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Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business

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Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business

#21

Post by jsmith99 »

jahnu wrote: post #7
netr0ute wrote: post #2

Every day since Windows 11's release, Microsoft is alienating people and indirectly making desktop Linux the better option.

I'm a software engineer and have many software engineering friends and acquaintances and still even in this group of people who are almost all at least comfortable with Linux hardly any use it for anything except work or learning. It's roughly a 50/50 split for the rest between Windows and macOS. So how can it be remotely plausible that Linux will become a mainstream desktop/laptop OS? Non IT workers also seem to fav…

Desktop Linux is great for Grandma who only needs a web browser and it's great for greybeards who remember what config file to edit, but anyone in between is going to be doing a LOT of pasting incantations they don't understand into terminal windows.

Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business

#22

Post by throwawayninja »

blinkingled wrote: post #4

Why? Windows 11 as an advertising business wasn't nasty enough for Microsoft? I installed it on one of my sparingly used machines and it's as blatant as it gets. The Edge push, all the installed crapware, the telemetry and God knows what else - either way it didn't feel like I was running my own OS - instead it felt like I was running a rented one at a Kinkos.

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.

Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business

#23

Post by maximus-decimus »

S_A_P wrote: post #17

Microsoft is on an interesting trajectory of late, but it also seems like there is some bifurcation as to what they're doing. On one hand they are trying to embrace Linux and pushing development tools forward, but on the other they are just making every slimy big tech type decision they can. I have my own personal axe to grind with them as they tricked my completely non tech savvy mother in law to upgrade her Surface…

Something similar happened with my father. He upgraded his laptop to w11 and now his microphone is incredibly finicky and will only capture his voice making if he's sitting exactly in front of the middle of the computer. This makes the mic useless for my father's base use case : have video calls where both he and my mother speak on the same computer. They now have to turn the computer around to fact the person who's speaking. The same computer with the same mic worked perfectly fine with w10.

Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business

#24

Post by spaetzleesser »

The tech big companies are getting too big for their own good. Their core business is not large enough to satisfy the growth demands so they have to branch out into other sectors. Give it a few years and Apple, MS, Google and others will basically offer the same products and services. I really wish they would get broken up so one division doesn't have to do shady things to satisfy the needs of other divisions.

Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business

#25

Post by LeifCarrotson »

S_A_P wrote: post #17

Microsoft is on an interesting trajectory of late, but it also seems like there is some bifurcation as to what they're doing. On one hand they are trying to embrace Linux and pushing development tools forward, but on the other they are just making every slimy big tech type decision they can. I have my own personal axe to grind with them as they tricked my completely non tech savvy mother in law to upgrade her Surface…

"Some bifurcation" is quite an understatement!

Unless you're trying to partition all actions into "good" and "bad", it's more like octofurcation or dodecafurcation. Microsoft is not a homogenous monolith...what does it even mean to split something that's already split apart?

Here's an old org chart which shows Microsoft trifurcated:

https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000

But realistically, each of 5 divisions - Windows, Office, Server & Tools, Online Services, and Entertainment & Devices (the above chart may have been made before the latter two existed) - has a president that's trying to make their division successful, even at the expense of goodwill earned by other divisions. Yes, Server & Tools has been knocking it out of the park for you and I recently with regards to developer enthusiasm, but they're a long ways away from Entertainment & Devices. Each of those divisions actually has another ~25 VPs and hundreds of Directors each trying to climb the ladder faster than the others.

To put it bluntly, Windows is jealous of all the post-sale revenue that Entertainment & Devices gets, and all the telemetry that online services gets, and has shoved as much as possible of both into Windows 11.

Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business

#26

Post by garciasn »

franczesko wrote: post #20

Why Microsoft is pushing for its weakest link - the advertising business? They missed the mobile train, hardly anyone uses Bing (even DuckDuckGo, which is based on their API, seems to be stagnant in terms of the daily query growth). I find it difficult to connect the dots here.

Am I misunderstanding your comment regarding DDG's daily query growth? According to https://duckduckgo.com/traffic they're continuing to grow.

Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business

#27

Post by syshum »

jsmith99 wrote: post #21
jahnu wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a software engineer and have many software engineering friends and acquaintances and still even in this group of people who are almost all at least comfortable with Linux hardly any use it for anything except work or learning. It's roughly a 50/50 split for the rest between Windows and macOS. So how can it be remotely plausible that Linux will become a mainstream desktop/laptop OS? Non IT workers also seem to fav…

Desktop Linux is great for Grandma who only needs a web browser and it's great for greybeards who remember what config file to edit, but anyone in between is going to be doing a LOT of pasting incantations they don't understand into terminal windows.

Ironically modern Linux is trying to alienate the grey beards with uneditable config files, breaking decades of convention, etc.

Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business

#28

Post by spaetzleesser »

jahnu wrote: post #7
netr0ute wrote: post #2

Every day since Windows 11's release, Microsoft is alienating people and indirectly making desktop Linux the better option.

I'm a software engineer and have many software engineering friends and acquaintances and still even in this group of people who are almost all at least comfortable with Linux hardly any use it for anything except work or learning. It's roughly a 50/50 split for the rest between Windows and macOS. So how can it be remotely plausible that Linux will become a mainstream desktop/laptop OS? Non IT workers also seem to fav…

I have switched to Linux completely for my own stuff but I honestly would be reluctant to recommend this to non-tech users. There are a lot of problems when you run Linux on a laptop like battery life , suspend/wake problems and others. A lot of consumer software isn't available on Linux either. With Apple you get pretty nice integration between phone and desktop/laptop. Sort of possible on Linux but requires tech skills and hard work.

Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business

#29

Post by teh_matt »

jsmith99 wrote: post #21
jahnu wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a software engineer and have many software engineering friends and acquaintances and still even in this group of people who are almost all at least comfortable with Linux hardly any use it for anything except work or learning. It's roughly a 50/50 split for the rest between Windows and macOS. So how can it be remotely plausible that Linux will become a mainstream desktop/laptop OS? Non IT workers also seem to fav…

Desktop Linux is great for Grandma who only needs a web browser and it's great for greybeards who remember what config file to edit, but anyone in between is going to be doing a LOT of pasting incantations they don't understand into terminal windows.

As someone who doesn't own a Windows machine and only uses Macs for work, this feels like an outdated perspective. It's been many years since using desktop Linux has required magical terminal incantations (for me at least). If it says Nvidia, don't touch it. Otherwise, everything seems to just work, and things at least don't get broken arbitrarily by companies whose goals don't match mine. Even all the games I've tried have run solidly with Steam's Proton support.

Maybe I've become numb to them, but I just don't see these painful interactions that get referenced, and don't see why their bogeyman would be worth giving up your freedom to use your machine.

Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business

#30

Post by franczesko »

garciasn wrote: post #26
franczesko wrote: post #20

Why Microsoft is pushing for its weakest link - the advertising business? They missed the mobile train, hardly anyone uses Bing (even DuckDuckGo, which is based on their API, seems to be stagnant in terms of the daily query growth). I find it difficult to connect the dots here.

Am I misunderstanding your comment regarding DDG's daily query growth? According to https://duckduckgo.com/traffic they're continuing to grow.

Looking at the whole 2021, both the daily avg. and total monthly queries seem to be flat. Only October and November were positive outliers.
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