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Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news

(www.tomshardware.com)
1725 points taubek | 1 comments | 27 Mar 23 05:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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AraceliHarker ◴[27 Mar 23 06:20 UTC] No.35323471[source]▶
Microsoft has a funny way of selling us ‘productivity’ with Windows 11. On one side of the screen, they promise us a sleek and smooth user experience that will make our work easier and faster. On the other side, they bombard us with widgets full of celebrity gossip and sports trivia that have nothing to do with our lives. What’s the point of that? Are they trying to distract us from our work or from their work? Maybe if Windows 11 were free, we could forgive them for their sneaky attempts to get us hooked on Bing. But no, they want us to pay 200 dollars for this dubious privilege. How are we supposed to feel about that? Grateful? Impressed? Satisfied? I don’t think so.
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Veen ◴[27 Mar 23 07:01 UTC] No.35323683[source]▶
Presumably, the teams who develop the OS do want to give us a smooth user experience and help us to be productive and efficient. But between us and them are other teams tasked with extracting the maximum value from Windows users and increasing engagement with Microsoft's shittier services.

The same thing happens in web development. The developers and designers of news sites don't want to create an unusable mess of ads and auto-playing videos, but the business development guys love that shit.

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1. hkatx ◴[27 Mar 23 19:24 UTC] No.35331134[source]▶
There is a viral clip of Lebron James saying he doesn't pay for spotify premium. If a multi millionaire can justify going through the friction of the free software, you can argue masses feel the same way. An app/service with frictionless UX that requires subscription/fees is just going have a very small percentage of users. A developer/small team may be content with that, but VC funded outfits are advised and need to have a massive growth of user to justify further rounds. So the app/service has to be free with ads/other dark patterns to boost engagement/revenue. (exceptions that come to mind are netflix but even they have an ad tier now)