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

People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

windowscentral.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 640 posts

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#11

Post by jmclnx »

>Windows 11 will still force you to setup an internet connection and sign-in with a Microsoft account during the out of box experience

One has to wonder if this change will occur, that is due to these state laws requiring various levels of age verification. I can see MS stating you need to have this account because of the Age Verification Law in your State.

In a way, California's law is a huge gift to big tech, and now it is being replicated to other US states with additional requirements.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#12

Post by grujicd »

This "make Windows better" push is far more political than technological. It's a fight with other divisions about using Windows as a marketing and sales channel for other products and services.

It has to be a decision from the very top. I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore. It's not just 10% of revenue, it's a foundation for how enterprises ended up on Azure and are bringing big money.

I'm still a Windows power user, MacBook is a wonderful piece of hardware and I'm typing this on one, but I'm not nearly as productive as on multimonitor PC with TotalCommander and Visual Studio where I use all the shortcuts subconsciously.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#13

Post by spandrew »

I would never advise anyone buy a Microsoft Windows laptop these days — between the forced updates, the account and service-fee thirst, ads, and consumer unfriendly product release process (forced opt-in).

Guess what? With Apple's new Neo laptop the price is also way way wayyy out to lunch.

If MSFT gives a business a huge bulk discount to buy their laptops + Office360 + Teams... OK? But as a "consumer" it really sucks.

Want PC gaming? Steamdeck or Steambox.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#14

Post by Supermancho »

kstrauser wrote: post #10
throwa356262 wrote: post #7

Serious question: why is this not a problem with apple products?

How do you mean?

people remember creating an Apple Account login and using it on their laptop, but don't understand that it's connected in fundamentally different ways.

The answer is: Because the Apple Login is not calling out for every service, including login.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#15

Post by Jare »

throwa356262 wrote: post #7

Serious question: why is this not a problem with apple products?

I don't recall macos forcing it. They definitely over-suggest it and the ecosystem (especially for dev) is very full of it and I consider that a problem, but it's limited in scope. If you don't want the Apple ecosystem, as far as I know you never need an AppleID.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#16

Post by [deleted] »

kstrauser wrote: post #8

Microsoft has, by far, the absolute worst sign-on experience of any enterprise vendor I've ever used in any industry for any reason. Try to log in to AWS and you'll either get authed or a clear denial reason. Google Workspace? You're in or you're out. Enterprisey MS service like Outlook or Azure? Well, if you've logged in from that computer before, you might get to log in, but you may also have to hunt around for you…

[deleted]

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#17

Post by SirFatty »

ano-ther wrote: post #2

That would improve things. Over the weekend, a family member could not log into their laptop any longer. Turned out to be “a problem with Teams” that required an unscheduled update which was marked as optional. Needless to say that they never used Teams on that machine. When the login worked partially, their files weren’t accessible because they accidentally saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online o…

That must be the free version of OneDrive that forces cloud only.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#19

Post by pipes »

ooterness wrote: post #3

Too little, too late. I switched to Linux and I'm never looking back. Good riddance, Microsoft.

I've done this several times over the last 18 years or so. The most recent was a few months a go. And my steamdeck persuaded me. Unfortunately I ran into the same WiFi networking issue I've never managed to resolve. Even on different hardware. Pings to my default gateway are ridiculously slow compared to windows. I spent countless hours trying to resolve. I gave up and have gone with windows 11 ltsc.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#20

Post by riversflow »

grujicd wrote: post #12

This "make Windows better" push is far more political than technological. It's a fight with other divisions about using Windows as a marketing and sales channel for other products and services. It has to be a decision from the very top. I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore. It's not just 10% of revenue, it's a foundation for how…

> I use all the shortcuts subconsciously.

I realize you probably are referencing visual studio, but at the OS level KDE plasma seems to have copped Windows hot keys wholesale. I was giving it a go recently and was delighted that even meta+arrow keys for monitor switching fullscreen apps works. My only gripe, and what got me booting back into windows, was that even the latest wifi drivers for my brand new wifi 7 motherboard were too flaky to reliably play multiplayer online games.

Post reply on HN