This was actually central to the DOJ antitrust case against Microsoft. As part of the settlement, Microsoft had to agree to allow OEMs to keep installing crapware [1].
It's things like this that make me a little nervous when people say that going after big tech with antitrust law will necessarily be good for the consumer.
It's hard to differentiate 'crapware' from competition, particularly given the context where Microsoft had just leveraged their power over OEMs to crush a competitor.
This still sucks though, a better outcome for users would have been Microsoft being able to require the machines to sell with a clean OS and then allowing OEMs to install software for the user at their request (rather than the OEMs being able to bundle crap for kickbacks).
Somewhat related, apparently the netscape guys went to Redmond and hung up signs around Microsoft's campus mocking them for ignoring the internet. Legend has it Gates saw these and pivoted teams to IE with a focus on crushing Netscape.
Startup talk often discusses how most startups fail not due to competition, but because of internal collapse. Big companies can't compete, innovator's dilemma, etc. There's a lot of truth to that but this is a counter example (and others exist too).
Wildly stupid to antagonize the elephant that's focused on other things to direct all of their resources to destroying you.
The matter predated the IE / Netscape battle.
The OEMs wanted the ability to yield money off of the desktop for the systems they sell and had been fighting with Microsoft for years to be able to place crap onto Windows when it boots up. The system makers saw dollar signs in being able to sell placement to AOL dial-up and so on. Microsoft used their position to try to keep them from doing that, fearing an inability to control quality for their own product from the first moment the end user begins their experience.
The antitrust case was brought by the states because Microsoft's behavior "was not in the public interest." As far as I know, it wasn't just 1 thing. It was the exclusionary licensing (OEMs were forced to pay an "MS Tax" even when they shipped a Linux computer), it was the bundling of IE, and it was their manipulation of their APIs to favor their software.
Plus there was the EU antitrust case that had nothing to do with OEMs.
It's also worth noting that Microsoft defense was...awful? They falsified evidence, they were belligerent/petty. Gates was a particular train wreck (1)
(1) https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/revisiting-the-s...
Back in the day, if you bought Windows directly from Microsoft, you'd get a pretty clean OS without too much bloat. I guess there were things like Minesweeper and Solitaire -- but those were apparently added to help people become proficient at using a mouse back when this was novel.
One if the offered extras was “Microsoft signature” optimized install that sounded like it came with extra stuff. As I was going to install Linux anyway, I declined.
Then I received the laptop which somehow did have “signature” set-up, so I looked into it: it was basically just pristine windows setup without crapware; Apparently, that’s the only thing they were selling at the time, but were welling to take extra money from people who didn’t want crapware.
Anti-trust is a joke and holding Microsoft accountable for 1/10th of today's standard operating procedure was ridiculous.
I'm pretty sure Apple never made anyone selling an iPhone pay them for an iOS license on all the phones they sell.
That's not to say Apple's conduct isn't egregious, but the context isn't the same either.
That's a wildly different situation. Of course Microsoft charges hardware vendors for Windows licenses - we have to pay for them too! Windows is Microsoft's main product - should they be giving away licenses to vendors?!? (I'm ignoring the underlying issue of sell vs produce here, because it's such a clear fallacy it's not even worth explaining)
I believe in US antitrust law, better for the customer => lower prices. And installing crapware on laptops means lower prices.
The theory would be that if anyone actually wanted crapware-free laptops, there's nothing stopping any manufacturer from selling them. It's a problem for a market. I think it would be a bad idea to let courts decide what "product quality" is for something like that
And I don't think antitrust is supposed to always benefit the consumers, it seems more designed to help the market through competition. But more competition means less compatibility, so we'd just end up with 20 shitty walled-gardens of services instead of 3 good ones. What we need it competition and cooperation, but the market was simply not designed to allow that.
Especially Google's business model of giving away free services to grow their monopoly, then making money off of their data, would not be able to survive. That sounds like a benefit on paper, but most people would consider not getting free Google services a huge problem.
That being said, I still support it. I don't care about the short-term slight negative impacts if it means we rid ourselves of these invasive companies and get at least some semblance of control over our tech.
This is what we see coming from a mile away when people (usually user-hostile devs) clamor for the App Store to be broken up etc.
One of the greatest losses from the retail Microsoft Store shutdown was the loss of Microsoft's "Signature Edition" PC program. They only sold in their Stores PCs with clean Windows installs, which they labeled "Signature Edition". Many of the OEMS participated (Dell, Lenovo, others), and generally when you could directly compare Signature Edition models to their regular direct from the OEM counterparts (which the companies model naming/numbering schemes often intentionally tried to make hard to do) it was often about a $50 premium over the "full of junk installed" PC (showing about how much all that bloatware is valuable to the OEMs if it subsidizes machines by about $50).
For a brief period it even looked like other retailers might adopt Signature Edition sales and you could even walk into a Staples or a Best Buy and find sales people that could source Signature Edition machines, for the people that still liked to try to deal shop between multiple retail stores.
I miss being able to give the advice "buy whatever computer you want from Microsoft Store, or if you go to Staples/Best Buy keep asking sales people until you meet the person that knows what Signature Edition means and you generally won't have any problems with the machine".
Now the advice is back to "buy a Surface from Microsoft or be prepared to spend a couple hours using the Windows Fresh Start tool from Microsoft first".
They have a windows 10 builder tool that downloads the ISO and burns it to USB or DVD. So there's not much stopping a customer from registering and then doing a crapware-free clean install. The downside (besides needing the skill and time to do it) is you'll lose any baked in freeware but the line between freeware, trialware and crapware is so thin now I'm not sure that's a concern.
Finally you can rein in the data collection and remove much of the microsoft freeware by using https://old.reddit.com/r/tronscript.
> They have a windows 10 builder tool that downloads the ISO and burns it to USB or DVD. So there's not much stopping a customer from registering and then doing a crapware-free clean install. The downside (besides needing the skill and time to do it) is you'll lose any baked in freeware but the line between freeware, trialware and crapware is so thin now I'm not sure that's a concern.
And the best thing about your computer is that it's so complicated that a determined manufacturer like Lenovo can hide their crapware installers in, say, the UEFI. Which will then automatically install them on a fresh OS install.
You make the mistake of thinking that you own your computer. You do not.
My last 3 desktops were the ones I assembled myself from components, desktop motherboard manufacturers don't do that.
I think your example is a rare exception, not a rule.
Does anyone maintain a list of crapware-infested motherboards customers should avoid?
2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.
Ah sorry, I got lost in the the thread hierarchy.
> 2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.
Yes, I do. I guess other than CPU microcode and other such stuffs that I can't reasonably get around.
>2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.
I ran openbsd for decades, bought every release dvd, a few t-shirts and did my best to own my hardware. The only reason I don't run it now is their networking stack can't sustain gigabit speeds on the firewall hardware I use. Freebsd can't either, but it gets much closer. More than double the performance, actually. At least for me, it'll have to do.
[0]: My work laptop runs Windows 10, because they issued it, administer it, and own it. I'm required to use their software baseline for working.
Would I miss the updated drivers from Dell or other vendor?
There's some controversy (linked elsewhere in this thread) that those basic drivers are allowed by Microsoft to advertise their "full bloat" versions in notifications and launch time popups. The flipside to that controversy is that if you want the "full bloat" versions (such as the Geforce Experience if you are a game player), that makes it easy to acquire them as it is general a case of go through the notifications and popups on first launch, from what I've seen.
You can turn off the advertising ("Suggestions") and as long as the bundled "crapware" remains UWP sandboxed, it is a far cry from most of what the OEMs have been accused of.
Quality control on Microsofts driver database is really poor.
I'm seriously considering a switch to iOS at this point.
Admittedly it has a rubbish camera but I don't really take pictures so that's fine with me. For a £200 phone it has been just as good for my needs as every flagship nexus/pixel I've owned asside from the crap camera.
It's got to the point that it'll be out of support soon and I'm having a hard time finding a decent replacement for anything near a comparable price.
Maybe it's time to try out LineageOS?
That makes me sad to hear. One of my favorite things about the old Nokia (especially the Lumia series) was that they cared about having good camera hardware. The low end stuff was better than most of the other brands I tried, and if you got something with PureView...
Authoritarian walled gardens and "herding" users? Do NOT want!
The freedom to install and uninstall (and also modify, but that's a slightly different argument...) whatever software you want on the hardware you own is extremely valuable to the concept of general-purpose computing, and yet we are slowly losing that freedom due to these stupid "security" and "damaging their brand" arguments --- and the same goes for right-to-repair.
This is extra hostile, because it's separate from whatever video chat application they were using
What's even more hostile? A proprietary feature that only works in one application. Composition is one of the cornerstones of computing freedom, and another thing that is being slowly chipped away by the corporatocracy; also under the guise of security and privacy, not surprisingly. They want to slowly take away your choices and then nickel-and-dime you to get a fraction of them back.
Having the filter on by default is not nice, I'll agree with you on that --- but it's a huge stretch to go from that, to essentially declaring war against general-purpose computing.
And even today everything about audio / video chat is wonky.
I'm always trying to figure out what application is using what audio or video device. Is the OS messing it up or the application or what is any given conference app choosing to use today ....
It's bad when Lego Star Wars is onto it:
And now they are actively distributing it through Windows Update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24502768
The difference now is that you also have to:
1. Uninstall Candy Crush and similar.
2. Disable Cortana.
3. Disable ads and internet search for your Start button.
4. Click through several small greyed out buttons to have a local account instead of cloud account.
5. Do some of these things again whenever an update nukes part of your settings.
As a bonus, they still haven't fixed the decades old thing in file manager where all your directories default to displaying in stupid mode.
In short: pay for the professional version of Windows or prepare to be annoyed.
On trying to download Mojave from Catalina I get "Update not found. The requested version of macOS is not available."
The system seems to try and be clever and uses software updater, and software updater says I can't have that version.
So how do you get Mojave?
Edit: On further testing, maybe this is a regional issue? I'm not in the US and the link is to the US app Store. This makes the App Store app unhappy ("Cannot connect to app store"). Changing the URL to my region doesn't help. Same issue for all downloads that predate my current version (Catalina). El Cap and Big Sur download nicely.
Why does it have to be connected to the Internet? The point of using a USB installer is for it to work offline.
Big Sur makes this incredibly painful though, with its root filesystem stuff. Not sure what I'll do if I ever need to use that version. It may or may not be worth it to modify the snapshot...
This sort of crapware feeds off the folks who aren't aware of the options, or comfortable performing them.
Fortunately it is great for gaming and I have macOS for everything else.
I bought a Razor mouse a year ago (a mistake I won't repeat), and wanted to disable the pointless built-in LEDs. Can't do that without Synapse, and the settings are not retained when you exit the program. So you must keep it running at all times, or you'll be forced to have circus lights on your desk.
I disassembled the mouse and tore out the LEDs. So much for the "just turn it off"-crowd that appears whenever I complain about RGB-infested hardware.
Also, Razer hid the screws under the plastic feet of the mouse, so now they're all wonky since I had to remove them to take the mouse apart.
Don't buy Razer.
Most if not all mouses are designed like that. You can even buy sheets of replacement mouse feet, with varying levels of friction, if you find the current ones too slippery or sticky.
This makes it possible for the OS companies to bilk the entire industry while they protect their ecosystem with an infinitely deep moat.
There's a spectrum here. On one end, we have completely a completely open OS. Less knowledgable people can certainly be harmed. On the other, the OS is a protected fiefdom. An entire industry is protected and taxed, and the execution model held hostage. You can't run or distribute software freely.
There's good reason Microsoft lost their case. The requirements for openness are better for competition and innovation, even if it sometimes hurts the little guy.
A better, targeted solution for this exact case might be regulation requiring that OEMs offer a zero-bloat option to consumers. They could add a price markup to make back their margin. (Hardware, other than luxury hardware, can have razor thin margins.) Zero regulation (maintaining the status quo) isn't really the end of the world, either.
All giants should have weak points. Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. If they don't, we get trampled.
Except that this is completely false. Microsoft has almost the same PC market share, and no innovation has occurred on the desktop other than by Apple, and to a lesser extent Microsoft’s own response to Apple.
That sounds like car firms should make their own petrol/gas or 3D printer firms should enforce their PLA/etc or perhaps printer firms (like HP) should enforce their own ink/toner.
That's my personal definition of a monopoly with benefits - no thanks.
But it's more akin to car companies making both the car _and_ the engine - which wasn't the case in the stagecoach/early era
This is only part of the story but functionally it was the same. Also 95/98/Me were woefully insecure. And they didn't take security seriously until it started getting really bad mid-2000s.
To be (somewhat) fair, those Operating Systems were intended to run on standalone consumer machines that weren't permanently attached to a network. The most likely means of getting infected with a virus/malware back in the Win95 days was via the floppy drive.
Though always-on internet connections was clearly the direction things were moving toward the end of the 90s - there was no excuse for going back to the trough with WinME rather than pushing everyone to NT.
Who could forget the login bypass "hack": https://i.imgur.com/rG0p0b2.gif
Boot a Linux usb live boot of choice, mount the Windows C: parition. Rename the Command Prompt exe to be the accessibility or sticky keys exe (something roughly along those lines). Save and reboot into Windows. Hit the on screen keyboard button on the login screen and an administrator level command prompt opens allowing you to reset the local admin password to be able to log in or do anything else that you would like to do.
and on most PCs you don't need secure boot to block booting from USBs, a BIOS password is usually enough...
Microsoft does make their own hardware amd last time I checked, it's still full of bloatware. Not as full as old consumer-tier HP laptops used to be, but still.
As for removing OEM bloatware, an option in Windows to ignore the OEM force install partition would be trivial to add, so people could just factory reset to a clean install after buying their machine.
They can theoretically tie the bloatware ban to the Play Store license, like how they force OEMs to install Chrome, Maps and YouTube if they want to have Play Store on their phone, but alternative stores are already on the rise after recent controversies (deleting negative reviews (robinhood, tiktok), deleting unwanted apps from store (fortnite, parler), regional app blocking (tiktok in india)), and doing so would probably just push OEMs to abandon play store in favor of their own store...
Still not quite as clean as a Nexus/Pixel but the best install experience I've ever had on any non-Google device, and the only one I've ever decided not to install a fresh ROM on.
You're thinking of this backwards. The problem isn't too much antitrust enforcement, it's not enough.
If all the major OEMs are bundling crapware then it's a cartel and installing the crapware is anti-competitive tying (or is the cartel shaking down the crapware vendors for money to include theirs instead of encouraging the user to choose a competitor), so go enforce antitrust against the OEMs too.
If not all of them do it then the ones who do get panned in reviews and lose business, reducing the incentive to do it.
Yeah, I personally love vendor lock in, price gouging, and having no aftermarket parts support whatsoever.</sarcasm>
Haven't heard that, but haven't paid much attention to windows since c. 2000 - I believe it's more stable and secure now than it was in the windows 98 days.
Why not have a "reset to clean install" option in windows, which resets everything to just the installed state? Why not distribute the windows CD with the machine so the user can reinstall?
A major reason that CD's stopped being used is the straight up lack of optical drives on modern computers. In most cases these days you specifically need to look for a device that includes optical or other physical media that is not USB.
Given the ubiquity of internet access in most markets where computers are sold (even in developing countries), it is very reasonable to expect that even as a last ditch, the user will be able to connect to the internet on a tethered cell phone, and this is reflected by the fact that on consumer OS you can specify that a connection is metered.
A proper windows CD would have allowed people to wipe all that out and just have vanilla windows. Microsoft weren't interested in that.
Not all hardware is as friendly as Linux on a Thinkpad... Sometimes a clean install would leave you without a display, or would put some bizarre peripheral in an unusable state.
I do like their surface machines a lot (PowerMacBook User before, switched because of the pen input/drawing for workshops).
They should have a fancy/premium Windows version that everyone wants and that's more like OSX for their machines to pull people over. Everyone else gets stock Windows (a little bit like Android model to prevent being sued).
If we can't expect hardware companies to write good software, it's unlikely that software companies' hardware will be much better unless they put a ton of effort into it (which they likely won't unless they're a premium brand like Apple).
That is a pretty strange conclusion to draw. I would say this is a reason computers should ship with no software installed whatsoever. Hardware vendors using software as a differentiator is what started this mess. All PCs are pretty much interchangeable and should be treated like it.
(If they aren't interchangeable, that's because someone is selling broken hardware. Looking at you, Nvidia.)
This makes more sense to me, I was wondering how that would have gotten set by a clueless user. The answer turns out to be that old dell machines shipped some shitty avatar software (along with lots of other stuff) that defaulted to on. The lawyer is probably using an ancient dell computer with this software and hasn't used video chat on it before this.
This is extra hostile, because it's separate from whatever video chat application they were using - so it would have been harder to know about and turn off.
As an aside, Microsoft fought in court to force OEMs to not install this crap alongside Windows (reasonably since it was damaging their brand and making the machines less secure), but they lost. Another reason why the macOS model is better for users. OS companies should make their own hardware. Isn't candy crush installed on new windows 10 installs?
The answer turns out to be that old dell machines shipped some shitty avatar software (along with lots of other stuff) that defaulted to on. The lawyer is probably using an ancient dell computer with this software and hasn't used video chat on it before this.
This is extra hostile, because it's separate from whatever video chat application they were using - so it would have been harder to know about and turn off.
As an aside, Microsoft fought in court to force OEMs to not install this crap alongside Windows (reasonably since it was damaging their brand and making the machines less secure), but they lost. Another reason why the macOS model is better for users. OS companies should make their own hardware.