Comment by userbinator

Comment by userbinator a day ago

7 replies

There's a huge difference between antitrust concerns, and mass surveillance and anti-user hostility. MS' business back then was to sell software, not monetise users.

leptons a day ago

You don't think Microsoft is doing mass surveillance? They own Outlook and Teams, and Windows 11 is quickly turning into a platform for training AI on your data. I doubt Edge is going to be much different. It's the reason I'm switching to Linux.

  • userbinator a day ago

    They started going down that route many years ago now (Windows 10 "telemetry" being a critical inflection point), but the Microsoft of the 80s and 90s and even early 2000s was not about mass surveillance but selling software.

    • aspenmayer a day ago

      Perhaps you’re right, but by the time Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1997, MSN was already two years old and had its own dialup service. Microsoft knew what they were doing.

      • twilo a day ago

        Yes but like the post above says MS didn’t start to “monetize” their users until the 2000s and it was mainly because Google set up that beautiful business model… on top of Microsoft’s platform (Windows) which makes the whole thing really funny