Microsoft knows that the addition of adds to Windows, Recall, data mining, etc are not suicide. As far as tech news goes, Lemmy really exists in an echo chamber. The vast majority of us at least have some interest in technology. For the majority of the population, though, this isn’t true. The typical person sees a computer as a tool to be used for other things. They’re not reading articles about the latest release of Windows, new CPU technology, the latest GPU, etc. They’re using their computer, and when it’s time for an upgrade, they buy whatever suits their needs.

If I was to ask any of my family, or most of my coworkers, about any of the latest “controversies” surrounding Microsoft, they would have no idea what I was talking about. Microsoft obviously thinks that the added profits gained by monetizing their customers will offset the loss of 1% of their users that switch to Linux. They’re probably right, too.

I like Windows, personally (well, Windows 10 at least). My unofficial rule has always been if it needs a GUI, then it runs Windows, otherwise, it runs Linux as a headless machine. Once Windows 10 is no longer a viable option, my unofficial rule will be “it runs Linux.” Most people will not make this switch.

The problem with big companies like Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, etc is that once all the smart & creative people have gone, all you have left are the “line must always go up” business idiots, who have no idea what their company even does or how to fix it.

CoPilot / Recall is exactly the kind of End-stage, “let’s screw our customers to death” idea the CEOs come up with before just their company implodes. Seriously. No one at Microsoft has thought this through beyond “data mining our customers.”

How are other governments going to react to this? Will they trust their nation’s secrets to an OS with such a blatant backdoor built into it? How does this “feature” work with search warrant requests? How secure can a database connected to an always-on Internet connection possibly be?

The HIPAA concerns are very alarming. And I agree with the spirit if the article. However, I’m not sure the article is correct when it says Recall cannot be disabled. I’ve already seen other articles telling you how to turn it off. The fact that it’s opt-out and not opt-in is a huge issue, though.

Microsoft makes its money with Azure and M365 licenses for enterprise customers now.
Windows as a consumer operating system is a loss leader. The only reason it still exists is to breed familiarity with the MS ecosystem in all future employees.
This strategy works until a certain amount of really big businesses do the math and find out how many millions they can save each month by throwing their weight behind a Linux-based solution. Luckily for Microsoft, most CEOs and CTOs of these major corporations are forced by the shareholders to prioritize short term profit.
Rebuilding your infra and retraining your entire staff on a new ecosystem would be really expensive in the short term, even if it pays off in 5-10 years. And a high one-time cost is always harder to justify than a monthly amount that’s already budgeted into your operating costs and product prices.
So it’s still safer to stick to what you know, for now.

By the way, MS hasn’t been fighting against Linux for a long time.
They’re among the top contributers to the kernel, integrated Linux into Windows as a subsystem, run their own Azure backend on Linux servers, and post help articles on how to install Linux.

Because CoPilot+ is purportedly trained on what users actually do, it looked plausible to someone in marketing at Microsoft that it could deliver on “help the users get stuff done”. Unfortunately, human beings assume that LLMs are sentient and understand the questions they’re asked, rather than being unthinking statistical models that cough up the highest probability answer-shaped object generated in response to any prompt, regardless of whether it’s a truthful answer or not.

Hehehe.

Corporations must generate growth to please their investors no matter what. If the CEO doesn’t do it the board members will replace him with someone who will.

Microsoft cannot significantly generate growth by increasing their user base by making a more attractive product anymore. They have maxed out their share of the market. So they must pursue other ways to generate “growth”, like data mining their customers to generate an additional source of income.

In this kind of situation you will see all sorts undesirable behaviors emerge from corporations like that, like lowering the quality of their products or cutting down on their workforce to “reduce cost” event though they are already turning a profit.

We will see this shit happen over and over again until we come up with a solution to this “infinite growth” problem.

I feel like the headline and all these comments have WAAAAAYYYYY too much faith in the technical savvy and/or privacy concerns of the average pc user. They are not committing suicide. They know that a very small minority will be upset by recall and AI but the vast majority don’t know enough to care and definitely won’t take the time to learn about why they should care.

Microsoft wants to lock up business dollars while the AI feeding frenzy is still fresh.

They do not care about any other markets or segments, which is why their products are getting so bad so fast for literally everyone else.

They really are screwing it up. I’ve long been a proponent of dual booting. Yes I spend 99% of my time in linux, but I’ve always kept a windows drive going for the things that I’m just too lazy to get working. RGB lights, nicehash miner, exact audio copy, my aio cooler’s nzxt software for its blingy screen, the very off chance game that’s got a couple of glitches.

But like now, I don’t even want that OS on my PC. Even sitting on a drive that I hardly ever boot from. I view my password vault and it takes a screenshot of my credentials? Does it grab my bitcoin wallet too? At what point does windows 11 start scanning my local files simply because I booted the OS? When does it start scanning my other drives and OSs?

They just can’t be trusted anymore. And the fact that I’m actively solving the above mentioned pains in Linux and actively working to deleting the dual boot win11 os…. Well… when lazy people start doing work against you - you’ve screwed yourself.

Suddenly every PC becomes a target for Discovery during legal proceedings. Lawyers can subpoena your Recall database and search it, no longer being limited to email but being able to search for terms that came up in Teams or Slack or Signal messages, and potentially verbally via Zoom or Skype if speech-to-text is included in Recall data.

Discovery includes personal devices too, btw.

I never thought I’d see one of Charlie’s blogs posted around Lemmy unless it was about his books. Good to see him getting some recognition.

there’s no 5 year plan, it’s 5 one year plans in a trench coat.

wow haven’t seen antipope in a long time

They need to stop polishing a turd. It was a great OS when it was windows 98, but at this point they’ve just tried to shove so much iOS and Linux into it that it’s a shadow of its former self.

They need a shadow team to make a new product that isn’t windows and is basically just a kde Linux distro.

They are too big and the corporate contracts are too ingrained in society. They won’t lose anything meaningful over these terrible anti-consumer decisions because they don’t care about individual consumers. As long as the bigger ticket contracts are in place, their income is totally safe.