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Comment by cduzz | Hacker News Reader

If you buy a car from a dealership, then yes indeed you are "less" of a customer of the manufacturer.

Consider this relationship:

Toyota makes a car to the specifications of general motors, who brands the car as a "Pontiac Vibe" and sells the car to a Pontiac dealership. The Pontiac dealership then sells you the car at mostly a wash because you're also financing the purchase and they want to sell "your" loan to a loan bundler and reseller.

So -- everyone gets a cut, and almost nobody's actually got a direct interest in how the schlub who buys a car feels about the car.

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I don't believe you've proven the point you're attempting to make.

Tesla is a rather famous example of a car manufacturer that doesn't have a dealership model. Do you imagine that GM or Toyota is somehow less interested in how their cars are either liked or disliked by their target audiences than Tesla is? That seems pretty hard to imagine.

I'll try to be clear here:

Microsoft is selling your eyeballs to advertisers: You are the product not the customer.

Vendors are buying windows from Microsoft and installing it onto a computer and selling that computer to you. You are buying a computer not windows. If you need support you talk to the vendor, not microsoft. The vendor is the customer to Microsoft, not you.

And regarding cars -- car companies make lots of crappy cars and sell them to dealerships who have to buy them regardless of if they want them or not. The dealerships are the customers of the car companies. You are a customer of the dealership. 99% of the time if you've got a problem with the car, the manufacturer is going to be of limited use to you.

> Microsoft is selling your eyeballs to advertisers: You are the product not the customer.

> Vendors are buying windows from Microsoft and installing it onto a computer and selling that computer to you. You are buying a computer not windows.

Sometimes people are buying Windows[1].

It is possible to be the customer for the OS and the product for the ads at the same time.

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1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-home/dg7gmgf0kr...

Microsoft clearly has zero interest in the idiots who buy retail licenses, especially home licenses. They'll cash your check, but they're not going to pay any attention to your opinions. You're trapped in their ecosystem and they have no reason to pay attention to your desires. They're going to sell your eyeballs to as many advertisers as possible and there's nothing you can do about it.

> ... and there's nothing you can do about it.

Except - like with the car examples above - eventually customers get pissed off or frustrated enough to switch to a different OS (or car manufacturer).

Thus Apple and Linux distro's picking up a lot of ex-windows users. KDE plays well to this audience. :)

The executive in charge of that strategy, by then, will have moved on to Google.

Also, likely microsoft has realized there's zero long term revenue in operating systems -- you'll have been forced to move all your data to their Office 365 environment and will be paying them rent regardless of if you use a windows or a mac or a linux or an oracle desktop.

I think valve did there part to remove one large reason to stay on windows.

I think if steam decks gets a good linux desktop, similar to windows in look and feel, that can be run on a desktop, parallel to windows. Its over, very suddenly, very brutal.

And here it is: https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/download?ver=steamdec...

A challenger appears. He is unburdened by the need to advertise. Its super effective.

This seems like something we’ll get to see play out over the next few years. Given that GM has decided that they don’t care if customers want CarPlay, we’ll see if customers say “No thanks” to buying cars from GM because of that.

I'm pretty sure they're doing this because they know a good chunk of their customers don't want this.

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