No, they didn’t. This community read too much into a blog post that stated “over 1 billion,” compared it against an old blog post from several years ago that stated a more precise number of “1.4 billion” and came to the hasty conclusion that they must have lost 400 million users.

Microsoft has since updated their blog post to clarify that it’s now “over 1.4 billion.”

Edit: downvotes, really? Can’t even correct misinformation in this community anymore?

Thanks for providing insights and inviting a more nuanced discussion. I find it extremely frustrating that in communities like Lemmy it’s risky to write comments like this because people assume you’re “taking sides.”

The entire point of the community should be to have discourse about a topic and go into depth, yet most comments and indeed entire threads are just “Nvidia bad!” with more words.

Obligatory disclaimer that I, too, don’t necessarily side with Nvidia.

Yes, indeed this was just a copy error. Thanks for pointing it out.

The linked Reuters article provides a bit more context:

The jury agreed with the plaintiffs that Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), was liable for sending and receiving information from the devices without permission while they were idle, causing what the lawsuit had called “mandatory and unavoidable burdens shouldered by Android device users for Google’s benefit.”

[…]

Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement that the company would appeal, and that the verdict “misunderstands services that are critical to the security, performance, and reliability of Android devices.”

Let me get this straight: your position on this is that the issue is only worth even talking about when on average, each American experiences a shooting at least once? Or are you just making small talk?

I still have fond memories of using Ubuntu. At the time, it must have been 2009 or so, I was working at a company developing desktop software for Windows, OS X and Debian. It’d be so confusing to constantly switch between operating systems because it’d mess with my muscle memory, but Ubuntu was my favorite because of POSIX and the fantastic file manager.

For my purposes and from my experience, things have improved tremendously on Windows, despite it being popular to hate upon. I still frequently use Mac as well and it’s really hardly changed at all. I confess that I only ever use Fedora on a remote instance for very specific purposes and can’t really judge it fairly on day-to-day usage.

Push notifications though GMS don’t use the device ID; they use a generated GCM registration ID that occasionally rotates. Who knows what Google uses internally to associate GCM reg IDs to users, but to overly state that it uses device IDs is simply not correct.

I’m not suggesting push notifications are inherently secure because it’s impossible to make that determination from the outside. But their assessment is incorrect and the same privacy concerns apply to Apple.

I distinctly recall a version of Ubuntu that not only showed search results, but Amazon shopping links.

The topic is windows losing customers.

To a degree yes (ignoring the fact that assumption proved to be incorrect, but who comes here for facts), however the comments mostly don’t focus on that topic; much of the discussion here is about how evil Microsoft is and malicious Windows is as a product. The individual I replied to before you was the one who immediately sidestepped into a debate about laws that should restrict Microsoft’s ability to operate as a company.

People here are outliers in ideas and passion.

Ha, this genuinely made me laugh out loud! An amusingly and refreshingly optimistic position! I’d have chosen the words “circlejerk of pessimisme, hate and nativity” but it’s certainly accurate to call the community exceptionally passionate among each other.

It’s ironic that the only comment in this thread suggesting government action is your response. Lemmy is an echo chamber no better than the internet communities that predate it. The only thing Lemmy truly hates, is a nuanced opinion.

I wonder if consumers would choose to pay more to opt out of this. Surely corporations have done their research, because none of them have chosen to offer a buy-out option. To be perfectly frank, I wouldn’t pay more for a laptop for a guarantee that I’m not prompted for any up-sells, and it’d only make the consumer offerings more confusing if such an option existed.

All these companies are forcing themselves into the corner of offering the one-time fee to be as low as possible, preferably free, and find other revue channels after the purchase. I hold them all equally guilty of this: why pay $100 for Windows when there’s no such fee for a Chromebook or MacBook? Microsoft is forced by competition to reduce the fee and recoup it elsewhere, and they’re in my opinion not even the worst among those examples.

It’s odd that Lemmy directs its anger at an individual company, while they’re all guilty of the same practices, instead of towards their government representatives who are actually able to take action against it.

Kindly reference the sections where I’ve provided misinformation and I will add a correction.

I see my comment about advertising and will clarify it.

You’re right that Edge routinely attempts to make its return—that’s annoying alright. Microsoft is skirting a fine line here since they were found guilty of antitrust practices for this very thing. (Tangentially, I wonder if iPhone users have the same complaints about Safari.) In Europe, at least, those updates prompt you whether to make the switch, and the user remains in control. It’s been many years since Microsoft changed my defaults.

You’re also absolutely right about the attempted upsells for Office 365 or OneDrive or whatever. I agree they’re ads and that they’re annoying, but not more so than how my MacBook constantly nags me about iCloud or how iPhone consumes it with app data, or how Google leverages its surfaces for Photos, Drive, Workspace and Gemini upsells.

In the end all these companies arrive at the same challenge: converting a one-time purchase into regular payments through subscription models. I had honestly forgotten about these prompts until you reminded me of them, and so long as they’re irregular and easy to ignore, I feel like Microsoft isn’t doing anything outright awful.

I often think communities like Lemmy choose to disproportionately hate on things. In this case it’s Windows, which I really don’t think is warranted.

I reviewed the community rules and didn’t see anything about Europe, so I’m left confused about what I’ve done wrong.

I didn’t mean to have upset you as I wasn’t aware that European users weren’t allowed to comment here. I only ever meant to speak to my own experiences and not on behalf of anybody else.

The results are honestly pretty spot on, at least for my use cases, and this isn’t different from how Chromebooks or MacOS does it (although for the latter, Spotlight results are hilariously terrible). Even Linux distros often combine on-device and online search results—are those also advertisements? I’m puzzled why Windows is called out in particular on this.

Yes, I probably use this hundreds of times a day! This is a perfect example of something missing from Mac that requires an App Store purchase to fix—same for better window management. I suppose Apple prefers this situation because it allows them to both monetize on a lackluster OS and avoid making investments to fix anything.

My personal experience with Windows has been different. I’ve not seen advertising in Windows; where have you seen that?* I’m a bit shocked about Microsoft spying on me, too. Do you have any sources on that? It feels like that should be illegal in Europe and would make headlines.

I don’t use desktop office software and haven’t purchased any desktop software in probably a decade. My business makes heavy use of Google Workspace and uses online services that are agnostic to the operating system. The only things I’m really installing on my machine are developer tools through apt-get and games through Steam.

*) Edit: Windows periodically prompts to use Edge or subscribe to Office 365; I had forgotten about that because it’s perhaps less frequent here in Europe.

I know everybody’s here to rag on Microsoft, but I honestly am quite pleased with Windows 11. I comfortably do software development in an Ubuntu shell using the Widows Subsystem for Linux and it honestly works like a charm. Then I can unplug and play video games in Steam and everything works great, there, too.

Of course this is all possible on Linux, but my point here is that Windows really isn’t as awful as everybody makes it out to be.

Meanwhile, MacOS enters into a second decade of no innovation. It still relies on Homebrew for developer tools, still lacks any substantial improvements to Xcode and only ever receives iterative cosmetic changes like video lock screens and the new bundle of desktop backgrounds for its latest “update.”

Funny, I was just reading comments in another thread about people with mental health problems proclaiming how terrific it is. Especially concerning is how they had found value in the recommendations LLMs make and “trying those out.” One of the commenters described themselves as “neuro diverse” and was acting upon “advice” from generated LLM responses.

And for something like depression, this is deeply bad advice. I feel somewhat qualified to weigh in on it as somebody who has struggled severely with depression and managed to get through it with the support of a very capable therapist. There’s a tremendous amount of depth and context to somebody’s mental condition that involves more deliberate probing to understand than stringing together words until it forms sentences that mimic human interactions.

Let’s not forget that an LLM will not be able to raise alarm bells, read medical records, write prescriptions or work with other medical professionals. Another thing people often forget is that LLMs have maximum token lengths and cannot, by definition, keep a detailed “memory” of everything that’s been discussed.

It’s is effectively self-treatment with more steps.