Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant’s lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows’ user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.
Hey, I have an idea that will help Microsoft:
why not add even more AI that logs everything and then reports it to the government through additional telemetry?
then they could even require the next edition to include a dedicated advertising GPU to take those logs and create tailored ads on the wallpaper as well as occasionally parse the logs and generate summaries for safety purposes!
that will bring the customers back and boost short-term profits too!
You mother fucker… You’re hired.
friendship ended with npu chips now ad-processing-unit chips are my best friend.
Sad thing is I guarantee they’d keep a majority market share after doing this. Few people would even be aware, and fewer still actually give a shit about their privacy. As for ads on the desktop, that might push people away… but then again, I had to practically force uBlock Origin down my friends’ throat after finding that they’ve had ads on YouTube for years and didn’t really care.
This is insane to me. How people can use the internet with ads is just beyond me.
And you wanna know the full hypocrisy? Google Chrome also comes with an Ad blocker, on by default. They block ads they don’t deem good, but allow all ads from AdSense, of course.
Perfect for when malware distributors host on Microsoft domains (Sharepoint?)… built-in ain’t blocking that enormous mess, sigh
My friend did have an adblock, but it was the one built into Brave (iirc) by default. I noticed they knew it was there and active, but didn’t really think twice about any of the sites it didn’t block ads on. I assume they just didn’t know it was possible to block certain ads, never really crossing their mind that some adblockers are better than others. No, if theirs can’t do it, no adblock can.
I also think years and years of unskippable commercials on cable TV, and now even streaming services, has made people kinda numb to it.
This is the terrifying part. Ads have become so normal in everyday life that people see nothing wrong with wasting their life away being marketed to by corporations. How much of someone’s life is wasted hearing their existence isn’t good enough but if they’d only buy some product they could be happy?
The Fifteen Million Merits episode of Black Mirror was supposed to be a warming.
But instead it seems corporations used it as a guide, and people just accepted having ads bombarded into their skulls in exchange for content, instead of getting enraged by it.
Yeah, that wouldn’t really do anything, google just announced it for gemini and I don’t really see a push back against it, meta wants to compromise the copy right of all creators on its platform and it too was allowed, sadly right now in the name of AI advancement every kind of privacy will be compromised