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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Other than being able to gobble up user data and being able to associate it with a person (or at least an email address) and later sell that information, what is Microsoft reasoning for refusing local accounts?

This whole obsession with forcing users to create a Microsoft account is really weird. It may provides some features for certain types of users, but I really don't see any reason for forcing a Microsoft account. Apple also REALLY want you to have an Apple ID, but you don't have to.

I still fail to see why Microsoft doesn't go all in on privacy, do they really need the extra profit from advertising?

Microsoft doesn't give a shit about the desktop anymore and at this point they're also stopping to care about the business customers, unless they can move them to subscription based services in the cloud.

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They can charge a recurring and increasing subscription fee for on-line accounts and services. And of course data.

Before they can do that, they first have to get everyone dependant on the on-line account and services, because most would not voluntarily knowingly agree to be charged a subscription just to use their own computer, not intentionally using any external services.

So step 1 is do not charge for the basic account combined with force everyone to use it.

Most will go along with this because it's free this exact minute and most people follow strictly the path of least immediate resistance. You can make most people do anything you want by just making anything else 0.0001% more difficult. This is not cynical, this is studied.

In the olde dayes, if you wanted to sell a subscription service, you created a service and then convinced people to become paying customers.

MS is tricking everyone into becoming customers first, and then when the deed is done, inform them they are now paying customers.

And of course also data.

> Most will go along with this because it's free this exact minute and most people follow strictly the path of least immediate resistance. You can make most people do anything you want by just making anything else 0.0001% more difficult. This is not cynical, this is studied.

This is terrifyingly accurate.

The reasoning is Microsoft is now in the services (as well as advertising) business, with traditionally-licensed desktop software revenue becoming less and less important. Which you kinda stated in the last sentence.

The reasoning for not going all in on privacy is because they want to maximise services and advertising revenue, and they also sell to government and enterprise who actually like the ability to spy on their employees. There's not much financial incentive or government regulation to make them focus on consumer/end-user privacy.

Some exec at microsoft probably has their promotion depend on user growth and is able to push the Windows team to implement this crap. Things megacorporations do don't really have to make long-term sense for the organization as a whole - they only need to provide a short-term advantage to someone in the hierarchy.

Right. You can retroactively think of all sorts of reasons, and people internally will talk about it and make presentations and plan meetings over it, but it's just a gigantic corporation and it doesn't think, it's a number that can be chased.

The also seem to have an odd relationship to the US government, to the point where they sometimes come over as a half-public entity. (See the domain seizure and other anti-cybercrime operations where the FBI and DHS were very openly cooperating with MS, even though MS had no direct involvement in the cases)

Maybe they just think of them selves as part of the government already and believe they are too big to fail...

> but I really don't see any reason for forcing a Microsoft account.

Microsoft has ties with many governments. I wouldn't be much surprised if the reason they amass user data had nothing to do with selling that data to companies.

The big players would be fools to sell data, as such. Their whole thing is that they are so big they can target ads effectively. You'd be a fool to sell that data. They sell ad targeting and ad placement, not the data to do those things.

What I like about the apple way of doing it is you can toggle on and off every single feature of having an account. So every app and every featyre has been designed to exist in both states, working locally and working with icloud. Remindered for example, are local or on your account. Toggle for every feature. I have photos and password sync turned off on my mac, I never use them.

Two reasons I can think of to force the creation of a MS account is to

a) make it easier to get started using MS products (e.g. Office), since you don't need to go through the hassle of creating an account; it just works and

b) once (almost) everyone has a MS account, using MS oauth may become the default login mechanism for many third party services (although Google is already starting to take up this space).

c) report to (their real) customers and shareholders the number of people that are using their OS and measure the reach of start menu ads.

>It may provides some features for certain types of users, but I really don't see any reason for forcing a Microsoft account.

To play Devil's Advocate, I can see some:

* Backups. Let's face it, most people do not and will not take backups and yet they all cry when they inevitably suffer data loss. OneDrive syncing everything at gunpoint is a holy grail in the face of this problem.

* Sync. Clearly, most people like all their computers looking, having, and acting more or less interchangable with all their others. Together with backups above, OneDrive and a Microsoft account bring this to fruition.

* Licenses. Most people aren't going to keep the Windows box with the key around, or neatly store the documentation (which contains licensing information) they get with their new laptop or big box desktop. Chances are they're all in the trash the next day. Tying license activations to Microsoft accounts addresses a lot of headaches around lost licenses.

I, as a tech nerd, hate it. But if I hang up my nerdism at the front door and see things as a normal man with too much shit to do and too little time to deal with 'pooters, why yes, a lot of this actually makes fucking common sense.

Wrt licences, these days laptops have their Windows licence burnt in their BIOS (and this has been the case for some time now). Backups and sync are great, except if someone doesn't want to upload all their data to the cloud. There could be many reasons for this, I'm sure you can list some of them too.

I understand that some cloud providers (now) scan stuff you put into cloud storage. This could be a problem if you're dumping terabytes of stuff. Maybe a million monkeys on a million keyboards might never trigger a false positive on modern sophisticated scanners; but now make it a billion or a trillion.

Money is money, and companies want more. Of course if they notice they can both sell you the product and have you be the product, they'll ask themselves "Why not both?"

The login thing is also probably partly because it does genuinely make the user experience better - log into a computer, To Do has your tasks, OneDrive and OneNote start fetching your notes and files, Edge seamlessly syncs your browser history, and so on. Things Just Work™. MS has a cloud-based clipboard and Edge has a OneDrive-backed AirDrop clone. All of that needs accounts to function properly.

Piracy

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