Does this give Microsoft access to AT&T call data?
Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business
41–50 of 153 posts
Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business
#42Microsoft 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…
I feel it's strange that this kind of hyperbolic response to a network adapter driver bug is considered normal discourse.
I dont know that its hyperbolic to be irritated that MS couldnt get an upgrade right on their own hardware, especially when it was installed by the use of dark patterns.
Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business
#43Earlier 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.
> but anyone in between is going to be doing a LOT of pasting incantations they don't understand into terminal windows.
This thinking is really obsolete and couching everything as grandma or graybeards is really ageist, anyway. Last I looked, you have to do this on Mac more often than I'd like. On Windows, it's open up CMD as administrator and paste this command or download and install this little app and run it (that does God knows what as administrator).
Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business
#44All big tech companies have a problem: once you are on top, growth is hard to do by innovating and having a superior, more useful product. It's easier to acquire other businesses and find ways to leverage your existing customer base. MS has been great for the last couple of years because they were doing the hard thing and innovating (playing nice with open source, VS Code, etc...). Eventually, though it's easier, and lower risk to just leverage the customer base.
Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer isn't microtransactions. Even if you solve the payment problem, Microtransactions involves huge amounts of new friction and creating an entirely new selling process and method. I think the answer is in federation and mutually owned infrastructure. People are comfortable paying Netflix/Hulu/Crunchyroll $10-15 per month. They don't have to worry about "do I want to watch this episode enough to spend 45 cents…
How is federation the solution? Federation isn’t free to setup or manage and so now you’re back to square one. It’s funny that you use Netflix as an example because that’s what they originally tried to do and it didn’t work.
It solves the "how do we make non-ad-supported content palatable for consumers." Federation ensures that there's a big enough pool of content that you won't say "I don't know if this is worth $20 per month" or "I'll subscribe for one month and binge-consume everything, then cancel."
Yes, it involves customized billing and account infrastructure, but if you set things up properly, the cost of the infrastructure should be less than the revenue it provides. If the federated content creators, in turn, fund a "captive" development and maintenance team to supply things at cost, it may well be cheaper than leasing off-the-shelf solutions.
Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is federation the solution? Federation isn’t free to setup or manage and so now you’re back to square one. It’s funny that you use Netflix as an example because that’s what they originally tried to do and it didn’t work.
It solves the "how do we make non-ad-supported content palatable for consumers." Federation ensures that there's a big enough pool of content that you won't say "I don't know if this is worth $20 per month" or "I'll subscribe for one month and binge-consume everything, then cancel." Yes, it involves customized billing and account infrastructure, but if you set things up properly, the cost of the infrastructure should…
My point is that only large content producers would even entertain such a thing to begin with, and among those the largest will just spin-off and do their own thing.
If you're a YouTuber why would you even deal with any of that vs. just continuing to upload on YouTube?
Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business
#47Why? 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 Edge push This is one area I give MS a pass. Google engaged in aggressive Chrome pushing for years, people seem to forget now that it’s so ubiquitous they don’t really need to anymore. It’s good someone is fighting back. Especially since, while I much prefer Firefox, Edge is actually decent.
I still remember their ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0
But Chrome had a clear advantage those days compared to other solutions
Microsoft's value proposition? PDF users and memory consumption?
Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business
#48Why? 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 Edge push This is one area I give MS a pass. Google engaged in aggressive Chrome pushing for years, people seem to forget now that it’s so ubiquitous they don’t really need to anymore. It’s good someone is fighting back. Especially since, while I much prefer Firefox, Edge is actually decent.
The issue with edge is the underlying browser engine is still chromium. The only reason I use Firefox over something like brave or edge is because I’m trying to advocate against a monopoly chromium browser engine.
Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business
#49Microsoft 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…
I must admit Windows just doesn't know what they are supposed to do.
UWP, .NET Native and C++/CX just tanked due to their mismanagement, and having burned the few believers with what are now about 5 rewrites since Windows 8 was introduced plus having dropped the .NET Native and C++/CX toolchains.
Forget about.WinUI 3.0, it is so messed up that Windows 11 still needs to rely on UWP and WinUI 2.x, despite being "deprecated".
Then we have tons of GUI tooling PMs, each selling their own stack, and every couple of months the faces on community calls keep changing.
There are surely some big fires happening in. Redmond and they keep carrying water buckets hoping to make it right.
Specially since it appears the lack of love between WinDev and DevDiv never went away.
The forces that won over Longhorn have managed to completely mess up WinRT and aren't doing any better with the Project Reunion endeavours.
Anyone that is bored during the season festivities can browse the GitHub issues for WinUI, AppSDK, cppwinrt and a bunch of other ones connected to them.
Re: Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business
#50Fundamentally it's just difficult to maintain the modern internet without advertising. You have content creators busting their backs with millions of hours of video and content for free, and hosted for free. Obviously there needs to be a way for all of that to be paid for. Whether due to income equality, laziness, greed or something else, the vast majority of people aren't going to engage in micro transactions.
The answer isn't microtransactions. Even if you solve the payment problem, Microtransactions involves huge amounts of new friction and creating an entirely new selling process and method. I think the answer is in federation and mutually owned infrastructure. People are comfortable paying Netflix/Hulu/Crunchyroll $10-15 per month. They don't have to worry about "do I want to watch this episode enough to spend 45 cents…
This sounds like what Nebula is attempting to do. A streaming service owned and run by the content creators. https://nebula.app/
No affiliation