I think the sad reality is a huge portion of the American population actually likes being fed commercial/branded b.s. Just look how common it is for folks to voluntarily affix things like Monster energy drink logos on their vehicles... The culture has no class, monster trucks dude.

We have no class. It’s kind of the brand.

But respond favourably to, in sufficient numbers, that it remains profitable for the shovelling class? You betcha.

This statement is extremely ironic. You are scolding someone about not empathizing more. Do you see it?

But... I totally empathize with you.

The reason I would argue it's not a useful concept is that class in this context refers to one's social signaling outputs in a national monoculture that hasn't been the predominate way people in the US have interacted with culture for decades.

The obvious reality of course is that #1 won't make Apple users migrate to Windows because of #2. And both #1 and #2 will alienate diehard Windows users.

There's genuinely no economic incentive for them not to sell their own OS down the river at this point.

Mac has established itself as a only-on-mac-hardware market, which rules it out as an option for the majority of corporate and educational settings, and while I wish the year-of-the-linux-desktop was actually coming, most coorporations just aren't set up to / don't understand how to manage OSs without the fallback of a company guaranteeing support.

I see a lot of people celebrating Windows 95 as a high point, and it isn't really a surprise - that was one of the last times that Windows had to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS share.

That might also have been around the last time when people expected to pay for a new operating system. The other thing Apple has done is to lower the cost of OS upgrades to the point where selling the OS itself has become economically difficult. Apple simply offsets that with insane margins on the hardware, MS doesn't have that option.

I think it has a lot more to do with nostalgia goggles. Windows 95 still had a lot of the same cruft on install. It really wanted you to sign up for an MSN dial-up account to use the bundled IE to browse MSN.com as your home page "of choice". Another bundled app suggested a subscription service to get and send Faxes.

(Windows was always like this. It seems far more "extreme" now, but the roots are deep and old. A lot of regular Windows users don't even notice what Windows 11 is doing because the frog has been boiling in that pot for so long.)

Don't forget was Windows 95 that became the anti-trust scandal because a lot of people felt at the time that Microsoft didn't have to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS.

(Same as it ever was.)

My point was that in contrast to today, where consumers have windows, and pro users are turning to non-windows alternatives, in the late 90s Microsoft themselves provided the pro user alternative.

Perhaps Microsoft intend LTSC to be that pro alternative, but as you say, thats not available to everyone.

That's not a simple switch you can flip on in an organization. Especially if you lack a culture that has a consensus view of what good taste even is.

Like really, you have outstanding hardware, great margins is it really worth deteriorating the experience in the hopes people will sign up to one of more of the 20 or so subscription services you now sell. They've even resorted to car industry-like subscribing to use hardware features on the chunky watch.

End of the day its inevitable unless you have a product CEO at the helm with a strong vision, Apple no longer has that so the money graph will always win at the expense of experience.

Apple is a hardware company that develops an operating system and services to add value to their hardware. They make nearly all of their money from hardware.

For the longest time, Microsoft didn’t really make any hardware at all, apart from some peripherals like keyboards and mice. Now they have Xbox and Surface, but they’re still predominantly a software and services company. The biggest reason they’re trashing up their OS with advertising and other crap these days is that they now make a lot less money from Windows licenses than they used to.

Long gone are the days when people lined up at the stores for their chance to snag a copy of Windows 95 on CD!

I preferred them served on floppy disks. 5 inches too!

Maybe if they made a better operating system that wouldn't be the case.

At this point Apple has a structural advantage over Microsoft in that Apple doesn't need to monetize their operating system to be profitable, as they're funded by hardware sales. That frees them up to provide a better user experience because they don't have to find way to make money off of their users. Not many companies are in a similar position, where they can recover software development expenses solely through hardware sales. There are a handful that could in theory, but they seem to lack the willingness.

It seems like Apple has largely forgotten that; a hardware company seeking to maximize value for their hardware would, for example, tolerate (if not outright encourage) alternative operating systems on said hardware instead of using "security" as an excuse to maintain a tighter and tighter grip on a walled garden of software. The App Store is lucrative enough that it's sucked in the rest of Apple; instead of making hardware for hardware's sake, Apple's hardware is increasingly a funnel into that App Store ecosystem.

Likewise...

> The biggest reason they’re trashing up their OS with advertising and other crap these days is that they now make a lot less money from Windows licenses than they used to.

You'd think a company whose bread and butter is software and services would understand that pissing off customers ain't exactly a winning strategy for making money off those software and services.

I'd also question the idea that they're making significantly less money on Windows licenses than before. Yeah, not very many people are buying retail copies of Windows like they were back in the day, but there's still plenty of volume from desktop/laptop OEMs (in spite of the perennial claims that mobile devices have killed the desktop) and plenty of volume from enterprise customers (which is arguably Microsoft's money tree, far more so than anything consumer-facing). Microsoft's probably perfectly fine with Windows Home Edition (and even, to an extent, Professional Edition) being a loss leader of sorts if it means maintaining mindshare such that enterprises instinctively pick Windows Enterprise Edition and Windows Server for their business needs, and especially if they instinctively pick those running on Azure. Shoving a bunch of ads and bloatware into their flagship OS is entirely unnecessary from that perspective.

The ads and bloatware are more likely from the other side of Microsoft's strategy: competing with Google on the ad delivery and search engine front. There's growing pressure from the Bing side of things to use the consumer versions of Windows as a funnel into Bing - as manifested in everything from the Start Menu to the incessant demands to use Edge as the default browser (which just so happens to use Bing as its default search engine).

There are countless other examples of this tendency of accidental goldmines sucking in the rest of a company's products and turning them into funnels. Valve is a notable case, with Steam evolving from a tool to support Valve's bread-and-butter of PC games to Valve's bread-and-butter in and of itself - and with Valve's software and (more recently) hardware projects serving primarily as funnels into the Steam ecosystem.

It’s a terminal phase you see in a lot of companies. Phase 1 is mega growth in user base. Phase 2 is innovation to try to sell as much as possible to the base, but mostly steady state. Phase 3 is shady monetizing and dark patterns to try to squeeze the last drops of revenue out of the base before dying.

It resembles the lifecycle of a star actually.

Though why Microsoft continues to do business with a company that thought it was a good idea to install a root certificate (with a publicly known private key) onto every single laptop they sold so they could MITM some ads into websites is beyond me.

I'm sorry, what ?!

>and it pleadingly tries to stop you from using Firefox,

But you gotta realise, for an OS, this is already too much..

I naively expect my OS to help me organise my files and provide a platform to run applications. And that's about it.

The weird thing is Microsoft seems to be acting as if they're competing madly against some competitor and must keep up the updates and new features and be constantly changing things to keep peoples' attention. But I'm sure this hasn't been the case for quite a while now.

I actually have never experienced this. What I HAVE seen is that if you accidentally open a not-firefox browser, it asks whether you want to make it the default.

That's not correct. ThinkPads never had this stuff on them.

One of the sysadmins responded with something like "lol" followed by a screenshot of an Xbox app on a production server.

One of the benefits of entrenched monopoly power is you don't have to care about quality.

If they could just drop it right now, both desktop and server, without causing a major explosion, I'm pretty sure they would.

The hassle of dealing with hardware compatibility and vendors can't be worth the small amount that get per licence these days, why not let Apple and Open Source deal with that collection of end-user grief?

Server-side & similar they don't care what OS you use, or are heading that way, as long as you host it on Azure. If you use any OS directly at all: function-level based hosting being a commonly pushed option ATM. SQL Server claims Linux to be a first-class host OS IIRC.

Desktop support directly is still a bit Windows-oriented and that might not change, but the browser-based alternatives are coming on in leaps which makes user OS less important (and pulls more users towards Azure lock-in via OneDrive and syncing office app files between users).

It used to be that Windows, Office, and SQL Server were their cash cows and everything else was intended to funnel people towards them (or, at least, pull them away from other options). Now that triumvirate is Azure, Office, and SQL Server. In both cases with VisualStudio as a distant forth.

That, and while there is a push to get other apps stable and feature complete online or otherwise on other-OS options, they are not close enough to any such goal that trying to kill their own OS that way is desirable enough to make it worth the risk yet.

This is what I mean by “if they could they would”. To be more specific: “if they could without it pushing people away from their other products as well”.

Also, the big EOM contracts will have some pricing guarantees within they. All others things permitting, they still couldn't make such a change quickly.