I miss the days of being suspicious of Microsoft. But Microsoft isn't nearly as diabolical as Google, nor are they as competent.
Google, on the other hand, is fundamentally incentivized to sell ads, which requires collecting data. The more data they collect, the more money they make. As the saying goes, we are the product. No amount of hand-wringing or shaming is going to change that fundamental fact.
I think that in 100 years we're going to look back on how personal data is used the way we look at barbaric medical practices of the Dark Ages. People in general just didn't know or expect better.
Microsoft is in the same business as Google. Search, Bing. Gmail, Outlook.com. GCP, Azure. They even operate an ad network.
Google has some bad incentives but Microsoft has all the same ones. If not, why isn't there a single button for "never send any of my personal information to Microsoft" anywhere in Windows 10?
Microsoft and Google may have competing products, but they are in completely different businesses. Microsoft is in the business of software, Google is in the business of data. That's why there's a public Bing Search API[1], but there's no public Google Search API.
[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...
In what way are Windows and Edge "software" but Android and Chrome are not?
> That's why there's a public Bing Search API[1], but there's no public Google Search API.
The company that is operating a data service is the one not in the data business?
> The company that is operating a data service is the one not in the data business?
A company in the software business charges for the usage of its software (Windows, Bing API). A company in the data business gives the software for free, and monetizes the data it collects about its users (Android, Google).
A services API isn't software. You're not buying a copy of the code and running it on your computer. And Google offers the same category of thing (paid services), e.g. the Google Maps API or G Suite, while Microsoft offers free services equivalent to google.com and gmail.com like bing.com and outlook.com.
Meanwhile Microsoft has been giving away actual software like Windows 10 for free, along with a variety of other things like IE/Edge (including for non-Windows platforms), VS Express, the Skype software, etc.
They're direct competitors operating in largely the same markets and using the same business models.
It's called SaaS, which stands for "Software as a service"[1].
> They're direct competitors operating in largely the same markets and using the same business models.
Google generates 84% of its revenues from ads[2], Microsoft generates 95% of its revenues from software[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service
[2] https://martechtoday.com/google-posts-31-1b-in-total-revenue...
[3] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2018-Q1...
In other words, you're not buying a copy of the code and running it on your computer. So the provider has all your private information.
And if that's "software" then how is Google not a "software" company? All their services are that.
> Google generates 84% of its revenues from ads[2], Microsoft generates 95% of its revenues from software[3].
It's understandable that you missed this, but the distinction you're making is arbitrary. Microsoft can book ad revenue under software and service categories because the software/service is what generated the ad views. They definitely make more than 5% of their revenue from ads.
Percentages are also useless in general. If Google merged with Amazon (which has much higher revenue) then most of their revenue wouldn't be from "advertising" but how would that change their incentives at all? If anything it would be worse -- now they're providing more non-advertising services to you and have the incentive to spy on you via those services to increase their ad profitability.
So, literally every click you make is trickling data back to Facegoogsoft, because that’s how indexing works.
It's unfortunate that every large vendor today has short-term incentives to screw users.
> any Edge-WebKit differences are bugs that we’re interested in fixing
context:
> We recommend that web developers avoid UA sniffing as much as possible; modern web platform features are nearly all detectable in easy ways. Over the past year, we’ve seen some UA-sniffing sites that have been updated to detect Microsoft Edge… only to provide it with a legacy IE11 code path. This is not the best approach, as Microsoft Edge matches ‘WebKit’ behaviors, not IE11 behaviors (any Edge-WebKit differences are bugs that we’re interested in fixing). In our experience Microsoft Edge runs best on the ‘WebKit’ code paths in these sites. Also, with the internet becoming available on a wider variety of devices, please assume unknown browsers are good – please don’t limit your site to working only on a small set of current known browsers. If you do this, your site will almost certainly break in the future.
Personally, I think operations infrastructure should take a a more hands-off approach and let people use whatever web browsers they want and focus on educating users on why and how rather than on what. However, it is not practical for a variety of reasons. I had a chance to chat with a Chrome team member. He assured me that if you are an IT department and want to deploy Chrome in your enterprise, the Chrome team is committed to stand behind you. You can start at https://enterprise.google.com/chrome/chrome-browser/ If you have custom home-grown applications that require a legacy browser, you can centrally manage lists. In practice, this means that users will just need to open Google Chrome. If they go to some address that requires a legacy browser, Chrome will automatically kick you to the legacy browser. When someone continues on the legacy browser, you can kick them back to Google Chrome and have them continue there. I think this is the better path forward especially considering that Windows 7 will end of life in 2020. While I love Mozilla Firefox, I think Chrome is your only choice when it comes to Enterprise desktop.
For web developers like me, Edge has such a small market share that it makes no sense to test for Edge. From what I understand above, I shouldn't have to test for Microsoft Edge. It shouldn't have any of the legacy stuff from MSIE. That being said, threats of mono culture aside, I think it is best for any corporation to move their web browser to Google Chrome. Your people will be more productive on Google Chrome because it is the browser they know and love.
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-mo...
If you're reading this, hello from Google Cloud Summit New York!
Google has clearly showed that they will kowtow to whatever the local law is. As far as I can tell they do this as a last option though, and not just because they don't believe in certain ideas of privacy.
That makes total sense. Google is in the business of selling ads, this requires getting as much information as possible on users, through any means possible, software downloads, online services, it's all the same in the end.
I think that Firefox Quantum is a better alternative.
Damn. I just realized that. Signing out of browser signs you out of GMail. And signing into GMail signs you into the browser. Went to download Edge but turns out it's not on Win Server. MSFT really needs to get its act together.
Agreed.
I had always been a FF user, but switched to chrome about a year ago because it was faster. The latest version of Chrome pushed me back to Firefox, as it's WAY slower and not particularly friendly to tracking, even with Ghostery/uBlock etc... installed
I'm done with Google and refuse to support their products and services.
It doesn't sounds like you've actually tried this.
It doesn't sign you into anything but the google website, just like before. You have to turn on browser sync to sign into the browser. Seriously, try it. Your passwords, history, etc aren't there, and nothing shows up in your history from that session. Signing out of gmail still signs you out.
The new system is annoying because it makes it more difficult (impossible?) to sync to one Google account while having another one be the primary signed in one, but it doesn't sign the browser into anything on its own.
- log out of Google Chrome
- clear all cookies (requires digging deep into the settings or using devtools, otherwise Google's cookies will remain)
- restart the browser
- make sure that your picture is not displayed in the browser itself or in the browser settings and that you aren't in incognito mode
- visit the Gmail website and log in
- your picture will now be displayed in the browser software itself (not just Google websites) and in the browser settings
- clearing cookies (ctrl-shift-del on Linux) will not log you out of Google websites or the browser
In about:settings, does it say at the top "Syncing to codefined", or is there a button you can press to "Sync as codefined". Maybe the confusion is the UI.
This seems to be the direction for all users of Google. The new version of Chrome signs you into the browser even if you don't want to sign into the software itself. You can't really use Google's browsing device (Google Chrome) without providing your identity, if you ever want to sign into a Google website.
Support for Firefox is more important than ever.