Microsoft saw how much the average user would install, and thought "we can do that too"; of course, by being "official", their own adware is much harder to remove.
Windows can show the weather in the bottom left of the task bar, which is nice
I've never wanted that feature nor found it appealing. I can just look outside if I want to know the weather where I am, or visit a site otherwise.
It's sad, isn't it? In many a Hacker News thread about the Year of the Linux Desktop, someone will inevitably deadpan how there's just no money to be made; there's no business model.
It seems to me that the same is true for Apple and Microsoft. There's "no" money in the desktop itself, only as a value-add, via platform effects or via dark pattern monetization like this.
And honestly, Microsoft isn't doing too bad at tooling. Had you told me 3 years ago I would be developing .NET applications, mostly ASP.Core, on linux, I woulda said you were stoned. But here I am today, cranking out .NET code that runs servers on Linux. And the tooling is pretty good and is just getting better.
No, it should not. The NT kernel architecture is drastically superior to the Linux monorepo.
Azure outpaces everything else. Azure, under the covers, runs Hyper-V on Windows Server.
A massive number of VM's running on Azure are Linux, so investments in that area also pay cloud dividends.
This is something that won't change on the shift to Linux. It has to be a deep cultural shift, until then the company is never going to prioritize experience.
Same for the obligatory stocks feature every OS is obsessed to put when (certainly outside the US) only a tiny minority of people trade stocks.
I believe the correct term for it is yolo stonks
But it wasn't _that_ hard to turn it off. I didn't have to hack anything, just look for the settings.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 (Win10/11, well-maintained. Closed source but coming from trusted devs with commercial interest in shipping a quality freebie that publicizes their other software)
https://github.com/builtbybel/privatezilla and https://wpd.app/ (both not super maintained)
I do have a Pi, so technically I am halfway into Linux ;)
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-ooberegion-bloatware.htm...
And you can't argue that it's /useless/. It's more information, and, ceteris paribus, more information is better.
Why can't it be both? Being data for Microsoft doesn't preclude it from also being data for you. Being able to just put in a query without having to fire up a browser might be a marginal improvement for a lot of people.
And Microsoft doesn't sell you data. No advertising platform does. They sell access to you, by using your data to classify you in ways you can be targeted. It's a subtle difference, but it changes the implications. If someone is making money off of being able to reliably target you based on your data, that means your data is precious to them. Selling it (or losing it) is tantamount to selling their competitive advantage, such as it may be.
The same graph that will soon feed into the various Copilots and GPT-things to personalize the heck out of your search and document creation which leads to more usage which leads to more data to feed into the graph.
I'm sure some of that "accidentally leaks" into their ad business too (despite their privacy assurances), but again, I doubt they'd ever sell it to 3rd parties (if nothing else, out of fear of litigation... FAANGs usually take PII handling pretty seriously).