple Music but Apple has designed the UX so that users are likely to hit the ad to sign up from time to time.

Then stay away from the YouTube app...

> ["Microsoft Ergonomic Desktop" keyboard] has an "Office key" which if you press launches an ad to buy Microsoft Office.

That is the funniest and saddest thing I've heard today. Ergonomic indeed..

With their work in open-source, like developer tools and programming languages, Microsoft has been regaining some of the trust they lost over the years with their business strategy and product insanity. I'm surprised to note that these days I'm using more and more of their products regularly.

At the same time, it's widely recognized that the company culture is still sick in some ways, with incredibly questionable design decisions in Windows 10 and other products.

That's what worries me, for example, about their acquisition of GitHub and NPM. I never want to be stuck being dependent on Microsoft, because you never know when they might slip into crazy mode and ruin a good thing.

On a related note, while my wife and I were trying to remember how to put the Apple TV to sleep we accidentally subscribed to Apple Music. I only found out the next day when I saw an email informing us of our 3-month trial.

There are registry tweaks to disable or reassign buttons, and utilities that make it easy to do them. I made my left Windows key be inert this way, by mapping it to another key that does nothing. The software I used is SharpKeys from randyrants.com.

Honestly I would jam a paperclip under that key to disable it out of spite

You mean Clippy?

Can you remap this monstrosity out of the way (or making another control key or something more useful)? I always remap control and caps keys on my keyboards, which is a pretty minor one-time regedit incantation.

Anything which spies on me for Microsoft, I want disabled. I'd like my Windows to:

* Occasionally grab a list of patches available, see which ones apply to my system

* If I install new hardware, with my permission, find drivers.

Sending random information about me to Microsoft is not okay.

But no, the author doesn't disable all Microsoft ads as advertised; you also need to uninstall the massive number of paid pre-installed craplets, which as far as I know, can only be done with command line incantations.

I think Microsoft is doing this since OS licensing costs will disappear at some point, with

(1) actual increasingly fierce competition from places like Android

(2) ease of future free OS competition as things moving online (20 years ago, no business could run Ubuntu because Word; now, Ubuntu, Chromebooks, etc. are enough to run a business on)

The Microsoft tax will become increasingly unsustainable on the low-end, and that may quickly trickle up.

> First of all, I don't understand why Microsoft is doing this.

For money. All companies do things for money.

> so it's not like they need the few cents advertising generates.

Few cents? Advertising is behind some of the most profitable companies in the world today.

> Probably the windows group trying to up their own numbers, not noting they are hurting the company as whole.

When windows 10 was released, MSFT had a market cap of around $400 billion. Today it has a market cap of $1.4 trillion. If the windows group is hurting microsoft, that isn't being reflected in its market cap.

Not enough to offset their continuing monopoly in productivity software, but it's certainly kept me from buying a Windows device. n=1, ymmv, etc.

Everyone on HN is an outlier, though. We’re very atypical users.

The word monopoly gets thrown around like it's nothing these days. Google Docs and LibreOffice also exist.

Monopoly and anti-competitive go hand in hand, though I don’t think Office has anything to worry about currently.

Alternatives to google search exist but they’ve still been declared a monopoly by the EU, with something like a 90% share of searches.

In the US we’ve blocked cell phone company mergers that would take them over 40% share for comparison.

Of the office suite front Gsuite has ~57% share and MSOffice ~43%

I used Windows almost exclusively from mid 2016 to mid 2018. Ads, tracking I couldn't get rid of and annoying questions on the beautiful login screens drove me back to a Mac for most things, despite the bad video card other hardware deficiencies.

Ye I hate those "Haha I wont tell you where this butieful island is click to know more" clickbaits.

I am fine with the pictures they are nice. But the click bait link is distracting.

Is this also present in Enterprise version of Windows?

It depends on what you mean by "Enterprise". My Windows development VM currently runs Server 2019, which doesn't have the issues described above.

> The stupid preinstalled games and apps that fill your start screen upon your first boot.

While I agree that this is advertising, note that they're not really preinstalled. Those game icons will download and install the app on first click.

> I don't understand why Microsoft is doing this

Maximizing shareholder value is about pushing everything to the limits, to fully explore every opportunity for potential revenues.

Not saying I like this concept and what it does to the world. But at the same time I am invested in the stockmarket, meaning that I want to profit from it. I guess I want it all...

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