It's an OS created for enterprise corporations to support and manage the actions of their employees in a digital world. First and foremost. Most MS products are.
The ad platform is MS trying to find ways to continue growing profits. :D
AKA, the new control panel that has been evolving.. most users are likely locked out of it for anything more advanced than changing the sound volume, its the IT nerds that need to figure out the optimal set of setting and push it out. Which is work that the C*'s would be more than happy to not have to pay IT staff to perform.
I agree big time. We pay for licenses so none of this crap is shown. However, most businesses get the Windows license that is included with their hardware purchase and this crap is shown to them.
It would take a bit more class within Microsoft these days to realize that and maybe they just aren’t ready to take the step in the right direction yet.
I'm not defending Microsoft here, but just about everyone else is doing that same thing (and not just tech companies, auto, appliance, consumer electronics manufacturers and many others are doing this), so why wouldn't Microsoft do so as well?
Microsoft isn't the problem per se. Rather it's the lack of effective privacy regulations. GDPR (sadly, I'm not in the EU) is a start, but is still far too weak to reverse the perverse incentives that lead to your coffee maker[0][1] spying on you.
Yes, that example is (I think) an outlier, but I used it to point up just how widespread this sort of thing is.
But we shouldn't let Microsoft off the hook for that reason. We should bash them (and everyone else who does this kind of thing) and do our best to vote with our wallets/feet.
Failing that (for whatever reasons), as others have pointed out, Pro/Enterprise versions of Windows allow you to turn this garbage off.
[0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jun/14/chinese-sma...
[1] I'd note that the article linked in [0] has some pretty blatant China bashing^W^W jingoistic undertones. That said, concern over this sort of thing out of China is definitely a concern, but less so (at least to me) than the US/Western corporations that are doing at least as much of this disgusting stuff.
Edit: Clarified prose.
Win 11 changing the Settings CPL doesn’t change the overall body of work required.
I mostly put this down to bad salesmanship/C*s tending to be effectively technological cavemen...perhaps there are backroom deals we are not privy to, though.
I’m surprised XFCE isn’t pushed more as an option.
Doing a quick check, Red Hat still has a "Workstations" product for RHEL:
https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enter...
Hmmm, I thought they used to have a non-"workstation" desktop oriented flavour too, but maybe that's been discontinued or rolled into the Workstation thing above.
Subjectively, I am under the impression that, in the enterprise desktop space, Linux is a more serious competitor to Windows than mac OS is.
For example in public administration: At one point the city government of Munich had replaced over 12000 desktops from Windows to Linux [1], and you keep seeing ideas to do similar things pop up in political party manifestoes and position papers like [2].
It is also not uncommon for large universities and research facilities to run on Linux.
Meanwhile, an enterprise running hundreds or even thousands of mac OS devices is something I've never heard of.
I think, in the past, enterprises were a bit more locked-in than they were now because they ran Windows software that they custom-developed, or off the rack but very niche and available for Windows only. But with the trend over the last two decades having gone towards writing that kind of software as web-based software, I think that element of lock-in is gradually but steadily decreasing as well.
The problem is that, once this competitive threat against Microsoft reaches critical mass, it's a bit too easy for Microsoft to counter the threat by simply backpaddling on the trash. In the meantime they just want to milk the cash cow as much as they can possibly get away with.
De-trashing an OS is easy. Meanwhile, they are working hard to make sure that Windows is the OS that runs the widest array of software on the widest array of hardware, which is not so easy (anything Windows from ancient to modern, Windows subsystems for Linux and Android). Windows emulation on Linux is also making massive progress, thanks in part to Steam, but I guess that structurally, it will always be easier for Windows to emulate Linux than for Linux to emulate Windows.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux [2] https://www.transformation.gouv.fr/files/presse/Declaration_...
Their thinkpad business had been spun off, the thinkpad exclusivity contract had run out, and IBM were in a "we already give too much money to MS" mood at the time. No idea how far that went.
They also had a RHEL workstation-based distro you could put on your thinkpad (with a few tens of thousands of users on that IIRC), or if you were particularly adventurous, a 'layer' that could be installed on Ubuntu (that had a few thousand users) or Debian(I was one of 22 people doing that at the time!))
as a former sysadmin in these places, it's not easy to lock down macOS down - and less so to ensure that compliance is being enforced. compliance is huge, far more important than what platform you run on. MS makes this easy, and Linux support is mainly for labs, etc, who get put on a separate network most of the time and locked down.
account management on linux and mac is a nightmare, and just simple to relegate to AD. for all its problem, GPO makes this cakewalk.
Your experience doesn't match with reality. There are multiple sources available describing the growth in macOS usage. One that's quoted in news reports, but hidden behind a paywall, is an IDC report from 2021[1].
It describes macOS penetration at ~23% in 2020 up 6% from 2019. The is supported by descriptions of the impact on enterprise end-user computing management teams that historically have only supported Windows. You can even look at the growth of Intune, and the breadth of acquisitions by Microsoft, to see that Microsoft is very likely supporting 1000s of mac devices.
An important element of how we got here is mobile. Windows had made huge investments in configuration management while OS X was an oddball. Managing it required a different set of tools. iOS and Android adoption in many enterprises caused an end run around the end-user computing gatekeepers from 2007-2012 with a proliferation in MDM solutions.
This eventually led to standardization of so-called "modern" configuration management API/interfaces/tools. The door was opened to more Mac adoption through Apple Business Manager while admins had already adopted modern management tools that covered Windows and mobile.
This doesn't discount the challenge with some users needing to use legacy Windows software. Once upon a time this was a strong moat. For years, IT have been under pressure to make this work on mobile (where feasible) which has cut down the blockers on macOS or Linux usage.
[1] https://www.idc.com/research/viewtoc.jsp?containerId=US46965...
There have been working comparability layers for the various hard-to-run on anything but Windows software appliances, but a major sticking point has been the GPU support (which keeps the software running well).
I don't think this will be true forever though, graphics drivers continue to make strides in being more open, often to the benefit of the various organizations writing or purchasing the gpus/firmware/drivers.
Some companies tried to use free alternatives to Excel, but there were always compatibility issues when customer or partner use Excel.
I think if someone had created 1:1 alternative to MS Office (with all its quirks and bugs), then switching to Linux would likely be a no brainer.
Even Linux.
OS for enterprise customers and Windows Pro users who know how to use Group Policy.
Advertisement platform for everyone else.
Sad times.
You can whine all you want about the user experience being terrible, but that literally doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how profitable the company is, and the value it provides to shareholders. Nothing else is important.
If customers don't like being bombarded by ads in their OS, they're free to choose something else. Alternatives are available, but most users don't want to bother looking.
MSFT is one of my major blue chips. Between Office, Azure and Windows; they always perform pretty well:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/
I’m not expecting any big returns from them, but they certainly beat inflation, when amortized over my investment period. And they don’t seem to be going anywhere soon.
When Microsoft loads their OS with annoying ads, you have a simple choice to use it, or not. You can easily use a different OS if it bothers you so much. I don't see any ads in my OS...
>They are polluting our visual space. These ads are unwanted and not sought out.
You made a choice to buy an OS that has this pollution. That's on you, not Microsoft. MS offered you a crappy OS with ads in it at a certain (presumably low) price, and you accepted their offer. You could have used a different vendor, a free OS, or even a more-expensive version of Windows that doesn't have the ads.
This is nothing like environmental pollution. MS Windows is not a shared resource, it's a product from a private (publicly-held) corporation, offered for sale with the goal of making money for its shareholders.
My introduction to containers was HP-UX Vaults.
same as virtual machines were a thing in the early 70s and client-server in the 80s, but not for the target market despite the industry thought so for some time
But there wouldn't have been the hardware, resources, or depth of support available for the end user in the 2000s. There are still non-technical folks I deal w/ at work that don't get what a VM is...
Make this ad-supported version a budget option for people who can't afford more and won't install Linux if you must hit that market. Just don't ruin the whole thing for those of us who will pay a modest amount for hardware and software compatibility.