Comment by observationist
3 months ago
Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.
If Microsoft can't do it, if Apple, Google, Facebook, X , OpenAI can't do it, then maybe we shouldn't allow companies to operate at scales which inevitably lead to widespread consumer harm.
They should be required to provide human customer service, with some sort of legal liability to ensure their products perform as advertised, without an end-user having to spend tens or hundreds of hours chasing down a solution, spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer, and all the rest of the hassle.
This is a legislation and regulation issue - the data barons are exploiting the effective absence of any accountability for harms they casually inflict on the public, ranging from gotcha situations like the OP to viral self harm trends among kids to mass surveillance and commercial invasion of privacy.
Pirate everything, support open source, pay content creators directly.
If they want to have billions of users, they damn well better be able to handle each and every one of those users in a commercially responsible fashion, or they have no business operating at that scale. We should be done with the "oops, we're too big and we make too much money to care that we just casually wrecked your life, oh well!" If the solution is to force users to have to buy a new PC, or a new phone, or create a new account, or anything in that vein, it's almost intentional, and casually malicious.
It's not like these companies don't know what they're doing, they can simply afford not to care. Until there's regulation and accountability that's more expensive than ignoring the consumer casualties, things will continue to get worse.
> Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.
The best way to do that would be for all the governments and large corporations that buy Windows machines for their employees to switch to Linux. That would probably end up cheaper in the long run. But nobody wants to sign up to be the one driving the switch.
Unless and until that happens, the unfortunate fact for individual Windows users is that you're rounding error in MS's numbers anyway. You're not the one they're making all the money from. The large government and corporate accounts are. And as long as people have to use Windows at work, they're going to use Windows at home because it's familiar to them. (Except for outliers like me who run Linux at home even though we have to use Windows at work. But those outliers are rounding error to the rounding error.)
> That would probably end up cheaper in the long run. But nobody wants to sign up to be the one driving the switch.
If memory serves, the French government (and various French municipalities) have been actively moving to Linux since the early 2000s. The French police even have their own Linux distribution, GendBuntu [1].
And yes, the reported cost savings are around 40% [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
[2]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/french-police-move-from-window...
That just ends with everyone back in the same boat. Serious enterprises will still need OS support and no one is anywhere near prepared to challenge Microsoft for OS support contracts whether they be Linux, Windows, or otherwise.
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They should have gone with GendArch as it kinda makes more sense than GendBuntu.
No, the best way would be to have legislation and regulation that mandates that level of service.
"Voting with your wallet" cannot solve every issue, and that's never been more true than today. Rampant hyperconsolidation means that there are no longer enough companies providing these products and services to have any real hope of being able to just switch to one that does what you need. Furthermore, even if you can find a solution that lets you stop giving them money—like switching to Linux—those solutions are not sufficient for the vast majority of people and institutions, and there's no way for enough to switch to actually hurt the megacorporations.
And even if it did start to hurt them, what do you think would happen? They'd say "oh, our bad, we'll be real nicey-nice now!"?
No; they'd flex their money muscles and find ways to make sure those institutional customers switched back.
The only ways to solve these problems are a) better regulations mandating an acceptable level of service and customer protection, and b) serious antitrust with real teeth. Break 'em up.
Unfortunately, neither of those are going to happen in the current political...situation.
Apple has customer service you can call and speak to a person.
Apple offers tech support via FaceTime for people who require a sign language interpreter.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/101572
They are the polar opposite of Microsoft and Google when it comes to providing customer support.
I had the iPhone 3G back in 2008 and only had Android phones after that. Until 2020. But when trying to log into my old Apple account, it was asking for answers to security questions I’ve never setup because they weren’t a thing in 2008. After calling Apple support, my problem went up the ladder until someone called me and told me the way to do it. Try that with Google.
Your Apple tax dollars at work.
No, really. They're not perfect, and as time goes on I keep agonizing more and more about whether they're worth the money. But also, I've had some amazing customer support from Apple employees over the years, and I at least have to concede that the money for those people's salaries has to come from somewhere.
We're constantly reminded that "if it is free/cheap, then you're the product", which is more or less a restatement of "you get what you pay for".
Apple charges more, and people lose their absolute shit over that, but then you don't get abused anywhere near as much as Microsoft/Google do to you.
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It was a long time ago but more than once I had troubles with a Windows license and it was known that if you talked to somebody at Microsoft on the phone long enough they'd take pity on you and give you a new license key.
They're not really afraid that individuals are going to rip off Windows, they are afraid that system builders are going to rip off 20 copies of Windows for machines that they build. In fact, given that they are so into Azure and GAME PASS and all sorts of thing you've never heard of, Windows might just be a loss leader.
They also high-street stores as well for that human experience.
Every time I call Apple customer service, they tell me to box up my device and send it in to be replaced. The human element is nice but it's hardly a panacea - you need trained customer support.
That is a bit inconvenient but replacing a faulty device is an example of excellent customer service
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Apple computers are more expensive, too.
It's not the computer that Microsoft is selling, it's Windows. It's apples and oranges (no pun intended). Apple doesn't charge for its software and Microsoft has many other products. It's just about how you distribute your costs.
FWIW, Microsoft has a much higher profit margin than Apple.
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>Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.
The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
> The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
The key words are monopoly and lock-in. Those things can really scramble the bad vs good equation.
Does Microsoft actually have a monopoly on anything these days? Maybe gaming? I saw its like 95% windows on Steam.
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No, that's not the reality of the situation. You are theorizing a perfect market with no costs of entry or exit. Customer demand for critical systems is inelastic to start with due to technical burden (ie most people are not good enough with computers to casually switch OS), and large vendors work hard to maximize that inelasticity.
By "not good enough" you mean "not motivated enough" which boils down to what the OP said. It's not a big problem in reality for most people.
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> If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
The problem is that while this is true, in practice it's more like the mandate of heaven than laissez-faire economics. When political power structures are involved, and thus the status quo itself is reliant on the omnipresence of certain economic forces, there can never be a drawdown under normal market forces. There is an intentional, exerted force which unbalances the equation in favor of the monoliths. "Enough of a problem" ends up becoming violent social upheaval. In effect, you advocate for normalizing the driver to aim our societal bus off the cliff because "somebody hasn't grabbed the steering wheel yet, so it's clearly an acceptable course." Discounting the fact that the co-driver is pointing a machine gun at the back of the bus.
Adam Smith would be absolutely apalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.
I don't recall the Soviets building higher quality products.
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> Adam Smith would be absolutely appalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.
One problem is that the ambient propaganda has changed the definition of capitalism to exactly the problematic one you describe, so that arguing for a more sensible balance of the kind that Smith and others described is taken as an attack on capitalism itself.
These days I'm reminded more and more often of Wimp Lo from Kung Pow! Enter the Fist: "We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke." Except people have been trained wrong to make them better targets for farming their capital.
Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.
100%
So many business models today are based on rolling over the customer, on the theory that anything with that much momentum is impressive to new buyers.
They should be required to provide human customer service, with some sort of legal liability to ensure their products perform as advertised, without an end-user having to spend tens or hundreds of hours chasing down a solution, spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer, and all the rest of the hassle.
Apple (which you mention earlier) do. I've used their live support at any time of the day to solve issues whether it be a software glitch or having trouble using something I just purchased. The only company that comes close to this level of streamlined, anytime support, is American Express.
If customers just start bugging Microsoft devs directly as though they are customer support (which…technically they should be since they built the product) then maybe productivity would grind to a halt. When all the MBAs running the show start seeing all their JIRA dashboards full bad news then perhaps they’ll think twice?
Heck if the McDonald’s CEO and family were required by law to eat their own McDonald’s product for 80%+ of daily caloric/macro intake, then we would probably see things change quickly.
Companies that can’t run at a particular scale should definitely not be enabled to do so. But sadly, we seem to not hold them accountable, directly.
Building a product doesn't magically change your role. Devs are not customer support.
What you're saying is basically that the ability to do a task means you technically should do that task. I can definitely mop, but that doesn't make me a janitor, not even technically.
Worse, a software dev may have no experience with IT-style troubleshooting. I've seen this first-hand. And there's no telling what assumptions they might make about how much users do or do not know when offering advice.
>>>Heck if the McDonald’s CEO and family were required by law to eat their own McDonald’s product for 80%+ of daily caloric/macro intake, then we would probably see things change quickly.
Hamurabbi's code: An architect, or equivalent next of kin, was put to death , if the building he had built killed the owner, or a kin of the owner.
This is why we have courts and judges, to hear complaints and issue remedies when the defendants are unwilling to do so. A better solution would be to reign in arbitration agreements, which are horribly inefficient. Arbitration purports to be lest costly, but it encourages unnecessary litigation by preventing the operation of res judicata, it increases the costs of litigation by preventing class actions, etc. It increases injuries by keeping wrongdoers conduct confidential.
The issue is cost. You're going to have to pay considerably more for a computer to have a human ready to help you with it.
How about giving less profit to the shareholders? How about making customer support legally mandated so companies don't have the "greedy shareholder" excuse?
> How about giving less profit to the shareholders?
Then the shareholders will sell their shares.
> How about making customer support legally mandated
Then you'll have to pay higher prices for the product. Every mandate put on a company costs money and so higher prices are the result.
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Have computer prices gotten considerably cheaper since the days when companies had human support employees? Some components have gotten considerably more expensive, so it seems like they haven't, at least on average.
Relatively speaking yes. My Macintosh Quadra 605 was around $1000 in 1994 and was a low end model at the time. Today that $1000 would be around $2100 or so. I can get an entry level MacMini for $499.
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The humans have gotten more expensive.
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With many products, every contact a customer makes with customer service is an opportunity to profit. However, it requires quite a mindset to appreciate this.
You can rig your product reviews by providing above and beyond customer service, for example, warranty claims dealt with in a day with a replacement in the post arriving as if by magic to surprise the customer. Hit them up for a review and they will write a review with meaning, explaining how you fixed their problem, exceeding all expectations. Unless you have done this then you would never know. Although most companies do collect reviews, they don't know the way to do it is to get reviews from the customers that complained rather than the ones that didn't. It is very counterintuitive.
You can always upsell. If the customer has problems with the product then maybe they need a different product or a whole suite of stuff. With software you can always give trials too. Complaining about what comes with Windows? Maybe you need Office. Here you go, a three month trial to tide you over.
Customer service should also be the eyes and ears of the company, to alert product and sales teams to any problems with new products so corrections can be made very quickly.
It is also about having customers for life. It is more cost effective to retain the customers you have rather than churn them.
All of this applies regardless of the company size. There are some caveats though. Nothing can be queued unduly, queues don't save time for anyone and you still have to get all of that queued work done. This means you need team members that work from both the front and the back of the queue, to have a clean queue by the end of day.
If you get it right then customer service is not a cost, it is the exact opposite, at the heart of marketing due to word of mouth goodness that can't be bought so easily. If you can get the upsells to work too, then a customer service department can pay its own way, to profit even.
You also have to recruit people that will go above and beyond. Lots of people have hectic lives with kids and other obligations that make their lives unpredictable. They will need days off, special working hours and other niceties, however, give them a job that they can fit around their life and they will show gratitude with loyalty and hard work.
There are cultural problems why this 'bring it on' approach is not so common. Usually customer service are down there with the pigeons in corporate pecking order. In reality, customer service needs to be at the heart of the company with more than lip service given to the 'customer first' idea.
With companies giving customer service over to AI chatbots, there is plenty of opportunity for companies of all sizes, including Microsoft, to resist the AI temptation and get serious about customer service.
How can the government regulate companies into providing good customer service when they can't even provide good customer service to their citizens?
For the most part customer service is excellent from Swedish government agencies. There are exceptions with either poorly run or intentionally refunded agencies where it is not the case but usually the quality of customer service is excellent.
How can the government regulate car manufacturers when it produces no cars itself?
How are the two at all related
They don't.
What you do is have a real capitalist system with decent antitrust protections and real market competition instead a crony capitalist system where oligopolies can easily push regulators and legislators around.
And then, once you have enabled consumers to vote with their money, they will.
Perhaps some day we could try something other than fixing the problems of capitalism with more capitalism?
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I guess they don't want Windows to cost $10000 per licence.
When you buy a Windows license, you expect at least a basic level of support from them in case something goes wrong. It is built into the cost.
Now come on. A basic level of support would not cost Microsoft $9900 - that's absurd to suggest. It may reduce their profit margins a bit, or they may have to increase the price, but it's not like Microsoft has earning problems.
I mean it's one phone call Michael, what could it cost, $9900?