Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business
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Not sure why this thread has turned into so many off-topic complaints about Microsoft but this acquisition itself makes perfect sense. The duopoly of Google and Facebook has weakened with the changing landscape of mobile devices, tracking protection, and data regulation. Amazon is quickly building their ad business along with Apple and this gives Microsoft a solid leap forward to leverage their growing media inventory and onboard existing clients with a fully functioning demand and supply-side platform.
Meaning what? This is technology to deliver advertising.
Where ads are placed has nothing to do with this story, and hasn't changed because of it.
But even there, most people object to the personalized ads and the tech that measures it. People don't seem upset about ads in print magazines (that are tied only into the consumed content) or ads in podcasts.
In the 19th century, mercantile giants evolved into banks, because after expanding to the limits of their trading turf, that's how they'd get secure, predictable Return On Capital (ROC).
In the 20th century, industrial giants evolved into fintech services, because after expanding to the limits of their markets that's how they'd get ROC.
In the 21st century, the largest software companies seek to evolve into adtech for the same reason.
How is advertising synonymous with capitalism? If it were communism or socialism we'd likely just call advertising propaganda, but is there a real difference?
To be clear, even if Microsoft was born in a reality where America was Democratic Socialist, wouldn't they be doing the same thing just a slightly different purpose?
It's not absurd to envision a world in the next 30 years in which advertising is >33% of global GDP - and maybe 2-5 companies control >50% of that market.
You can never say if something is a bubble until after it pops.
On the other hand, I think there's a convincing argument that people are having more and more of their needs and basic wants met. And if you're in the business of selling things - you need to synthesize wants in your customers.
Only 200 years ago, basically everyone on the planet was a peasant. Only 70 years ago, even middle class people in the US and Europe had a laughably low standard of living by today's measures.
Now, in ~60% of the world (the developed world incl. China) - only a couple percent of the population is a dirt poor.
In many ways, it takes more effort to sell people a seventh computer than their first. In other ways, repeat customers are your easiest sales. Still, you usually need to market even to your repeats...
Still, in order to grow - you can't just sell your existing customers the same thing every year. You need to constantly sell them more...
That being said, there are tons of companies out there that are huge and do no advertising. Word of mouth, relevance to reality, and quality of product win out over the long term.
like if i go to a grocery store and forget my wallet, then i can pay for it by watching 10 mins of ads or something...
Advertising pays for a lot, but it also doesn't pay that much.
Have you heard about Mediaocean? They are an old adtech company. I have an interview with them but I don't really understand what they do.
It manages ad campaigns, audiences, billing and finances, workflows, optimization, comps, etc. It integrates with major ad platforms which run the actual ads, and collects performance data from APIs and reports, and puts it all together in a single place for analysis.
I installed it on one of my sparingly used machines and it's as blatant as it gets. The Edge push, all the installed crapware, the telemetry and God knows what else - either way it didn't feel like I was running my own OS - instead it felt like I was running a rented one at a Kinkos.
How did they make it worse with Windows 11?
This is one area I give MS a pass. Google engaged in aggressive Chrome pushing for years, people seem to forget now that it’s so ubiquitous they don’t really need to anymore. It’s good someone is fighting back. Especially since, while I much prefer Firefox, Edge is actually decent.
But Chrome had a clear advantage those days compared to other solutions
Microsoft's value proposition? PDF users and memory consumption?
https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-edge-buy-now-pay-la...
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/05/21/preview-micro...
"[...] To help these students on their learning journey, we are excited to announce that Microsoft Math Solver will be available as a preview feature starting with Microsoft Edge 91 stable. Microsoft Math Solver allows a student to snap a picture of a math problem – be it handwritten or printed – and get an instant solution with step-by-step instructions to help them learn how to reach the solution on their own."
Built-in vertical tabs? Tab Collections? If you like Chrome as a browser, and don't really care about Google, isn't that better to use the built-in one? "It's not IE11" is value for anyone using "the browser which comes with Windows".
A distressing amount of "I don't use the Internet, I just check my emails" in my old university IT support days.
ATT (and verizon tried too) got these ad platforms because they wanted to unite their 1st party user device data to an advertising graph.
They tried to enable targeting individuals (on harder to 1:1 target devices too). But they never seemed to actually merge the two 'pipes' together that well.
Because google & apple have blocked more targeted advertising for everyone but themselves, creating a competing platform that doesn't rely on 3p cookies or IDFA etc would be really valuable.
FB direct response ads are totally dead for us. Apple & google killed it. We use Xandr and they do have some broad demo 1p targeting segments, device expansion, but it's nothing like FB. Still have to use a 3rd party to load 1:1 lists, at least we do.
Google already has a huge login base on the web. In addition, AFAIK google includes a uuid in chrome that only google properties can read - I have never found info on if they use that for ad targeting, or correct my memory if i'm wrong on that?
Microsoft could create something like that. They would probably have to expand IE use or do something shady in between chrome and the web.
Maybe if they want to get into streaming too - blurg.
OR a better idea imho would be a microsoft smart tv, MSFT SSP + exclusive to xandr inventory included. There is some gaming advertising too that could be thought out and expanded. Maybe bundle xbox inside a tv, sell it at a loss to stream ads.
Very noble!
Also, can't help but feel bad for whatever engineers have remained there. OS development is rough in a world where people are apparently only willing to pay for Apple's offering.
Ads seems like an obvious one. Future is grim.
Seriously if any MS folks are reading this- you really have pretty much erased any goodwill I had towards you, but I suppose the ad revenue means you dont care.
Unless you're trying to partition all actions into "good" and "bad", it's more like octofurcation or dodecafurcation. Microsoft is not a homogenous monolith...what does it even mean to split something that's already split apart?
Here's an old org chart which shows Microsoft trifurcated:
https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000
But realistically, each of 5 divisions - Windows, Office, Server & Tools, Online Services, and Entertainment & Devices (the above chart may have been made before the latter two existed) - has a president that's trying to make their division successful, even at the expense of goodwill earned by other divisions. Yes, Server & Tools has been knocking it out of the park for you and I recently with regards to developer enthusiasm, but they're a long ways away from Entertainment & Devices. Each of those divisions actually has another ~25 VPs and hundreds of Directors each trying to climb the ladder faster than the others.
To put it bluntly, Windows is jealous of all the post-sale revenue that Entertainment & Devices gets, and all the telemetry that online services gets, and has shoved as much as possible of both into Windows 11.
It can do both, and we should strive to both prevent it from degrading our lives, and make it improve them. That's the original purpose of our computers. This should drive us. It drives me. I'd say this is critically important.
Please try to do the right things, whoever reads this. Computer scientists are powerful and impactful. Please reflect on how and what you (and whoever pays you) spend your time on, how it impacts society and human beings (and beyond) and make sure your are at ease with what you come up with, whatever the scale of the impact is. Don't lie to yourself. This paragraph should not be painful to read.
UWP, .NET Native and C++/CX just tanked due to their mismanagement, and having burned the few believers with what are now about 5 rewrites since Windows 8 was introduced plus having dropped the .NET Native and C++/CX toolchains.
Forget about.WinUI 3.0, it is so messed up that Windows 11 still needs to rely on UWP and WinUI 2.x, despite being "deprecated".
Then we have tons of GUI tooling PMs, each selling their own stack, and every couple of months the faces on community calls keep changing.
There are surely some big fires happening in. Redmond and they keep carrying water buckets hoping to make it right.
Specially since it appears the lack of love between WinDev and DevDiv never went away.
The forces that won over Longhorn have managed to completely mess up WinRT and aren't doing any better with the Project Reunion endeavours.
Anyone that is bored during the season festivities can browse the GitHub issues for WinUI, AppSDK, cppwinrt and a bunch of other ones connected to them.
The first thing you notice about Linux is all the different widget sets that clash with each other such as Motif, Lesstif, tk, gtk, qt, fltk, wxWidgets and many more. They all seem to be in a competition to look worse than all of the competitors. They also seem to share the belief that "font metrics don't matter" and be completely indifferent if labels burst out of their space.
Microsoft has gone through almost as many widget sets for Windows. Muggles don't notice, but if you are a dev or learn to be observant you might realize that you are using 8 different widget sets in a given day. Microsoft has so often seemed to be 90 or 180 degrees behind phase with the rest of the world: I remember that awful time in the early 00's that theming widget sets was a fad and the program that ran your scanner was in a competition with similar programs to look uglier than the others, such as
https://mercy-evs.com/back-orifice-2000-78/
Then they came out with WPF which had wonderful support for theming but everybody was burned out from theming and nobody used it.
At least in Windows Vista Microsoft made the transition to the GPU first WDDM rendering model. In linux every decade is going to be the decade of Wayland but it will never actually happen, which is sad.
Here are two more nice pieces, despite VS being a WPF application, the team that owns the installer decided it was a great idea to rewrite it in Electron.
And C++/WinRT tooling is so back to the 90's that even using MFC feels more fun. Apparently no one in WinDev can afford C++ Builder or Qt licenses to get how pre-historic they live.
So we get Forms, WPF, WinUI/UWP and WinUI/Win32, MAUI and then Blazor not happy with WebAssembly also tries to sell itself as Electron replacement on top of all those stacks via WebWidgets.
Clearly the cat has left the house and the mice don't know what to do.
Blazor on the desktop is a bit of a head scratcher.
It is an Electron app, check its use of nodejs when running it.
https://twitter.com/mrhestew/status/1369356955009966080
And just looking at the installer in Process Explorer, it is now a single process that does not load any Chromium or Node DLLs.
I had just accepted the Electron rewrite as fact of life and never bothered again to check its process information.
I really missed that info, thanks.
The finder is OK but many of the built-in apps like iTunes are "absolute p00p" and seem to drive away good competitive software.
Apple has definitely been more consistent on this front.
I work on a large MFC project and it's still a surprisingly nice way to develop desktop applications. It's fast, old, and stable.
Using some of the newer Windows APIs in MFC can be painful though (e.g. XAML Islands).
I used to have a great relationship with Microsoft. I gave them money, they gave me software and went away (patches aside). Now they want to monitor me and advertise to me. It's fairly sad. And certainly not what I would call the right direction.
It’s not that LinkedIn is bad; it’s a trackfire if dark patterns and has been getting worse since acquisition.
I really respect the decisions lately within Gaming but there have been some really disappointing changes in other spaces like Windows.
"Seriously if any MS folks are reading this- you really have pretty much erased any goodwill I had towards you"
It was an easy fix for me, but it would have been nearly impossible for a non-tech-savvy person to figure out. You would think that Microsoft would do a better job of testing their own OS on their own hardware.
For many professional digital artists and designers, however, the iPad is far more convenient that the traditional Wacom tablet connected to a desktop or laptop.
I swore that since Nadella took over the helm that Microsoft was becoming a good force for the industry. There were so many positive moves. Linux, open source, Github improvements. Now I can see that it's all still classic "evil Microsoft" under the hood.
They're taking over our industry with Github/VSCode in the cloud. Microsoft payments injection in Edge taxes web commerce, and with their default browser shenanigans they're generally treating the web as something they own. They're monitoring and recording your Windows files and secrets and uploading them for analysis. Github Co-pilot is training on GPL code and aims to eventually replace us. Xbox has the worst DRM that requires always-online to play games you own. LinkedIn - there's never been much good to say here.
Also I think you might be mistaken about the Xbox DRM, they mentioned they’d be requiring always online prior to the launch of the Xbox one but as far as I know they never followed through after all the backlash they received.
Windows telemetry is also a black box, but they admit to collecting some browsing history.
They missed the mobile train, hardly anyone uses Bing (even DuckDuckGo, which is based on their API, seems to be stagnant in terms of the daily query growth).
I find it difficult to connect the dots here.
Whether due to income equality, laziness, greed or something else, the vast majority of people aren't going to engage in micro transactions.
I think the answer is in federation and mutually owned infrastructure.
People are comfortable paying Netflix/Hulu/Crunchyroll $10-15 per month. They don't have to worry about "do I want to watch this episode enough to spend 45 cents for it?" or "do I need to make and manage a whole new account just to watch a different show?" The fact the money eventually gets divvied up to content creators is handwaved away behind the scenes.
Federation gives other creators the opportunity to sell a similar one-stop-shopping experience you that. I could imagine, say, a subscription where I'd get through the paywall not just on my local newspaper, but the dozens of other papers that might print one or two articles a month that I care about. Or a Patreon-style service where you unlocked everyone for a flat fee, and they use analytics to determine how much of the fee goes to each creator each month.
The problem is that most of the content is living on third-party platforms. An OnlyFans or YouTube, for example, could offer a subscription around that model, but they'd just vaccuum up most of the revenue generated for themselves. The creators have to own the platform themselves to prevent that sort of diversion.
It’s funny that you use Netflix as an example because that’s what they originally tried to do and it didn’t work.
Yes, it involves customized billing and account infrastructure, but if you set things up properly, the cost of the infrastructure should be less than the revenue it provides. If the federated content creators, in turn, fund a "captive" development and maintenance team to supply things at cost, it may well be cheaper than leasing off-the-shelf solutions.
If you're a YouTuber why would you even deal with any of that vs. just continuing to upload on YouTube?
To think that if I had accepted, I would be a future Microsoft employee.
Honestly I think this is a good way to create more competition in the advertising space which is currently dominated by Google and Facebook.
At some point some “smart” executives are going to decide it’s better to cooperate rather than compete… that’s when consumers get exploited. Which is why the threat of regulation is important.
Their sources of profit are from very different products and services though.
Microsoft and Alphabet and Amazon have cloud computing.
Alphabet and Meta earn money from ads.
Apple is the only one making money on selling hardware.
Microsoft sells software, with the bedrock being Excel.
Amazon is selling logistics, physically via warehousing and delivery and virtually via a website others can sell on.
MS is selling Surface. Google is selling Pixel. They aren't necessarily successful but they are trying. The only outlier is Facebook which doesn't try to sell hardware or services.
I don't think it's a good thing that another trillion dollar company is trying to get a share of the advertising business. It would be much better if we had more small and focused companies.
> Microsoft can accelerate the delivery of its digital advertising and retail media solutions, shaping tomorrow’s digital ad marketplace into one that respects consumer privacy preferences, understands publishers’ relationships with consumers and helps advertisers meet their goals.
How do they write crap like this with a straight face?
Microsoft Linux contribution is almost completely around making run better on azure or wsl not making Linux itself better.
For open source they are attempting to control the mind share with dotnet, vscode, GitHub aka embrace phase
We have started seeing signs of the extended phase in all 3 projects
We all know what phase 3 of eee is
Azure Sphere OS is also based on Linux kernel, not only cloud stuff.
Another non Windows OS is Azure RTOS.
As to the other 2 projects, I am not sure how this refutes my statements, which is Microsoft linux contributions are about making their commercial offerings better, and are not useful to anyone outside of those Commercial Offering (Azure and WSL)
So how does pointing to Azure RTOS, and Azure Sphere refute that claim?
The point about Google is that is already did to Linux what you are telling about Microsoft.
Google has crossed the Linux EEE finish line years ago, in fact the Linux kernel is the only GPL thing left on Android and ChromeOS.
As someone that was mostly a UNIX user I mostly don't care in what shape POSIX offerings end up in the market.
Linux today, XYZ tomorrow, whatever.
It's roughly a 50/50 split for the rest between Windows and macOS.
So how can it be remotely plausible that Linux will become a mainstream desktop/laptop OS?
Non IT workers also seem to favour a combo of phones and tablets too only using laptops for work not caring what it runs.
Because of time and inevitable changes happening to everything over time.
Remember when Windows was nothing and everyone was using something else? Remember when macOS was nothing and everyone was using something else? Same thing can happen with Linux, or some other operating system. Sure, might take 10, 50, 100 years, but eventually, Windows and macOS (and probably Linux) will be relics of the past.
Things get A LOT more complicated when you add localisation, accessibility, UI and all the other things we take for granted.
They're technical people, and yes, LTT is hammed up a bit (I call it the Top Gear of Tech), but the number of issues they ran into that you just don't on Windows (in most cases) was illuminating.
I have no troubles running a Linux home server, but I don't have time to fiddle around so my gaming desktop is Windows, and for work it's MacOS.
I guess Desktop Linux's biggest hurdle is that most people have no idea it even exists, and there's zero advertising.
Systemd, netplan, and many other things.
I am not sure what UNIX clones have to do with this
The latest version of Ubuntu you can not even set the IP with standard etc config, you have to use netplan YAML configuration
systemd has replaced all kinds of things with non "grey beard" configurations,
the list is pretty extensive
OS X configuration files (plists) can be XML based or binary, many are binary and managed via plist CLI or app.
Maybe I've become numb to them, but I just don't see these painful interactions that get referenced, and don't see why their bogeyman would be worth giving up your freedom to use your machine.
This thinking is really obsolete and couching everything as grandma or graybeards is really ageist, anyway. Last I looked, you have to do this on Mac more often than I'd like. On Windows, it's open up CMD as administrator and paste this command or download and install this little app and run it (that does God knows what as administrator).
But for non-tech users, I think buying a device with one OS and then wiping it to install a different OS is scary. Or doing anything that sounds risky to their daily laptop. So, where is the non-scary option for them to start with Linux? The laptops with Linux pre-installed, they aren't well known (or cheap).
Does a Chromebook count as desktop linux?