Microsoft's new Windows chief on the future of the OS, Surface, and annoying ads | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's new Windows chief on the future of the OS, Surface, and annoying ads

theverge.com

"We’re going to make Windows cloud native. We’re making a big push for Windows 365 ."

"Windows and cloud is going to be a game changer for us in the arc of time," says Davuluri.

It sounds like they are planning on making Windows a subscription-based operating system. Not too surprising given their need for continual revenue, but they haven't announced it as such yet.

as a whole the effort points toward a specific managed hardware ~dumb terminal like device, that accesses windows as a service, and does little else except analyse meta data, and inject the proscribed ad

With the Web winning, and RDP already being a common use case in many corporations, we are back to timesharing.

Additionally when all we have are thin clients, it is impossible to prevent data collection from the client side.

Once everything is in “the cloud” the vendor lock-in will be insane and prices for everything will skyrocket.

Not to mention hacks and attacks by state actors and also outages like the one that took place today. Oracle and friends also tried in the 90s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer

Makes sense, it will be a terminal with total recall functionality

Also, don't forget the ads!

All your recall data will be local. on your cloud based windows.

Fuck you Microsoft.

There is no way this could ever be abused.

I think they would have to either bundle it together with an existing subscription or have a free ad supported tier in order to make this work. The precedent has been set that the OS just comes with the computer for free. People don’t even pay for upgrades anymore.

Doing anything else would cause an exodus to Mac and Linux or just staying on the last non subscription version indefinitely.

And then finally it will actually be "They year of the Linux desktop"!

Honestly, my first thought was that this might be the kick of the pants the general Linux community needs to close ranks and actually solve some of the longstanding usability issues it faces (amongst the general populace).

I they actually did listen to us, they wouldn't have come up with Windows Recall in first place.

Dunno... personally I was waiting for this for years, and even so in the past two years: I always wanted an OS that learns my habits. Actually a few months ago I started to think almost seriously about working on this problem, if no one else does it...

Of course it's not all good news for me either: it is still Windows, something that I haven't used in the past decade, and don't plan to change my habits because of this. Nevertheless, the idea itself is one of the best usecases for AI in my opinion. Not the best implementer, however, unfortunately.

But recall isn’t that, it’s just a log of everything you type and do with the computer for attackers to compromise.

So that what, it opens your calendar in the morning? You don’t need anything like what recall is doing to achieve shit like that, you sure as heck don’t need “AI”

The brandong is also dumb and immediately rings a bell for whoever remembers the Total Recall movie.

How else would they push ads at us if not with the help of AI!?

A single control panel would be nice... we've been in transition for how long now? Windows 8?

I discovered today on the BUILD session about React Native, that the new settings panel is written in it!

Windows has the least annoying ads because they can be trivially turned off. Try using Twitter, Reddit, or Netflix without seeing ads. You'd have to use a third party client or tool which is now explicitly being blocked by the service. And that doesn't account for advertising that's baked into the content in the way it's ordered or put on the home screen.

It seems like mandatory ads in an operating system are a kind of third rail. Hopefully it stays that way.

Alternatively, try any other OS, including older windows, where there are just no ads to turn off in the first place.

Windows has the worst ads, comparing it to something totally unrelated like webpages is nonsensical.

It's harder to figure out what text file I have to edit in ubuntu server to get the spam out of the motd than it ever is in Windows.

This is ultimately what led me to leave Ubuntu behind. What do you do when you install a fresh copy of Windows? Spend some time disabling / uninstalling all the garbage. I was trying to set up a new copy of Ubuntu, trying to remove snaps, disable the Ubuntu Pro nag screens, and more. It occurred to me I was needing to decrapify Ubuntu just like I previously had to do with Windows. Well, it had a good run, but it's done. Once you need to do that to an OS, it's time to move on.

oh, ubuntu added ads to the motd at some point?

I was about to profess surprise, but then I remembered that Firefox injected spyware and ads as well so I guess it's a given these days :-/

The irony of the big-P-Personal Computer becoming something that the user doesnt really control, and uses simply as a dumb device to consume computing on someone else's terms, is not lost on me.

Windows 365 I'm sure will be wonderful for some people. But we're back to people getting the computing that other people decide they get, like IBM and their mainframe priesthood in 1975. It makes me a little sad.

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