It's not just you. The business model of many tech companies consists of creating digital fiefdoms to lock "their" users into and then selling access to "their" users. They sell access to "their" users to other software developers. They sell access to the attention of "their" users to advertisers.
I reinstalled Windows 10 on a machine recently and like half the setup process is now ads for other Microsoft services or things related to ads. Do you want Office 365? OneDrive? Xbox Game Pass? Can we use your location for ads? Kind of ridiculous. I don't think there was any the first time I installed Win 10? Maybe just Office 365?
I can't wait for Windows 13 when Microsoft has sold installer ads to the highest bidder and I'm asked if I want a case of Mountain Dew during install.
>I can't wait for Windows 13 when Microsoft has sold installer ads to the highest bidder and I'm asked if I want a case of Mountain Dew during install.
As a Linux user, I look forward to that, so I can laugh even more at Windows users and what they're willing to put up with. I just wish Apple would follow suit with this kind of bad treatment of users.
The sad part is that even despite the horrific bullshit that's become bundled with Windows since 10, Linux Desktop market share still hasn't changed.
At the end of the day, what the average person wants is an OS that works properly without requiring complex configuration, and the people making Linux distributions don't understand or respect this.
Many many years back, when I knew nothing of programming and very little of tech words, I used to wonder why people don't use Linux instead of Windows if it is so great. Then I realized Linux is good for nerds. For the rest of tech ignorant people, it is Windows. As I read somewhere long ago, Linux is for people who know what they are doing. Windows is for people who don't know what they are doing.
I would consider myself fairly tech-literate. Software engineer, use git from the command line, can exit vim. Even then I gave up on Linux after using it for a couple of years because it's just so darn stressful.
When I need to get shit done, the last thing I want to is read pages and pages of documentation about someone's pet project or some Stack Overflow post containing the random incantation I need to fix some hardware incompatibility that is fixed out of the box on some distros but not others.
The Desktop Linux experience, at least for me, was like owning a car with an incredibly detailed repair manual and amazing parts availability but broke down every 6 weeks. Even the best mechanic in the world wouldn't want to use that car as a daily driver.
It's weird. I had that exact experience with Linux. Had to reinstall the system from scratch every major distribution upgrades because they always screwed something up. Fedora's package manager corrupted its own database once. Support was just badly answered forum posts.
Then I switched to Arch Linux and never had problems ever again. Been running it for years with no problems despite its inexplicable reputation for instability. Whenever I want to do anything, I just look it up in the Arch Wiki which is the best Linux documentation ever made.
I have to use Windows at work and it's nothing but constant never ending pain. The god damn OS just does all sorts of stuff I couldn't care less about that have absolutely nothing to do with my job. It actually costs me money in lost productivity. All this for what? The only thing it does is launch the browser, and very rarely Libre Office when the network is down and I have to save a document locally. Yes, Libre Office.
>It's weird. I had that exact experience with Linux. Had to reinstall the system from scratch every major distribution upgrades because they always screwed something up. Fedora's package manager corrupted its own database once. Support was just badly answered forum posts.
I feel like most of the people complaining about constant trouble with Linux were using Fedora...
>Then I switched to Arch Linux and never had problems ever again.
Same thing here with Ubuntu-based distros. Sometimes I wonder if Fedora is secretly made and pushed just to ruin Linux's reputation.
On the flip side, I had the opposite experience. With Linux it was just the matter of compiling from the source. And most of the time, it would just compile without any issue. With windows, I needed to download MSVC and the whole studio and wasn't able to have the app running. I really did not understand why it had to be so complicated. At least with linux there is a support from the community because the same problem might have been encountered by someone else.
Further, in Windows, whenever I was trying new things or doing out of the normal stuff, it required modifying a lot of registry values. I found it horrible compared to Linux, where everything is a file and you can immediately change the file.
It's weird how people are still complaining about this stuff. I never have any trouble like this; I just use an Ubuntu-based distro, and get well-supported hardware (i.e., just buy a Dell or Lenovo laptop), and everything "just works".
If you pay attention closely, you'll notice that sometime in the last year, the Windows 11 installation slide for onedrive went from "hey do you want onedrive, yes or no?" to "hey here's onedrive, we've enabled it for you" (with no option now for opting out of one-drive).
It's still possible to disable one-drive once you boot up for the first time, but the steps are kinda hidden and convoluted:
1. open onedrive settings, go to the "backup" tab, then "manage backups" and uncheck all the folders
2. go to another tab to the left (whose name escapes me, but was something like "sharing" or "syncing") then go to "select which folders are shared" or something like that, then uncheck all the folders. You can even uncheck the "personal vault" folder if you expand it and uncheck its contents (consisting of a single subitem) first.
3. go to the first tab and unselect "start onedrive at startup"
4. Right click onedrive's menu and click "quit onedrive".
These steps are now necessary, when in the past you were able to opt-out of onedrive with one click during installation.
The home screen on my Windows 10 copy usually has a nice image and a few bits of text about that image or location.
Recently, I got an image of a tropical island. The text was all about how Jurassic Park was shot on the same island, and how, more importantly, Jurassic World Dominion was also shot on the same island, and that Jurassic World Dominion had X many dinosaurs.
A very thinly disguised ad for Jurassic World. Right on my home screen.
Unfortunately, it's a very similar situation for MacOS. Seemingly endless prompts to sign up for one service or another. At least Linux is viable for some of us.
These corporations are not bastions of self-awareness nor moral fortitude. They are machines with the singular goal of making the red line go up. It will continue to get worse as long as people continue buying their products.
That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people? I guess founders only talk about this stuff in the startup stage.
If all these corporations will concern themselves with is "line go up" then it's time for society to step in and seriously constrain what they're allowed to do in order to drive that line up. Frankly, corporations making line go up by shoving advertising into everything everywhere aren't adding a lot of value. They're just increasing audiovisual pollution and that's an extremely charitable interpretation of their activities. What I actually think is they're violating my mind every single time they show me an advertisement. My attention is mine, it's not theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. I couldn't care less how much money it costs them, it should be illegal for them to do it.
> That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people?
Unironically, they've already done that.
Microsoft put a PC on every desk, running Microsoft software.
Facebook connected the world to all their friends and relatives.
Amazon first revolutionized e-commerce, making it possible to buy almost anything from almost anywhere. Then they revolutionized server computing, making it possible for anyone to spin up a software backend and scale it out without buying or leasing your own servers.
Apple got pocket sized general purpose computers into the pockets of the majority of people in the world (through iPhone and inspiring Android).
Google enabled people to find pretty much any piece of human knowledge or information.
The problem is, once those goals were accomplished, there was a still a need to keep revenue and profits rising. Which always seems to end up with selling ads at some point.
>Microsoft put a PC on every desk, running Microsoft software.
As someone who was in the industry in the 90s and 00s, and saw just how many man-hours were wasted in dealing with problems caused by MS's buggy and insecure software, I don't really count this as "improving the world and people's lives". Even at the time, there were far better alternatives available; they just didn't have the same marketing or lock-in advantages.
I'll grant you the stuff about FB, Amazon, and Google though, and maybe Apple with their iPhone.
>The problem is, once those goals were accomplished, there was a still a need to keep revenue and profits rising. Which always seems to end up with selling ads at some point.
Yep, this is the problem: unsustainability. These companies should have been able to shift into a "utility provider" type status where they don't really grow much (except from expanding population, or new untapped global markets), where they can simply provide a fairly constant service and have a regular revenue stream.
> I don't really count this as "improving the world and people's lives".
Microsoft provided the operating system that allowed the commoditised IBM PC, and later laptops, to launch.
Without this, no Google, no Amazon and no FB.
Put another way, if every workstation still cost $5k and up to own, far fewer people would have bothered in the first place.
No complaints about your views on Microsoft software ;) I'd argue I'm not sure Google or Amazon are "making the world a better place" when you get into the details, but this is purely about the wider impacts of their strategy.
> That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people? I guess founders only talk about this stuff in the startup stage.
These were lies calculated to help them recruit idealistic young people, who lack the experience to disregard companies making grandiose claims about themselves and their motives.
Most of the most successful corporations/businesses have vision/innovation to begin with, they do create useful things that people didn't know they wanted but once they see it they do.
After a while though, the business gets big enough that no new innovation can actually move the needle on the businesses revenues, the people at those companies who do have ideas are better off getting paid well for some period of time and then leaving to make it themselves.
That's the stage google is in more or less, innovation won't move their bottom line very much so they're trying to extract as much as possible from their existing businesses, which basically means as many ads as possible in as many places as possible.
tech giants have the moral-teflon of their bastardized implementation of DEI. So they're obviously just and benevolent. If you think they're ratfucking their customers, then you're just a bigot who's mad about the diversity but won't say it.
It's healthier to think of business models more like organisms. Animals aren't "good" or "bad" for having a lifecycle that involves parasitism or predation, stealth or deceit, or any number of behaviors, like cannibalism. Life doesn't care how you live, just that you live.
Businesses live because society allows them to live. How about we make humane business models a pre-condition for existence?
"It exists in nature" is not a solid argument for anything. I've read about insects that coerce their mates into copulation under threat of predation. Yet nobody seriously argues that humans should be allowed to rape because rape exists in nature. Such an obviously sociopathic argument just doesn't fly.
> Businesses live because society allows them to live.
It is not a one way street from "mores of society" -> "business practices". Large corporations frequently go to extreme lengths attempting to manipulate what society does and does not allow.
>"It exists in nature" is not a solid argument for anything. I've read about insects that coerce their mates into copulation under threat of predation. Yet nobody seriously argues that humans should be allowed to rape because rape exists in nature. Such an obviously sociopathic argument just doesn't fly.
It's worse than that. Some insects (I think it's mantises) will murder each other after copulation. I'm not sure what the evolutionary advantage there is, but this doesn't seem like something humans should emulate.
>How about we make humane business models a pre-condition for existence?
I argue only that organisms evolve to occupy whatever space is available to them. This true of organisms, it is true of businesses. Both respond to incentives.
I am not "life". Considering something humans do as "bad" is kinda like the cultural equivalent of an immune system. I don't judge a parasite for trying it on with me, because there is no utility in it. Use those resources for fighting back harder instead.
Of course. When I go to places like that, it's because I want to consume. When I go to a store, when I open the store app, it's because I want to see products. That's the whole point. In those cases, it's not advertising, it's information.
The problem with computers today is you get advertised to no matter what you do. Can't boot goddamn Windows without it finding an excuse to show you stupid Taboola ads. Can't open a simple website without being literally flooded with ads all around the "content". This "content" is just an incidental abstraction, an arbitrary square on the screen that ads mold themselves around like parasites. It doesn't matter what the "content" is, it could be anything that draws in users, the real product is their attention being captured by the ads.
You want to consume plastic stuff; Disney World wants to sell you plastic stuff; a magical time ensues.
But you buy Windows because you want a useful OS; whereas Microsoft make Windows as a shop-front for their paid-for services; your purpose and the makers' purpose are misaligned, and you end up frustrated and annoyed that Windows isn't what you want it to be.
Similarly, if a website's purpose is to make money (which is fair enough of course), but you're there because you want to read interesting stuff, that's a misaligned purpose and a frustrating time for you.
Websites that exist primarily to show off interesting stuff tend not to tax the content-blocker so hard, because the author and audience's purposes are well-aligned. And community-governed OSes/distros tend not to push other services, because the purpose for making them genuinely is to be a useful OS (for their intended niche).
My suggestion for what it's worth: choose tools and services where the maker's purpose for making it aligns with your purpose for using it.
> choose tools and services where the maker's purpose for making it aligns with your purpose for using it
What if they don't exist anymore? Because not taking advantage of your users by advertising to them means leaving money on the table. Eventually some executive is gonna show up, notice that and demand that it be done because his compensation is directly tied to revenue growth or something.
Yep. I'm saying: avoid things that exist primarily to make loads of money.
Smaller, looser, less-commercial organisations have fewer or no executives, less concern with making as much money as possible, and (in my opinion) tend to produce less bullshit.
This is distinct from producing good-quality work — their output may be unpolished, but it'll generally be sincere, and free of over-commercialised tat.
Which ISP, phone company, or electrical utility company works like that? They don't, because we have (hopefully) regulated them. There is a point in which a product stops becoming a choice and starts becoming necessary to function. You could argue that operating systems are one of those things. Lets put some ideas together for regulation in these spheres.
Yes, because it's trivially easy to avoid going to Disney. To avoid all tech giants, you practically need to opt-out of modern society and become a hermit.
Apple advertises their cloud services in macosx constantly and there's no way to permanently dismiss these advertisements, other than buying said services.
I am still running Catalina 10.15, and haven't seen any ads for Apple services. There is stuff like Apple TV and Apple News pre-installed, but I never open them, and they never send notifications.
Turning off the Apple Music / iCloud / Apple Arcade notification badge "adverts" in iOS (just got a new iPhone) is also - while not that difficult technically - mildly annoying...
It doesn't punch a hole in it. If P implies Q, that doesn't mean the inverse of P implies the inverse of Q. If you're not the customer, you're the product. But if you are the customer, well, sometimes you're still the product.
Sometimes you are neither the customer nor the product. (e.g. a service like wikpedia or a project like linux)
I think the context in which the phrase "if you're not the customer, you're the product" is often used implies that we should upgrade our relationship by paying, however this is not necessarily the case as shown here.
The comparison worked for Facebook at the time, because having a directly reachable and targetable audience was groundbreaking at the time (2006-2012)
In 2022, audiences are everywhere and getting them stratified and connected is not hard. Therefore, many companies are exploiting this to cross- and up-sell their products.
I guess my point is that product != audience.
You're always the product unless you're using freedom respecting hardware and software. If you're a customer, it just means you paid for the privilege of being someone else's product.
But doesn't it imply that the only way to not be the product is to be the customer? In this case, we see that being the customer is insufficient to not be the product.
No, being a product or a customer stand in no relation to one another. You can be neither, either, or both. If you don't want to be a product, you have to work on that, not on being a better customer.
Every app these days requires your unique and unchanging advertising identifier to log in. You can’t get an Apple ID or Google account, or order a pizza or make a dinner reservation without it.
Cosco doesn't make the goods they sell - they are just being an intermediary between you and the the manufacturer. An intermediary that takes a 60+% fee for their work.
> Cosco doesn't make the goods they sell - they are just being an intermediary between you and the the manufacturer. An intermediary that takes a 60+% fee for their work.
It can take such "fee" because it’s so enormous that it can negociate prices in a way you couldn’t, as well as handling the logistics and having lots of different products at the same place. It’s not "just an intermediary", it’s an intermediary that adds value.
If you want to eat a yogurt, would you prefer paying $4 a pack of four at Costco or $1500 for 4000 yogurts you have to transport from the manufacturer to your home with your own truck?
There’s no problem; Costco is an intermediary that brings value and so it takes its cut. Why do people buy from Amazon, who is also "just" an intermediary? Because you can buy millions of different products from one single place instead of having to go see each manufacturer where you wouldn’t be able to buy individual items anyway.
This situation is a lot more effective than forcing each manufacturer to develop its own customer-facing business with all the costs and logistics that go with it.
Those are not the only two options available. A locally produced yogurt would cost more than in Costco, but not that much more. Maybe $20 a pack, with a deposit for the glass, and you would get it at your door with your milk.
Technically, advertising business basically solves a market optimization problem, which means you can keep improving revenue/profit while your business structure remaining transparent to customers. This gives you a definite control on your business as well as removing lots of uncertainties. I have no doubt Apple or MS want to get their hands into the advertising business; how to do that is a different question though.
Huh, for some reason I'd gotten it into my head that Windows was free to OEMs. But it turns out that that was just a particular version of 8, "with Bing," a while ago. Wild that Windows is a paid product.
[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-11-remove-ads/
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...