The telemetry is an interesting reminder; I wonder how difficult it would be to modify/reverse-engineer W11 to spit out garbage telemetry? Gigabytes and gigabytes of the stuff, just give MS the same garbage they give us.

I really don't know how to feel about watching Microsoft degrade into yet another shady ad company. On one hand, they were never good. On the other, it is still somehow a loss to transform from an engineering company with evil business practices, to an ad company with evil business practices.

Also, can't help but feel bad for whatever engineers have remained there. OS development is rough in a world where people are apparently only willing to pay for Apple's offering.

This is part of their Linux marketing plan. Make windows worse (challenging work!), and push people to Linux. End goal being irrelevance.

Very noble!

If Microsoft pushes people to Linux, I'm pretty sure it would be their Linux (WSL + strings attached), nothing that would benefit the true Linux community in any way.

WSL is hot garbage and shares most of the problems cygwin has of the impedance mismatch between the hosted programs being shunted off into their own badly implemented filesystem, and that of the host.

Worse than Windows 10? That already seemed pretty bad when I kept having to uninstall candy crush and somehow it kept coming back, and literal ads in the start menu.

How did they make it worse with Windows 11?

I think that might be a great reason why! To make windows a unified advertising identifier.

ATT (and verizon tried too) got these ad platforms because they wanted to unite their 1st party user device data to an advertising graph.

They tried to enable targeting individuals (on harder to 1:1 target devices too). But they never seemed to actually merge the two 'pipes' together that well.

Because google & apple have blocked more targeted advertising for everyone but themselves, creating a competing platform that doesn't rely on 3p cookies or IDFA etc would be really valuable.

FB direct response ads are totally dead for us. Apple & google killed it. We use Xandr and they do have some broad demo 1p targeting segments, device expansion, but it's nothing like FB. Still have to use a 3rd party to load 1:1 lists, at least we do.

Google already has a huge login base on the web. In addition, AFAIK google includes a uuid in chrome that only google properties can read - I have never found info on if they use that for ad targeting, or correct my memory if i'm wrong on that?

Microsoft could create something like that. They would probably have to expand IE use or do something shady in between chrome and the web.

Maybe if they want to get into streaming too - blurg.

OR a better idea imho would be a microsoft smart tv, MSFT SSP + exclusive to xandr inventory included. There is some gaming advertising too that could be thought out and expanded. Maybe bundle xbox inside a tv, sell it at a loss to stream ads.

Seems like the current trend in software. We used to have a perpetual licensing system as the dominant way of buying software, with some upgrades / unlimited upgrades, somewhat like a warranty system. Then lots of online services started on the subscription model, justifiably because they were providing online services. Everyone got jealous and greedy, and seeing that sweet sweet recurring revenue that others were making, switched to that model that actually doesn't make much sense, even for software that you're installing on your computer, adding marginal online services like storage you don't care about as a justification. Now that everything is subscription based and market is saturated, the only ways to increase revenue are either to upsell existing subscriptions, or add new revenue streams.

Ads seems like an obvious one. Future is grim.

MSFT was already xandr's biggest customer. they ran dedicated hardware just for MSFT, and already handled most of their ads for msn and Xbox. they were already deeply linked companies.

> The Edge push

This is one area I give MS a pass. Google engaged in aggressive Chrome pushing for years, people seem to forget now that it’s so ubiquitous they don’t really need to anymore. It’s good someone is fighting back. Especially since, while I much prefer Firefox, Edge is actually decent.

The issue with edge is the underlying browser engine is still chromium. The only reason I use Firefox over something like brave or edge is because I’m trying to advocate against a monopoly chromium browser engine.

I still remember their ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0

But Chrome had a clear advantage those days compared to other solutions

Microsoft's value proposition? PDF users and memory consumption?

> "Microsoft's value proposition??"

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/05/21/preview-micro...

"[...] To help these students on their learning journey, we are excited to announce that Microsoft Math Solver will be available as a preview feature starting with Microsoft Edge 91 stable. Microsoft Math Solver allows a student to snap a picture of a math problem – be it handwritten or printed – and get an instant solution with step-by-step instructions to help them learn how to reach the solution on their own."

Built-in vertical tabs? Tab Collections? If you like Chrome as a browser, and don't really care about Google, isn't that better to use the built-in one? "It's not IE11" is value for anyone using "the browser which comes with Windows".

IMO the type of person probably using IE11 out of force of habit, probably also wouldn't notice too much if you switched them to something else by just redoing the icons.

A distressing amount of "I don't use the Internet, I just check my emails" in my old university IT support days.

Don't forget one-click payday loans!

https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-edge-buy-now-pay-la...