People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by masfuerte » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

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…

This is so true. When you log in to their website it bounces around through about fifteen different domains before it concludes. I'm nearly sure passport.com is still in there.

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

#22

Post by WarmWash » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

ooterness wrote: post #3

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

The problem with linux is that it is made and maintained by people who love linux. Until product people start getting involved, it's damned to it's eternal ~5% consumer market penetration.

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

#23

Post by ubermonkey » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

throwa356262 wrote: post #7

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

The key difference is that you do not need an Apple account to use a Mac.

Most people DO use one, though, because that's how you access the iCloud services that underpin the Apple ecosystem. But it's not MANDATORY.

My understanding is that you cannot even log into a Windows machine without an MSFT account. That's a big difference.

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

#24

Post by bushbaba » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

spandrew wrote: post #13

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 suck…

The neo is the Chromebook for education revolution. It’s cheap and better than 98%+ of windows laptops. I’d not be surprised to see further Mac penetration to the business sector

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

#25

Post by user432678 » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #22

ooterness wrote: post #3

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

The problem with linux is that it is made and maintained by people who love linux. Until product people start getting involved, it's damned to it's eternal ~5% consumer market penetration.

I actually hope “product people” won’t be involved as long as possible. “Product people” is mostly a reason of our current state of enshitification of most of the products. I would actually try my best to gatekeep.

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

#26

Post by freediddy » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

I have Windows and Mac PCs/laptops. I've used Windows since Windows 3.0, for 30+ years now. In the early 90s I invested in Windows NT 3.5 as a college student and learned how to use that over Windows 3.1 or OS/2. I attended the Windows 95 celebration in person. I almost went into becoming a Microsoft MCSE because it would have doubled my pay but went the programming route instead because I loved it more.

I'm still on Windows 10. Fuck you Microsoft for making Windows 11 worse than Windows 10. The simple fact I can't stop them from updating my Windows 10 machine and it reboots my machine makes me so angry that's one of the main reasons why I will never upgrade. Microsoft Recall is a non-starter for me, even though they made it "better".

If they force me to upgrade, I'll move entirely to Mac and install Linux on my current Windows desktop.

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

#27

Post by drewda » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

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…

FWIW I've been on a OS X for many years now, but I still miss keyboard shortcuts in Windows. So much more consistent across the operating system and applications...

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

#28

Post by keeda » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

lousken wrote: post #6

And they have not yelled when they were implementing it years ago? That sounds more like they were ok with it at the time and now they are seeing how much it actually backfired.

Alternatively, they yelled back then and were dismissed but now have some political ammo to push their case. I mean, if it was actually backfiring enough, they would not have to "fight" for it now, Windows PMs themselves would be scrambling to do it.

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

#29

Post by 999900000999 » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

spandrew wrote: post #13

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 suck…

The Neo is probably the best laptop for typical people.

I have an RTX 5070TI laptop. 95% I use it with Tumbleweed.

Unfortunately with work I don't have too much to play with LLM training and such.

The ultra poor person system is a used 200$ Thinkpad ( something about 2 years old) + your Linux distro of choice.

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

#30

Post by dahdum » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

You’ve always been able to install and use without an account (oobe\bypassnro). As long as power users and businesses can avoid it, they have no real incentive to change.