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.
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.
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)
Recently switch to Windows, and my feeling is the "Pro" moniker in the OS title has as much weight as in "iPhone Pro".
Under the hood there's price discrimination on the Hypervisor and other services that regular users wouldn't use, but there seems fundamentally to be no difference in the interface between the two versions of the OS.
I'd assume enterprise customers (the real "pros") will have their IT department deal with removing all the crap and adjusting the group policy so the experience is somewhat productive. So Microsoft doesn't have to care at all about "productivity", and is free to bombard users with all the crapware of the worlds as long as there's some remote way to disable it.
> I'd assume enterprise customers (the real "pros") will have their IT department deal with removing all the crap and adjusting the group policy so the experience is somewhat productive.
Ha ha ha. You know what happens when you "assume," right? I work for a Fortune 250 with 30K employees. We just "upgraded" the fleet at the start of the year. We're getting all the crap by default. It takes about 10 seconds for Edge to start and show the landing page with all of the stupid garbage. At least they NO LONGER prevent us from changing the start page on our browsers, and you can turn off the start menu crap. The only thing I can figure is that they got a discount on the licensing for leaving this stuff enabled. Like the general public, I assume that most people inside the company just live it.
I have Enterprise 11 on a non managed device and I can't really recognise many of the comments here. No news or pre-loaded spam apps. It's actually a pretty good experience.
Thanks, so it's really their segmentation of the market. I saw the Enterprise version of the Surface when buying mine, but didn't expect the internal OS was also different.
The price was pretty stiff, so it looks like I got priced out of the reasonable default experience.
Same for me. I have been using Windows 10 Pro on various laptops and I have never seen any ads or other kinds of bullshit. I always thought that these were only a thing in Windows home editions?
