Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Advertisement Inc.

neil.computer

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 212 posts

Re: Microsoft Advertisement Inc.

#91

Post by glogla »

ksangeelee wrote: post #76
zercurity wrote: post #7

We've been using this tool to strip out unwanted Microsoft 'features' such as Cortana. Its a powershell script you simply give it your Windows ISO and it lets you remove applications and services you don't wanted installed. It creates a really awesome Windows OS. I highly recommend it. https://github.com/DrEmpiricism/Optimize-Offline

While I'm glad these efforts exist, it's wrong to have to fight my operating system in this way. In my experience, it's a losing battle. Microsoft seem intent on having full control of your system, and they are in a position to take that control as and when they like. The occasional nods towards the technical crowd, for example WSL & VSCode are distracting us from the very large elephant in the room.

VSCode is a pure marketing effort, trying to convince people that Microsoft isn't all that evil.

WSL is more sinister - it's a counter to "I want to run Linux on my desktop / laptop". It is a carrot to the stick of Secure Boot that's trying to make anything else than Windows impossible on PC.

Re: Microsoft Advertisement Inc.

#92

Post by mavhc »

glogla wrote: post #90
ppfrc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use LTSC. No Cortana, no Store, no Edge, and obviously no Candy Crush--in fact, no Metro apps to speak which, not even the Calculator (instead you get the one from Windows 7)

But can I get that on my personal laptop?

You can pay for Windows updates by having ads, or by paying for Enterprise edition every year. Or realise that you should have switched to Linux already. Or overpay for your hardware and get a Mac, prepay for 5 years of OS updates today!

Re: Microsoft Advertisement Inc.

#93

Post by thejosh »

martius wrote: post #81
panpanna wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what engineers working on vscode and wsl feel when they run into people working on OS monetization in the company restaurant... What do you need to say in your interview to be assigned to the latter team?

What do they feel? What about being thankful for being a revenue stream, it allows us to work on more free (as in beer) and open source developer tools

It's almost like paying for an operating system should somehow be the payment itself.

Re: Microsoft Advertisement Inc.

#94

Post by ppfrc »

glogla wrote: post #90
ppfrc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use LTSC. No Cortana, no Store, no Edge, and obviously no Candy Crush--in fact, no Metro apps to speak which, not even the Calculator (instead you get the one from Windows 7)

But can I get that on my personal laptop?

I pirated it.

Re: Microsoft Advertisement Inc.

#95

Post by user84 »

neilpanchal wrote: post #68
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #58

What a load of shit. I love the guy trying to infer Microsoft's ad profit centers by trying to read between the lines of marketing copy. Entertaining stuff. But let's not confuse this for grown up analysis. Microsoft releases their financials, like every publicly traded corporation. Bing search ads are a small part of revenu, about 5% of what Azure earns, and stable. Desktop ads are a vanishingly small line item. Mic…

You’re right that I’ve not backed some of the claims with objective financial analysis. I searched for annual reports, then went off to finishing the post, in the interest of time. I thought that it would take a long time to read the reports to find out the revenue broken down into various business segments instead of “Microsoft Search Network” bucket. Furthermore, whether ad business is a 1/20th of Microsoft’s reven…

You have been more than entertaining. Thank you

Re: Microsoft Advertisement Inc.

#96

Post by yrro »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #69
nroets wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, personally I dual boot Ubuntu and Windows. But the problem is that many organizations I deal with are reinforcing Microsoft dominance by e.g. emailing me PDFs that only Acroread can open. If I want to fight these issues, I may need to resort to name dropping (Google, Apple) and other tactics.

> emailing me PDFs that only Acroread can open Please post any examples of those to the evince project as a bug report.

In my experience these are PDFs that embed JavaScript. I don't think there is much of an appetite for building yet another JS interpreter into the desktop...

Re: Microsoft Advertisement Inc.

#97

Post by cpach »

scarface74 wrote: post #59
cpach wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”Apple never wanted the enterprise” Are you sure? See e.g. IBM who use hundreds of thousands Macs https://www.computerworld.com/article/3452847/ibm-mac-users-...

I’m not saying they don’t occasionally get enterprise wins, but it’s not like they bend over backwards for it.

True.

Re: Microsoft Advertisement Inc.

#98

Post by Nextgrid »

ppfrc wrote: post #87
apk-d wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To solve this, they have an upgrade you can get called "Windows 10 Pro for Workstations". Costs a little over $300. Quoting the blog post on windows.com: "You will see for Windows 10 Pro for Workstations productivity and enterprise focused applications in place of consumer applications and games. This was one of the top feedback shared with us by our partners and users and we're delivering this in our next update" La…

Just use LTSC. No Cortana, no Store, no Edge, and obviously no Candy Crush--in fact, no Metro apps to speak which, not even the Calculator (instead you get the one from Windows 7)

How do you get a license for that? As far as I know you can't easily. You need to find a reseller and there's a minimum amount of licenses you need to buy so you can't just buy one.

I don't understand why Microsoft is doing this. There's basically zero effort involved in setting up a credit card payment form that gives out product keys, and there'd be at least some demand for it.

Re: Microsoft Advertisement Inc.

#99

Post by Nextgrid »

simonh wrote: post #82
dchest wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is not as invasive as Microsoft, but macOS has this preference: https://imgur.com/a/VhQec0O "Advertising in Apple Apps: View the information used by Apple to deliver more relevant ads to you in Apple News, Stocks and the iOS App Store. Your personal data is not provided to third parties." Apparently, you will see ads in their newest apps: News and Stocks apps (and ads for other apps in App Store).

If you have oped out, as in your case and mine, the answer is none of your information will be used in this way. It's one setting, it's a complete opt out and you get prominently asked at install time. I've really not got any problem with that.

> you get prominently asked at install time

Do you? I know the iOS setup wizard asks for analytics, but I don't recall it ever asking whether you want to turn on "limit ad tracking".

Re: Microsoft Advertisement Inc.

#100

Post by Hawxy »

neilpanchal wrote: post #68
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #58

What a load of shit. I love the guy trying to infer Microsoft's ad profit centers by trying to read between the lines of marketing copy. Entertaining stuff. But let's not confuse this for grown up analysis. Microsoft releases their financials, like every publicly traded corporation. Bing search ads are a small part of revenu, about 5% of what Azure earns, and stable. Desktop ads are a vanishingly small line item. Mic…

You’re right that I’ve not backed some of the claims with objective financial analysis. I searched for annual reports, then went off to finishing the post, in the interest of time. I thought that it would take a long time to read the reports to find out the revenue broken down into various business segments instead of “Microsoft Search Network” bucket. Furthermore, whether ad business is a 1/20th of Microsoft’s reven…

This article is incredibly misleading and I can't believe almost everyone on HN is taking it at face value. You've clearly made assumptions to fit your conclusion without verifying the validity of the assumptions themselves.

The items you list at the top are just part of the normal telemetry subsystem and have nothing to do with advertising. Windows has an separate system for advertising and it's completely isolated from telemetry data unless users opt-in to "Tailored experiences" within the privacy settings. (See: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4468236/diagnostics...)

Ad tracking within windows is limited to the windows store apps you open and what you search for in the start menu if web-searches with Bing are enabled, which is entire gist of the "Microsoft Search Network".

Opting-out from "Advertising ID" during install/in privacy settings, or disabling personalised ads globally @ choice.microsoft.com stops this behaviour entirely.

Instead of making assumptions about Cortana, you could've just checked the privacy guide: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4468233/cortana-and...

I quote: "Cortana does not use the data you share to target ads to you. Ads may accompany search results that Cortana delivers, just as they do when you search on Bing.com. Even if Cortana does the searching for you, your web search queries will be treated as described in the Bing section of the Microsoft Privacy Statement."

Using Cortana doesn't give Microsoft any more ad money over someone just doing a plain Bing search.

Post reply on HN