Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

To be fair to Paul, Microsoft does seem to be a zombie like company, at least the Desktop division.

I don’t know. I just had to buy, and use, a Windows 11 pc. Remarkably, it shares a desk with a new M3 iMac, side by side. And equally remarkably, they’re set up so they behave almost identically, except that Windows 11 is a little snappier and has a few fewer keystrokes than the Finder for most operations. (And search works!). I quickly acculturated to it after a decade away. Entirely unexpected.

Are you noticing ads within Windows? I haven't used windows in over a decade and hear there are a lot of ads you see throughout the OS, which is something you don't get on macOS.

I use Windows 11 Professional at work, and I haven't seen a single ad.

There might be sponsored apps installed or something, but I don't care. I open the start menu, search for the application I want and run that. They're not getting in my way, if they are there.

That said, I prefer late-Windows 10 to current-Windows 11. But I hated Windows 10 when it launched and they fixed the key annoyances, so there's a chance they'll do it with Windows 11 as well. They've already fixed some, like the centered task bar.

This is false; there are ads in quite a few places in macOS, examples of which were shared in another reply to your comment.

While I'm not a Windows user much anymore, my understanding is that there are at least unofficial hacks/tweaks you can apply to remove many of the ads in Windows. In contrast, certain ads in macOS (e.g. the one nagging you to upgrade your iCloud plan when you're near your storage limit) cannot be disabled through any mechanism that I've been able to find.

> which is something you don't get on macOS

Oh you sweet summer child...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252412228?sortBy=best

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7655683?sortBy=best

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251442866?sortBy=best

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251628859?sortBy=best

I pretty much stopped using MacOS because they put so many fucking ads in the OS by default and smugly expected you to just accept that they were there. It's not as bad as Windows yet, but honestly it's just as annoying.

I'm just one data point, but I haven't personally seen any of those ads in macOS but I don't use Apple News. Also I see all of these links are reports from 3 - 8 years ago so perhaps some of them don't occur any more?

Regardless, it's rather rude to call people names here when we're just having a discussion. Your tone is offensive.

Here's another data point: today, in 2024, I see the behavior mentioned in the 2nd and 3rd links on a daily basis on multiple of my Apple devices.

You were wrong. MacOS has advertisements, that's the long-and-short of it.

I correct people when they make this mistake because Hacker News has a habit of giving corporations undue lip-service. You can be mad at me if it makes you feel better, but the problem is that Apple doesn't respect your attention. MacOS today literally violates it's own Human Interface Guidelines to serve you advertisements; think on that for a moment.

> You can be mad at me

It appears you have missed the point. I'm not upset with you for referencing reports; my frustration lies with your condescending tone and name-calling, which contribute nothing to the discussion. Your approach is frankly very off-putting.

I don’t even know what people are referring to exactly when they say Windows is full of ads. Windows 11 is my main OS, it’s the basic Home edition.

The only ads I see are when I mistype in the start menu, and get some web search results including ads, just like when I google something.

Inline web search results is a crappy feature to me, but it didn’t bother me enough to go regedit mode and disable it. It only appears when the computer search can’t find anything, it kinds of fall back on web search.

It seems the most outraged people are those who never use Windows and rage at the fact that it’s still a popular desktop OS.

Or maybe I’m just lucky and I don’t get the horrible in your face ads everywhere, for some reason.

What bothers me is not that it displays web results but that it forces Bing results and forces Edge to open said links despite it not being the default system wide web browser.

Now that sucka.

Yeah it’s even embarrassing for Microsoft, having to lure people into using edge. That may be the raison d’être of these inline web search results.

It’s a crappy feature anyway, I never use it. It doesn’t get in my way so it’s not a big deal to me. In any case if that’s all there is to this ad thing, the drama around it is surprising to me.

Microsoft earned $22B net profit in the past quarter alone, and their debt is only $40B. That's not a zombie company.

Sure but it feels it's in same place IBM was 20 years ago.

"Feels"? What is that about?

MS has $3.5 Trillion market cap. Same as Apple.

Azure is catching up with AWS and could take the lead.

Nothing like IBM 20 years ago.

Windows is a small fraction of their business. Azure is bigger than the Windows, Office, and Xbox/Gaming divisions combined.

In what way? IBM wasn't prominent in as many areas 20 years ago as Microsoft is today. Today Microsoft has the leading business social media platform with linkedin, owns a leading consumer git platform with github, has a growing share of the enterprise cloud market with azure, now owns several of the most recognized game publishers with their acquisition of Activision and Bethesda, develops two of the top 10 most used programming languages with TypeScript and C#, and still has the leading os.

Windows is in cash-cow mode. It's a mature product that dominates a slowly shrinking market. And in terms of revenue it's not even that great compared to everything else they do. There is no point investing a lot of money.

That money goes elsewhere: pivoting MS Office to the cloud and pushing MS Azure - both by improving Azure and by improving developer tools like VSCode or languages like C# and the rest of the .Net ecosystem. And on the side they have minor projects like Github and LinkedIn.

That is because Azure, XBox, Microsoft 365, Github are pumping money.

Money that lands on Rust Foundation, Python, Go, Linux, FreeBSD, Java, VSCode.

A zombie company ? Exactly what competition does windows +office have in the enterprise?

BYO + Google Docs...?

A few years ago I thought Gmail was scarry. Now I'm more worry about Google Docs.

Diaclaimer: I use both, and everyday I pray my Google account is not baned due to an error in their system.

How many fortune 500 companies primarily rely on that?

It’s a holdings company. The end state for all big tech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com