I'm honestly surprised how brazenly they are doing exactly the thing they had 10 years of legal trauma from previously again. I mean, something different, sure. But exactly the same thing????!
They even force TCPA, sorry, TPM.
The thing we fought so hard against 20some years ago.
20 years later they just do it again, and no one protested. No one.
77.5% is definitely a "dominant market position". That is the term that matters, people just like to use the word monopoly instead (note: if lots of people use a word "incorrectly" the meaning of the word changes).
That differs between the US and Europe. The legal issue is abuse of dominant market position (just having the position is, of course, legal). The EU cares about any "detriment" for customers, competitors, employees,... . That used to be the case in the US as well, but over the last decades they switched to caring only about a specific niche and generally doing very, very little.
End result: Lots of big, successful companies that do shady things and only the EU intervenes and then is the bad guy.
Look at any of the threads about fines for Facebook or the like and you will find many replies to the effect of "The EU is just jealous and should not fine successful American companies".
Why just in the EU?! I know.. because of strict regulations and fear of billions in fines.
But.. what if Microsoft plays fair and just ditches this aggressive behavior and shows some respect to its users who have already paid for their Windows license and let them use whatever software they want.
I use Edge as my default browser in Windows and just a few days ago wanted to test something related to web in Chrome. I have chrome installed but didn’t open it in months now.. but, guess what? The moment I clicked the chrome icon, a notification popped up saying something like: “Use edge, a fast, secure.. a bla bla bla browser..”. I was literally shocked by how far can MS go to promote its own products even if you always use them as your main tools.
It's not illegal to promote something. What's illegal is overtaking a new market by pushing your stuff via already established monopolies in entirely different markets (at least under EU-law). Which is why Microsoft is taking action (and google stopped pushing their browser via their search engine)
> what if Microsoft plays fair and just ditches this aggressive behavior and shows some respect to its users
They've likely run the numbers and found that they make way more money this way. That's the only factor that comes into it. How far can they push and annoy people while still making profit.
Apple has had to learn this lesson a few times too. It always sounds cool to an engineer to propose "let's blend search results from the local hard disk with those from the Internet" but almost all users make a clear distinction between "stuff I have locally" vs. "stuff out there on the Internet" and they don't want them mixed.
Largely because they know stuff on the Internet is potentially dangerous and full of ads and their own stuff is not, so they want the two sources (and the search mechanisms thereof) kept distinct.
Serving web search results from a generic (formerly local only) search box serves multiple strategic initiatives:
1. Gives a place to plug and train the 1P search engine (Bing) or a place to sell access to a search provider (Apple wrt Google)
2. Pretty easy but flashy feature that doesn’t require any real creativity or delivery risks but is flashy enough to get people promoted.
3. Probably user research shows that computer novices are confused by the difference between a file and web search box.
Don’t underestimate the confluence of these three things: it’s easy to justify as good for the (highly technically inexperienced) user, good for the business, and a solid path to a title bump for all involved.
It shouldn't be even cool to an engineer if you get rid of all the abstraction sauce you need to make this appear halfway elegant on a technical level.
Web search and local search don't even have the same interface: one takes a string and returns a list of web URLs based on a black box algorithm, the other takes a string along with potential other attributes and returns a list of local files that match a fulltext search.
I don't see any meaningful way to calculate a relevance score across both web results and local files.
The only reason you'd want to do this IMO is if you're desperate to get traffic to your search engine.
Yeah the one exception is OneDrive/iCloud storage, it's fine to search that, even if it only pretends to be local. But those are 'my' files, not general web search results.
MikuMikuDance is ancient but somehow manages to use Direct3D features that WINE doesn't implement properly. Maybe Proton does now, but I haven't checked in a couple years.
I have some random monitor from China based on a laptop panel and "HDR mode" seems to mean something along the lines of "without the sRGB EOTF". However, the software support for HDR in Windows 11 is so bad that I just use the sRGB mode instead, which does a really good job.
And government deals. That's why in 2023 children still learn basic office skills on Microsoft's offering. US might be different because I know Chromebooks are popular over there in education.
I'm the IT guy. It's the LOB apps that require windows, not the company. Stop selling us windows-exclusive software and we can talk. Yeah, it's really cool what you can do with wine and proton these days. Can I do that to a bank teller's computer and expect the vendor to answer the phone if something goes wrong?
and honestly, windows is pretty durable these days. 'desktop stuff' is less than 5% of my timesheet and I really do have better things to be doing with my time than trying to achieve the current baseline functionality with noncooperative methods.
I don't know which world you live in, but I am pretty confident that there aren't that many HN users in my software company, even among developers
Even so people (HN or not) won't give up their productivity tool their daily work relies on because of some nuisance or really, ideal. I have seen comments where people are so pissed off by the aggressive ads in Windows that they switched to Linux or Mac, but the number is going to be very small.
Because this would create an environment where an ethical alternative could appear. Although, looking back at the history of Google, a cynic in me says the users will lose in the end anyway.
>Because this would create an environment where an ethical alternative could appear.
That's exactly like saying "if we remove this dictator form this middle eastern warzone, a peaceful and ethical leader will naturally replace him".
No mate, you'll get no ethical alternative, instead Google and friends will immediately take over the power vacuum left by Microsoft before any start-up can even begin hiring.
Nah, your analogy would be replacing that dictator with multiple federal or city governments. Sure, it will not magically make things better, but having changes/competition get started at smaller scales is much easier. So having multiple "google and friends" is preferable over just one.
Sure, there are plenty of alternatives, many are superior, but because of inertia and policies it's difficult to eradicate Microsoft variants. That's why many of us have to put up with broken products like Teams on a daily basis even though everybody (i.e. users, middle management, top management) know they're broken and half-useful when compared to competition.
Changing Operating systems is not a small feat. Also there are MANY enterprise applications that depend on windows, windows server, or Microsoft SQL server. It is not an easy task to migrate away from those. That is why companies pay Microsoft $$$$$$ in licensing.
Because of a "dominant market position". Nobody says "can't appear" or says anything about a literal monopoly or literally not exist (or whether butterflies are made out of butter); that is just short hand and how language works. The point is that any alternative, ethical or not, is much too easily stifled in the current environment. Allowing competition to actually happen would be better.
Because the whole history of Microsoft is based on the EEE paradigm. And now because of inertia it's almost[0] impossible to move away from it for any org that has been using their products for years.
[0] "Almost", because I know some large orgs that finally managed to break away, but it wasn't easy at all.
I was thinking about this recently as someone suggested it might be an American thing. But I don't think so - there are plenty of unethical companies in Europe, too. They often manage to exploit some loophole in the law and, say, sell expensive things to old people under some apparently legitimate guises. Or they'll fake car engine tests.
But ethical (=ethically neutral) companies definitely exist, and there are many of them.
Or, the government should step in and say "No. Have different companies take over different parts of Windows. Do this in two years or pay a 1 trillion dollar fine."
