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  > If you can't responsibly operate a business past a certain scale, you shouldn't be allowed to continue growth. I don't know what that looks like, legally speaking

A legal solution is not the correct solution to that problem. The classic answer to this question in Western societies is that the market will produce a better alternative.

For what it's worth, I'm typing this on my Debian desktop. In my opinion, a far better solution.

That’s a non-answer. The market very obviously did not produce a better alternative, and we’ve been playing this game for enough decades now to be reasonably confident it won’t—and if it will, Microsoft or some other megacorp will buy them, gut them, and carry on.

Regulation is the proper tool to force corporations to behave in a way that isn’t as harmful to society. This is something that should be regulated.

> For what it's worth, I'm typing this on my Debian desktop. In my opinion, a far better solution.

It’s almost comical how you speak about better alternatives in the context of capitalist markets, where better means reaching a higher market saturation, and then offer a niche solution that has a number of users so tiny that it’s less than a rounding error in any statistic.

This comment is almost unfathomable in a world where Windows and MacOS combined has a smaller install-base than Linux.

The capitalists already chose their winners, they just never let down a rope to the consumer market.

Are you referring to Android?

I think he's referring to the fact that, while everyone jokes about "year of Linux on the desktop":

In the last 30 years, we moved overwhelmingly from local workloads to internet workloads

We moved overwhelmingly away from desktop and to mobile

Android is the dominant mobile OS, and it's hand-in-hand with Linux at the kernel level

The internet, meanwhile, is powered overwhelmingly by Linux

So I tend to agree that just because normal folks think of "computing" as the Windows or Mac machine sitting in front of them, the world is now predominantly powered by Linux.

... GNU/Linux smth. ...

I generally appreciate the distinction, but I purposely did not use that distinction here because Android is only Linux if you don't include GNU.

The distinction is relevant here, because "year of Linux on the desktop" doesn't refer to Android. The philosophy of "Linux" is that the user has control. That applies more to BSD than Android. Also it's "on the desktop".

I fear we're talking past one another.

Oh sorry is it correct that you meant, that the "year of Linux on the desktop" doesn't matter anymore, because computing switched to mobile and servers and there the Linux kernel is dominating, while I understood that you mean that Android counts toward the "year of Linux on the desktop"?

Yep, exactly!

> they just never let down a rope to the consumer market

So this is a coded statement that I fear most people won't get, but it's pretty profound.

If I'm getting bigyabai's point, they are saying that people that are professionals at choosing operating systems have overwhelmingly chosen Linux, and it's really in the consumer markets, where folks don't have any special knowledge or judgment, that Windows and MacOS thrive. That's a good insight, because it's completely true. Both Windows and MacOS cater to audiences that, for the most part, don't care or want to care about how technology works, and this makes them vulnerable. Apple and Microsoft capitalize on this.

Your answer, and GP's reference to Debian, is highlighting the misunderstanding very precisely: Microsoft is not just an operating system vendor. If they stopped making Windows tomorrow, Microsoft would still exist and do well economically, because it's a hydra with a thousand heads.

Hence my point: The classical concept of "displacement" doesn't apply to corporations at that scale anymore.

Apple was a relativly small company on the verge of death and came all the way back to surpass Microsoft.

Indeed it did. Thirty years ago, when the world wasn't utterly dominated by giant tech companies like it is now. Back then Microsoft wasn't capable of buying a country if they so desired; they couldn't hold most world governments hostage, didn't have a product portfolio that covers almost any organisation globally, and didn't have a trove of petabytes (more?) of data to train artificial intelligence with.

The world is a different place now, and old rules don't apply anymore.

I actually think Microsoft was much more dominant in the 90s. There really weren't solid alternatives to Windows and that was their Cash cow. Now there's tons of alternatives to virtually everything they do

The market has created many better alternatives. The iPhone would have not been possible without MS being so ignorant about customers.

  > better means reaching a higher market saturation

That most certainly is not my definition of better. My definition of better is addressing my needs as a user.

You conveniently left out in the context of capitalist markets in your quote. The grandparent argued that legal solutions couldn't solve the problem, but the market could by producing a better solution. If that better solution doesn't displace the incumbent, it is by definition not a better solution, because that would—in the context of this question—imply displacing it, hence the market would have solved the problem.

So whether Debian is addressing your needs better than Windows bears little relevance for the topic at hand.

I quoted as much as I thought necessary to make clear which part of your comment I am referring to.

In any case, I think that the term "better" applies for each consumer, therefore the better solution for any specific consumer does not necessarily have to displace the incumbent.

There's another post on hn about how 19% of california homes are owned by investors, and when I saw that I thought to myself "wow, the free market really produced an optimal outcome there."

California housing market is not an example of a free market.

In a truly free market even in California real estate would be pretty affordable. It's not affordable because there's so many laws that have been passed by people who are trying to protect the culture and value of their area.

Like San Francisco, it's nearly impossible to build anything there.

The market has failed. It's allowed massive monopolistic and anti-competitive scenarios to play out, and technology outran legislation like crazy. There are billions of people who are a victim of the failure mode I pointed out. You using an alternative (and being here, on this forum) singles you out as one of one in tens of millions of people with the capacity and knowledge to accomplish that.

25 years ago it made sense to let things play out. Now we're looking at ownership by subscription, and people unable to actually own their own devices, with constant, ubiquitous, global surveillance for all but the most wealthy, and even them most of the time. We see a proliferation of some of the worst possible things online, and companies that are unable and unwilling to effectively moderate their billions of users with resorting to heavy handed authoritarian tactics. Tactics which, when recognized by those in power, are quickly taken over and utilized for purposes far beyond anything so prosaic as "protecting children" or "combating terrorism."

Apple and Microsoft and Google and the rest have shown us that the tech market is more or less just like the old steel and oil markets - robber barons rush in, coordinate, distill the market to a handful of effective players, capture regulation and lobby legislation to maximize their own profit, and there is no concomitant return of value to the users or the market in general.

If you're too big to run the business responsibly, you should be legally prohibited from expanding further. This is about as pro-market as you can get, it requires actual unmet needs in any market to be met, and holds those operating in the market to account for their behavior.

This failure is primarily due to regulatory capture, rather than a failed free market approach, for what it’s worth.

You're going to need some actual citations for that narrative before anyone buys into it.

The US refused serious regulation out of fear of stifling a fully-financialized economy. Now that America has no manufacturing capacity and a weak grasp on raw materials, our only lucrative businesses embrace exploitative subscription services, lock-in and planned obsolescence. Every economist in the US could have surmised that this would be an issue following the aforementioned oil/steel rackets. It just switched from the secondary sector to the tertiary sector of the economy.

I think you might have a slightly off-kilter view of what I mean. Regulation is not inherently good. Large corporations will often work through lobbyists (I don’t think anyone can deny the incredible access powerful lobbyists have in the US) to enact laws purely to stifle competition. An example of this is major groups like Meta directly requesting regulations on major topics, because when a law is in place, you know exactly how to skirt around it and you find all the loopholes you can.

A short overview with some examples on how the US differs from other regions in this respect: https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/regulatory-capture-us-l...

> Now that America has no manufacturing capacity

This is a meme that doesn't have any bearing in reality. The U.S. remains the world's second-largest manufacturer behind China, with real output reaching an all-time high of $2.5 trillion in 2021. Manufacturing's contribution to U.S. GDP in 2023 was approximately 10.2%, or $2.3 trillion.

The reason the meme persists, I think, is that fewer and fewer folks work in manufacturing, due to a massive increase in automation. In essence, the U.S. didn't offshore manufacturing as much as they automated it. So it seems to have disappeared from an employment perspective, even though in continues to drive the economy.

Automation has significantly boosted productivity and efficiency, enabling higher output, but it has also contributed to the long-term decline in manufacturing employment.

The notion that the U.S. subsists on "exploitative subscription services, lock-in and planned obsolescence" is, while part of the everyday consumer experience, not a good reflection of what is really driving the economy.

The market was free to capture the regulators, so they did.

> The market has failed. It's allowed massive monopolistic and anti-competitive scenarios to play out, and technology outran legislation like crazy.

Why is that the market's fault? That's like blaming a river for flowing downhill. The most stable configuration in a free market is a monopoly. Obviously everything eventually ends up as one without intervention. It's a mathematical certainty.

This is 100% on regulators allowing that to happen.

I agree, and now that we have an existence proof for the exact way things have gone wrong, we can see that these companies are exploiting numbers of customers and consumers far greater than they can responsibly handle. We need to legislate what responsible means, in this context, and apply reasonable boundaries and limits on scale. A single company that leaks nearly every person's private information online should be held to account for irresponsible practices, having damaged the entire world, but despite this happening multiple times, they hardly even get a slap on the wrist.

The status quo is untenable. We need better regulations that accommodate reality, and leave regulators no choice but to hold companies and people to account for the harms they do.

> The most stable configuration in a free market is a monopoly.

Free market doesn't mean unregulated. It means that the market reflects the true costs so market participants have free choice. When you have a monopoly, the market is probably not free anymore.

  > The market has failed.

So you argue that the capitalist approach failed, and now you advocate for a socialist approach?

Maybe the market didn't fail. Maybe the market is providing what the consumers demand. Maybe you are an outlier, different from the rest of the consumers.

Do you feel that there is no option for you on the market? Windows, nor Debian, nor Ubuntu, not Mac meet your needs? Do you think that there are others like you, if so then why not start a business and serve that market? You might have tremendous opportunity here.

No capitalism doesn't mean manchester capitalism. Capitalism is about the agency of companies as supposed to government control.

A market without rules isn't free. You need to regulate a market in order to keep it free.

The solution to bad client support channels is... using open source software with no support? I don't think this works at all.

> open source software with no support

Open source means you have as much support as you like to have, because you are the support.

> We need a scale reform for modern businesses - platforms and companies like Microsoft are logistically incapable of providing good service to their customers, or moderating hundreds of millions or even billions of users, effectively separating these companies from all the harm they cause.

And here is where "you have to spend X number of days a year doing CS" should be a requirement for every engineer, dev, product manger, and executive.

I do not think you understand the level of abject stupidity that customers are capable of. I do not think you understand how likely customers are to do dumb things and blame the company.

Companies who provide support charge more for their products to pay for it. How much? Well how many people break things and then ask for refunds. The company pays for those people by marking up all the other products.

IN any organization: first friend outside your team should be in accounting. The second should be in customer service. These are the most valuable resources you will have regarding the tempo of what is going on inside your organization. They are the front line and the oracles of "truth" (the books dont lie, unless your Enron' and then you have bigger problems).

I worked phone support for a while... I had a customer call about backing up their research paper they were working on (iomega, zip drive). After going back and forth for 20m or so, since the drive light wasn't on...

Me: "Would you be able to pull the computer out into the light so that you can check the connection with better lighting instead of the flashlight?"

Customer: "Not really, the power is out."

I worked on the iomega side, second level support, mostly Jazz and OS/2 calls, knew it was going to be a doozy when I got a non-warm zip customer. MCI operated support call center in Chandler, AZ... pretty sure that's where Safelight Auto Glass operates now.

Related: A buddy on the Compaq side of the call center got the infamous "broken cup holder" call. He could barely contain the laughter and popped up having to tell anyone at that moment about it.

> The point isn't to resolve user problems, it's to reduce the number of people taking up the time of support agents. Letting people vent in a pseudo-official channel accomplishes that. Whenever something gets resolved that was being fixed anyway, because the "industry partners", enterprise and high level customers wanted it, they can mark an issue as resolved, and generate the appearance of responsive service.

Yep. It's like Whitehouse "petitions". Time-wasting tarpits for the unaware.

> It's like standing up complex automated phone menus, you're going to frustrate a certain number of callers into giving up, and reduce the overall number of customers you have to interact with.

The point of pointless troubleshooting procedures, long forms, long wait times, denials, and inconvenience is to monetize misery and create a maximally-negative conversion funnel. Ask any UnitedHealth or airline CEO.

The market has solutions to this, but they are mostly for businesses. E.g. You can purchase "support" either from Microsoft, or other third parties that will then deal with MS for you if they can't fix it themselves. And whatever software you buy also has it's own support terms too. (I've had good experiences with paid AWS support under both models.)

On the flip side: if you're an individual, you're at a poker table with a $50 chip—you don't have leverage—you either just take the bet or don't. So you're basically forced to research the laptop/hardware/software you intend to run to verify it's a happy path, or it at least has vendors (or a local PC store) that will help you if something breaks, and hope for the best.

So I guess the question is, would people be willing to pay for good support? Would people even pay for an OS anymore?

> So I guess the question is, would people be willing to pay for good support?

They're already doing so, just not receiving it. Microsoft made a yearly profit of 101 billion dollars, or better phrased, 101,000 million dollars. The solution isn't "the consumer pays more", it's "investors earn less".

How much of that was from the products discussed in these Q&As?

I wonder if they will purposely train/instruct chatbot help agents to be a bit less helpful, to mimic the friction and frustration that phone trees and such create.

Or perhaps they'll train them to be cheerfully helpful, but to just dump all the feedback in a virtual circular file. If so, would the chatbot admit this is what happens if the user asked them?

Competition. Go build a better product.

At Microsoft scale, common market rules no longer apply. What would you even call their "product" that someone could improve upon? It’s a giant maze of offerings, competing interests, corporate and government relations, revenue streams… hoping for someone to disrupt this due to better support is like hoping for a country to displace the United States for their superior social systems. It’s nonsensical, that’s not how global mega-corporations work.

Sooo you're never going to be able to do what MS did to IBM? You're never going to be able to do what AMD is doing to Intel?

Well... being lucky enough to negotiate a fairly liberal licensing agreement with a tech juggernaut as MS did with IBM for something as critical as the OS? Not likely.

AMD has been making chips literally for decades with investments in Billions. They had to spin their fab business off it was too expensive to keep up with. And even now, it's taken nearly a decade of competitive and leading products to make inroads, and even then they're still under 50% of x86 computers in use.

Linux has been around over 30 years, and is just now cracking 5% desktop market share. This happens while Windows has become less than 10% of Microsoft revenue, with well over a decade of "free" upgrades.

So, yeah, if you're able to get a company started... get billions invested... able to create compelling products without triggering literal mine-fields of IP and legislative restrictions... sure, you might be able to unseat a competitive mega corporation. But unlikely in anything resembling a lifetime measured in less than decades.

If it was easy enough to be even remotely feasible for average HN users then Microsoft would already be long gone.

Because there are likely many many people in this world who had that thought before you.