Microsoft mulls cheap PCs supported by ads, subs In a world where global sales of PCs are declining and more work is shifting to the cloud, what can the maker of the world's ubiquitous operating system do to keep money coming in? For Microsoft, part of the answer might lie in low-cost, cloud-connected systems paid for through subscriptions and ads. We know, we know. A lot …
It WILL be hacked / cracked within days, and an attempt made to install a new, genuinely free (and advert-free) OS. You all know the one I mean. Watch El Reg to find out how to as soon as someone has worked it out. MS's only hope is to make it self destruct as soon as any significant changes to the OS are spotted, which ought to be simple enough when all the useful functionality will be in the cloud which MS will own and control. As other posters have said above, just more MS landfill...
C'mon little mouse - there's some nice fresh cheese in the mousetrap. I promise it won't hurt ........ to start with.
Welcome to our new, improved, rentier capitalism - You pay even more to rent what you have "purchased"!
Cheap PCs subsidised by ads only work if you can only use them with the delivered software. So these machines will have to be Pluton'ed to the max to ensure only the Microsoft cloud client OS will run - no sneaky Linux install for you!
So when the sub runs out, or they "expire', many will just get chucked out.
One of the main reasons ad supported PCs don't work, exactly as you say, is that if they don't suck people will strip them to remove the adware.
Or they are terrible hardware, and are miserable and useless in all cases. Those have almost no useful service live and will form the geographic strata in the landfills over all the netbooks and then Chromebooks. All over the basement layer of the e-machines that should still be the cautionary tale here.
This idea doesn't work. The math doesn't add up, and it won't. Because the company that makes the hardware can just sell the same machine sans crapware at a better price. There are also too many other stakeholders you have to deal with that will drain most of the profit off the top. Tech support costs eat up whatever's left, and how well are people going to treat these things. You wind up with nothing but a pile of toxic liabilities, including a literal hill of ewaste.
The only people that are in a market position to do something like this are a company like Nvidia, and only by doing something like releasing a version of one of their new GPUs that forces adware for a year(Technically MORE adware, as their POS driver already has an ad sever built in). It would trash their brand even more though, and is still a terrible idea in the long run.
It's a piece of cake for Microsoft. They solved this a long time ago by penalizing OEMs. If they sell their hardware without Windows, the Windows licenses become automatically more expensive. This is why even today you can't order a naked (with a blank disk drive) PC/laptop from any major OEM. They will rather charge you a Windows licence anyway so they can report a MS license sold and it's up to you the erase the pre-installed OS.
If you look at the global support pages of the major OEMs you'll find they have non-windows SKU's
Just because the US/UK/Western Europe accepts a market where a non-windows machine is limited or hard to buy, that isn't true everywhere. Your friendly search site and PC manufacture website doing their hardest to make sure you land on their local region helps with the charade.
Off the top of my head, HP, Dell, Lenovo, not 100% about Acer + Asus all have SKUs with FreeDOS and Windows versions of the same hardware. This isn't 1 or 2 specific models, this is a wide range of their models. HP, for example, do this for all-in-ones, mini pcs, desktops and laptops including their Omen Gaming brand.
The public voted with their wallet and the corporations sell what people will buy.
The Western world has been a sucker for a long time, accepting what the corporations decide/steamroll/lobby and if no government/regulatory body stops it, the general public just pay the extra.
This goes way back, not just in PCs either, while the music/video industry was demonising divx dvd players and mp3s in the western world, those same companies were shipping dvd players with divx support and even retailing mp3 filled CDs of their albums on shelf beside regular CD versions.
This could be true if MS produced a well designed OS, rather than buggy, rushed out messes to try and capture markets first. If the OS receives regular updates, which it will have to because MS, the likelihood of brickage becomes very high. And the vulnerability that lets you install Linux only has to be discovered once.
Chromebooks let you install either Linux extensions, or full Linux because Google realised that somebody was going to find a way sooner or later if they tried to defeat it. If the "cheap" adware PC is genuinely cheap, rather than just a bit cheaper than a standard laptop, this will happen quite quickly to the MS machine.
Of course, they wouldn't have to try and prevent this if they genuinely believed that they were offering something better that nobody would want to replace.
I suspect that adverts will appear on a scheduled basis - every ten minutes, for the sake of argument. Then, when they run out of adverts, it'll be "why not buy Microsoft 365?" or "have you considered the merits of 1TB in OneDrive?".
A kind of "we've been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty" for the Windows 11 age...
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"Be the master of your own data! New windows 25 , will store your data locally to ensure you have instant access to it when its needed regardless of your internet connection and cloud subscriptions.
Dont rely on other people to store your data for you... store it locally and work on it locally.
Followed a few years later with windows 33.1 with new local network abilities for when you need to talk to your colleagues...
etc etc etc in an ever depressing cycle
oh and I missed out the GUI changes in every version....
More like Windows 12 build 35718.6167394_ww_release and Windows 12 build 57274.16828_za_release 35H2 Insider Build.
Or whatever genius versioning scheme they end up following, now that their versioning postmodernism has killed any meaningfulness of the version and build numbers.
I'm as appalled by everyone else by this idea, but it just might work, at least in selected markets. After all, it's the same idea behind crappy entry level Android phones subsidized by ad-slinging bloatware. They are lousy phones that give a lousy experience, yet at least where I live most buyers go for those.
Around the turn of the century, there were a few vendors doing this same thing - cheap PCs, subsidized by advertising on the desktop. It was a dismal failure then, and it'll be a dismal failure - one hopes! - this time round.
Of course back then, as someone above alluded to, there wasn't the likes of Pluton and TPM and SecureBoot to ensure that the PC only booted what makes the vendor moneythe best, most exciting software optimized for the user with carefully selected premium offers...
The icon is because I think I just threw up a little on my keyboard typing that last phrase.
I live in a country where off-lease laptops aren't a thing because laptop leases aren't a thing anyway, and at the same time, laptops get used until they die (in order to save costs), so the secondhand market consists of used consumer-class laptops and grey-market imported business-class ones. And taxes are high, so importing is only an option for those who travel often or have connections to officers at customs.
Bad times ahead.
Windows OS's can't run on low-spec hardware. For that, they'll need to use an OS that isn't bloated and runs well in limited resources.
The irony: MS will wind up selling boxes that can only run *nix. Shame they'll be tightened up to /only/ run their modified *nix but even so.
The advert server provides tokens to indicate the amount of advertising watched. Don't have a sufficient number of tokens? The machine stops doing useful things...
...would be an easy way to get around simply blocking the adverts elsewhere.
My opinion on this is that it is an ever depressing part of the capitalist attempt to normalise constant in-half-face advertising. To hell with all of that shit.
Even better, utilise the gaze-tracking feature they borrowed from phones in 2017:
https://www.theregister.com/2017/08/02/microsoft_to_bring_eye_control_to_windows_10/
If the sensors don't record you actually watching the advert, then no token for you! Want to start a program? Watch this advert (we'll know if you look away) and answer a few simple questions about it before you proceed.
The future sounds ghastly.
One wonders how easily that could be defeated by having the proxy on the Pi-Hole "watch" those ads for you, and forward on the tokens. To M$, the Pi-Hole pretends to be the machine, and to the machine, it pretends to be M$. Some trusting of certificates may be required on the machine...
I suspect that their "direct to cloud devices" will simply run just enough to connect to a remote virtual machine (hosted somewhere on azure) with anything plugged into usb ports etc automatically passed through to the VM.
of course with the need to run windows (or anything more than a VM client) the architecture of these devices wouldn't need to be x86 based or very powerful since all it's really doing is streaming video & audio.
they will probably end up being something very like the Steam Link boxes (which from memory were Arm7 based)
Yeah because people who are poor are also gonna pay to be online all the time. Great plan Microsoft, is not like let's say some places llike the USA have ridiculous internet prices or the internet speed varies depending in what place you are connecting or who your provider is, or people won't hack the things or if they are too underpowered and need to be online all the time, just buy a cheap PC or laptop instead.
Clippy here. It looks like you are trying to get your financial forecast spreadsheet done by the end of the day, but allow me to show you this new electric toothbrush, it not only cleans your teeth but you can use it to scratch your ears and remove unsightly nose hair for the low low price of £200. <clicks CANCEL>. Thank you for your order, it will be despatched within 24 hours. Have you also considered the latest Karcher electric kitchen mop...
The non-singing part of me is just pointing out the Wheel of Reincarnation definition from the Jargon file:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html
The Singing part of me is blasting "The Circle of Life" from The Lion King at full volume, though...
The rest of me just wants a drink.
Maybe my memories are foggy, but isn't this similar to what MS tried with eMachines and MSN/MSNBC back in the mid-to-late 90's? ISTR there was a substantial cost reduction or rebate on the purchase of a shitty eMachine desktop if the buyer signed up for an MSN subscription. That didn't work out too well long term (or did it?) But the future is just the past in reverse, so let's try it again.
The same thing was done with AOL subscriptions. I kept pointing out to customers the difference between the "free" machines and ones that could be upgraded (Ram, CPU, hard drive, etc). Also, you paid more for the AOL in the subscription mode that if you signed up using the thousands of AOL disks you got each year in the mail and magazines (you got one every week in the Sunday newspaper). At the end of the subscription you had paid enough to buy a better computer and monitor and still get on AOL.
Note: On the "free" computers, RAM, CPU, and almost everything else was soldered onto the motherboard. No upgrades, no repair if something went wrong.
Amazon doesn't make profits on hardware Kindle sales to begin with - the real earner is the ebook side of the business.
Also, I've anecdotally heard that Amazon customer support will remove the Special Offers on a Kindle if it's your first one. Haven't verified it personally, but might be worth the $20 in savings. If not, just use it without Wi-Fi.
well, one option to lower the cost is buy decent 2nd hand one (or whatever they call 2nd hand these days). I got one for something like 30 usd a few years back, and though I hate amazon for many reasons, I never had to go through steps to set it up with mandatory amazon account and it ticked happily for a few years, until I misplaced it. I was about to splash out on 100usd / gbp / eur kindle kids variant (forgot what it's called, but with larger screen, etc.), but then I found my old, long-dead kobo glow, I recharged and... it works. Yes, looks terrible, with 'screen holes' and physical buttons half-gone (don't know how this happened!), but those buttons just remind me about why I hated kidle so much in the first place.
reminds me of that episode where Time Computers offered a free PC to anyone who took out a two-year subscription to Supanet, their in-house ISP.
In fact it was an attempt to get rid of their unsellable stocks of IBM / Cyrix 333 processors - remember those? The ones which actually ran a lot slower with funny jumper multipliers which made them overheat and crash.
Turned into a money black hole as they all had to be replaced by setups using AMD 475 processors and new motherboards
Do I want Windows 11? No thank you.
Do I want Windows with adverts? Really NO and NO!
Windows 10 may not be perfect, but it's become (almost by default) a mature and stable OS*.
I'd really like a decent Linux (such as Mint) to become more of a competitor, but (for me) this won't happen until the basic user unfriendliness of the printing system / options is sorted out - but that's probably just me!
*Yes, ok, I know stability is a relative, even a subjective, term, but my Win 10 is behaving itself...
Flooding the PC with ads is likely to degrade its performance. Then there's the fact Windows is a performance hog anyway. If you tried running this OS and software on a low-end machine it'd probably freeze up almost immediately. If you put it on a mid-range PC it's going to perform like a low-end machine at best. MS would have to pay the hardware vendors to get them to sell it at a price point where people might buy it, and possibly pay them quite a lot.
It seems like a risky venture.
Every time somebody suggests any service or product could be ad supported (either in terms of discount or being absolutely free) there are always people who say it will never work or that people will never put up with it. Except of course the available evidence proves otherwise.
While there are people who wouldn't put up with it there are others who will. I remember when ads started on youtube, so many people predicted that the service would be consigned to the history books within weeks. Not only did it not happened, but the incidence of advertising on youtube is getting higher and higher. Of course you can pay to get rid of the ads but very few people do. The same applies to many apps and services. Sure you can pay to make the ads go away, but who does?
Most social media is littered with ads and people put up with it.
And of course TV in most territories has always been ad supported. Even in the UK when people were used to ad free TV there were plenty of people who said that "commercial" TV would never catch on, but it did.
Yes there are plenty of people who would balk at the idea of an ad supported PC, but if the discount is big enough I'm sure there will be plenty of takers.
The fact that YT is forcing more and more ads into videos, and most people's response is "FUCK OFF ADS" might kind-of indicate that this model isn't as successful as they would like you to think. Those buying the ad space might start to ask whether pissing people off too much might tarnish their brand, rather than promote it.
Except of course that the evidence of a long history of ad supported services would tend to disagree with that.
Advertising works. I'm not sure why this is the case. Advertising has seldom had any effect on me. If I want to buy something I go and look for it.
A lot of people dislike advertisements but put up with them. There are a three main reasons for this. Firstly because often there is no alternative. Secondly people will tolerate ads if the alternative is to pay to make them go away. And finally people become desensitised to advertising. The latter seems to be what has happened with YT. When ads first arrived on the platform people would do everything they could (except pay money) to avoid them, but most folks seem desensitized now.
Lets see what the uptake is for the ad supported version of Netflix. When it was first announced most people who commented said it would never fly. It will be interesting to see if those predictions were correct.
Adblock is running on my chromebook and I prefer it to my much more expensive Windows laptop. I only started my Windows laptop yesterday after months for a Windows only app. I needed to use.
Adblock probably won't give you undisturbed browsing pleasure on this Windows device.
This device may spur people in to cloud based solutions but they probably won't be Office365 based.
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