Bait and switch.
It's a shame that toothless regulators can't do anything about it. Microsoft should received such a large fine, they should end up on the brink of bankruptcy.
It's a shame that toothless regulators can't do anything about it. Microsoft should received such a large fine, they should end up on the brink of bankruptcy.
In the past it took a lot of work to use alternatives. Today it is so easy.
In a large domain of things windows is still a monopoly.
Easy, as long as you are a technical user, who is willing to invest time in learning alternative tools and also willing to sometimes sacrifice some time to get appropriate results using alternative software than the mainstream Windows tools.
A lot is possible using other OS and alternative tooling, but it takes commitment and possibly time to learn. Many people are not willing to relearn tools of their professions or even for their hobbies. It really takes an open minded and willing person to listen to their engineering friend and give other tools chances and time and potentially even make a jump to a command line mindset.
Most people, compared to software developers and engineers, are almost computer illiterates. They are happy, when the thing turns on and looks as it always looks and they see some familiar icon for a web browser. Probably never before has the need for educating people about computers and what they can do with them been so huge. The resulting incentives from not educating people about such have terrible results for our whole industry/profession.
Linux tends to cause strange issues if you get unlucky.
Within the last year I've had to just try a different distro since Ubuntu didn't support my hardware. On a different PC I'm on Mint now.
Years upon years ago I gave someone a PC with Ubuntu installed. A week later he just asked how do I install League of Legends. The simple answer is install Windows.
90% of people don't want you to "educate" them about why struggling with the Linux CLI is a better use of their time than whatever else they had planned.
Back in the day when we still had a government that enforced anti-compete laws against mega corporations, Microsoft was found guilty, and nearly broken up, over simply including Internet Explorer by default. If we still had any government willing to crack down on anti-competitive behavior, I think the entire tech world would be in a far better place. The EU is ostensibly trying, but I suspect even that will largely just come down to companies accepting moderate sized fines every once in a while as business expense in the EU.
There's no law or regulation that requires computer makers to always allow operation and set-up while offline.
...I think having a law to require MS to allow offline set-up by all users would be an overreach, but a reasonable alternative would be to require Microsoft to sell Windows LTSC to anyone who asks for it, not just Software Assurance and MSDN Subscribers.
Why? Do you think it would lead to a better or worse world?
Your options are to simply not use microsoft windows. it is a cost that is borne by you (ala the switching cost).
There can be no such an option where you get to keep what you have, but also legislate exactly what you desire, without paying any of the costs.
I understand that there are downsides to over-regulating, but there are also downsides to under-regulating.
HOW? Until now we haven't needed a law because OS developers haven't been this brazen. In any case there are likely actually a few laws that can be used to litigate the you shouldn't need to be online to install and setup a computer. I'll bet that if they don't fix it themselves a class action will be incoming n citing privacy or child safety or maybe some other laws.
Microsoft can choose to support or not support offline accounts. Users can decide if they care and if they'd rather use something other than Windows. What's the problem exactly?
What legal line could be drawn to allow the government to regulate this without regulating all kinds of product and business decisions? Would it be reasonable for them to regulate what colors of crayons must be included in ever box of Crayola crayons? And if not, what is the legal boundry allowing them to say what features an OS has without allowing the crayon regulation?
Its not about doing good or bad things, and I don't see myself as having cucked out either. Someone will do what I consider a bad thing whether or not there are laws saying they shouldn't. And ultimately, who am I to say what they can't do as long as it isn't stepping on anyone else's rights?
In this more specific topic, I don't like how Microsoft has been setting any semblance of privacy on fire but I also don't see why I would need the government to fix that. Consumers have other choices, and if people care enough it will hit Microsoft's bottom dollar. With regards to Teams, I have actually been on teams where that tool was so broadly hated that they wouldn't use it whether free or not. If Microsoft was somehow blocking other chat apps on Windows that'd be a whole other ball game.
Microsoft isn't Uber. Their moat is decades of work on kernels, drivers and backwards compatibility that can't be replicated overnight by a competitor. If they self-immolate to chase some idiotic AI/cloud fad, that does a large amount of real economic damage.
I don't even know if I want any regulations in the tech industry, especially after all the e2e encryption bullshit everyone (especially my country's government) is trying to pull. But if I did, this would be right at the top of the list for risk/reward. If cloud sync and AI are so good then sell cloud sync and AI, don't risk established markets to try and flog it off on people that don't want it with dark patterns.
I don't see something like an operating system nearly on the level of worth protecting for a couple reasons. Humans can live just fine without operating systems and computers, and we can certainly live with or without support for local accounts. Additionally, there are other operating systems to choose so even if that's a red line for someone consumers still have options.
I can say I'd have less opposition to such specific laws if they came with an expiration date. At least in the US we don't do that and we end up with an ever growing list of laws that are either irrelevant or out of touch with future generations' morales or ethics.
So as a citizen, it is your right to access publicly funded services, right? So then by extension, the tools to access those services should be a fundamental right in a modern technological society. And moreso, you should have the right to own those tools outright without molestation by large corporate entities... Fuck, Microsoft isn't even a large corporation... It is a behemoth, 3.3 Trillion market cap! I think they, and their competitors, could stand to be saddled with some more regulation to insure a baseline OS for the citizenry of this county, and other countries. It's not like it's going to hurt their profit margins that much to comply!
Hah, well I'm definitely on the same page with this part! Companies shouldn't be given such massive legal cover that they can accumulate this level of wealth and power.
That said, I'm still not so sure I agree with computers being a fundamental right. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and for something fundamental it really should be something that can't be taken from you, aka inalienable rights in my opinion. Life in the US is certainly harder without a computer today, but is it really a right that needs to be legally enshrined?
Would this logic extend similarly to cars, phones, or air conditioning? They're all in the category of items I think everyone ought to have access to, but I don't think they're so fundamental to human life that governments must enforce that access.
I'm big on small governments in general though. I may just be seeing slippery slope here when that isn't warranted.
Honestly, no - it wouldn't be considering that for many decades we could use Windows without being connected to Microsoft cloud services.
At the moment MS is "only" enforcing an online account during OOBE.* The next step will be an unavoidable Windows-as-as-service product with "subscribe to remove ads and unlock xyz feature" - that's the goal they're heading for years.
They could do as simple as having two versions of OS: Windows Free with ads, telemetry, mandatory online account and a paid Windows Pro with all these limitations gone, with an offline account and more control for the end-user. And that's what the regulators, govt's agencies should really make happen. Sadly they prefer working over content scanning and damaging encryption, violating our privacy while pleasing entertainment industry with wild goose-chasing pirates.
[*] - last time I check in W10, singing out right after OOBE and reverting to a local account still puts residual traces all around the profile to the point that you never are truly signed out.