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An Open Letter To PC Makers: Ditch Bloatware, Now!
MojoKid writes "This is the final straw, the last stand. This is the year that companies have to wise up and realize that they're destroying the experience of the very machines they are marketing so vigorously against their competitors. We're talking about bloatware, and it's an issue that we simply cannot remain silent on any longer. The term 'bloatware' generally refers to any additional software installed on a machine that is not a native part of the operating system. 'Bloatware' is usually provided by third-party software companies, and can range from security suites to unwanted Web browser toolbars. It's most problematic, as these programs generally attempt to boot up first thing, right as the OS is booting up, before the end-user ever has a chance to launch the program on their own accord. It's time for manufacturers to take note: consumers do not want bloatware. It's a royal pain from top to bottom, and moreover, it ruins your brand. When people think of HP and Dell, they immediately think of just how infuriating it is that their last 'new' PC took over one minute to boot up and become usable. To these companies: why are you saddling your machines with software that makes it less enjoyable to use? The solution seems pretty simple. If you still wish to include loads upon loads of third-party software, stick it all on a thumb drive and include it with every new machine. Problem solved."
To these companies: why are you saddling your machines with software that makes it less enjoyable to use?
Because they get paid a fortune to do so
Bloatware is generally on a computer to help subsidize the cost down to "commodity item" prices. Removing the bloatware will increase the price of a computer. As the majority of people would prefer a cheap computer (with bloatware) over one with no bloatware, this is something unlikely to change.
That aside, and possibly also related to this, bloatware of certain categories helps fund the support marketplace. Most notably are things like trial antivirus software, that numerous computer purchasers let the trial expire and no longer receive definition updates, putting them at risk of malware infections. I've had a lot of customers come in with infected machines and tell me "but I had CrappyTrial 2011 installed" - at which point I find that the trialware subscription service expired 3 months ago. As sad as it is, I know it helps our business gain tech work. And I am sure it helps the big box places as well.
Other options include having a machine custom built - which of course will mean paying more, since there are generally no bloatware subsidies. At least on a PC, it's pretty easy to remove the bloatware.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
We get paid by the vendor to put it there, so that's money to us regardless of the price you pay for the machine. You'll buy the machine regardless of what we put on the desktop, so there is no economic reason to remove it.
You can remove it yourself using the normal software uninstallation process. You can remove the entire operating system if you like. People with opinions like yours have been doing that for decades, now, to put alternative operating systems on the machines. How did that affect our sales? It didn't. So don't expect it to now.
The only thing that could make us change our ways is if it actually starts costing us money, and since boot time is your time, not ours, it doesn't cost us a thing.
Consumers hate bloatware. They also like getting computers for less than the price of the parts that go into it.
Companies don't change their policies because of letters, open or otherwise. Companies change their policies when they see consumers buying something else. Sometimes that "something else" is a lower price. Sometimes that "something else" is a nicer set of features, which might just include not having bloatware.
As long as the OEMs are being paid to include bloatware, they'll be able to score that lower price point. The bloatware may aggravate, but it's not driving the customers away fast enough to make it go away, either.
It's much like web sites. You're getting something cheap because you're looking at ads. You don't like it, go elsewhere.
The companies that put that bloatware on your machine pay to get it there. Without these deals, the manufactures and retailers will now be selling each machine for less profit, and who do you think they'll be passing the "cost" on to?
On the other hand, feel free to buy a Linux or OS X machine. I can't remember hearing about "bloatware" for those.
Your wish has been granted.
Microsoft Works has been discontinued, and instead you get a defeatured nagware adsupported version of Office 2010 "Starter".
is PC Decrapifier. It's free, lightweight, requires no install, and just works. http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ It's not perfect, but it removes a good hunk of the stuff.
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
Try PC Decrapifier. http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/
Rather then cracking open that Add/Remove program list, just run this program and it will run through the process for you.
Life is not for the lazy.
It's crapware, not bloatware. Bloatware is shit like Microsoft's apps which are huge and slow but are at least 'functional' in some sense of the word.
Crapware is all the toolbars and trial virus checkers and other rubbish which is responsible for your machine taking 20 minutes to boot up and the drive light to never quite go out.
They not only add the bloat, they do what they can to prevent the crap from being removed.
Just yesterday I helped a cousin reinstall Win7 on a near-new Sony Vaio after their utilities decided to "helpfully" blow away the whole system including all data (fortunately, nothing vital was lost). I admit I have very little experience with Windows these days, but hunting down the needed drivers from Sony's website shouldn't take four freaking hours for someone doing IT for 25 years. They assume their recovery partition is the be-all and end-all and can never be wrong -- or perhaps, they are afraid someone may want to get rid of their precious crapware.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Or nuke the existing OS and install Linux.
It'll work out cheaper as well, even at the loss of your Windoze license.
You don't need to be a senior citizen to remember when PCs came with actual user manuals and proper OS install disks.
It helps if you didn't just fall off the turnip truck yesterday though.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Just shop at a Microsoft store (online or at retail). The PCs they sell are part of their "Signature" program whereby they remove all crap/bloatware and optimize the Windows install to run its best on that hardware.
Of course it's a bit more expensive, but it looks like it's worth it for the performance improvements and lack of hassle that you get.
No, i don't work for MS. I just think it's a good option.
http://signature.microsoft.com/
What are you, 60 years old?
I'm 57 and I remember when documentation included the source code of the OS and schematics. None of the 'restore CD' nonsense. We had to type the damned stuff in. Tech support? That's what your soldering iron was for.
But it's late and the nurse tells me it's time for my afternoon meds so I don't get all crochety and weird. But, if you don't mind - get off my lawn.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The economic reason is Apple (and soon, linux. This is the year of the linux desktop, right?) I have lost count of how many people have talked about how much better apple is than windows and faster etc. (I don't want to get into a flame war about which is actually better, for my purposes here lets just say they are within range of each other; both w/ strengths and weaknesses.)
I used to wonder why I never ran into any of the problems 'everybody' has w/ windows. I always blew away everything and laid down a clean os when I got a new machine. Then I sat down at one of these dell made loaded up pieces of garbage. It absolutely kills teh experience. The base MS experience is fairly responsive but when you load up the trial ware and tool bars this guy is talking about, it has a serious negative impact.
The feed backloop is broken though. People bitch about the crappy MS OS where it is really dell et al that are crushing the experience. As apple's marketshare (in consumer land) increases, the wintel crowd are going to need to reevaluate.
My first computer (a Sinclair ZX81), came with all kinds of neat stuff like port diagrams and information about how the CPU works IIRC.
You'd never catch someone like Apple doing that these days, which is a bit sad really.
I suspect that the one really pissed is Microsoft.
The vendor, at least, gets paid, and all their competitors are doing the same thing; but Microsoft doesn't see the cash, and the bloatware makes them look pathetic next to OSX, even in areas where they don't deserve it.
Slave for months getting Windows N+1 to boot really fast? Hahah, suckers, HP just signed a deal with 3 AV companies at once... Kiss your positive consumer perception goodbye.
Outside of Very Small business, not much time at all. System imaging tools and hardware homogeneity are your friend.
For sheer network throughput reasons(plus all the domain-join dicking around), a bare metal restore might take about an hour; but only a few minutes are human attended time. Dump the sucker on the network -> F12 -> PXE boot -> new machine pops up in management console -> scripted process does a WMI query to determine model and then dumps a suitable image on the sucker....
That is one of the main reasons I got the hell out of home-user IT as much as possible. The hourly is actually a little better; but dealing with people who don't have their install media, don't have media for the 3k worth of software they "got from work", don't have backups, and expect you to save their celeron shitbox with 5,2173 distinct malware infections in under 15 minutes, because that is how it works on TV(and anything that happens for the 6 months after you touch the bastard is your fault) Just Isn't Worth It.
Give me standardized hardware, actual tools, and networked backups any day...
The solution seems pretty simple. If you still wish to include loads upon loads of third-party software, stick it all on a thumb drive and include it with every new machine. Problem solved.
This is about as naive a solution as I've seen suggested on Slashdot in a long time. How did this story even get accepted? The suggested solution is to reduce the effectiveness of the advertising, thus reducing the amount of money the PC manufacturers can charge to the advertisers, and increase the cost of the delivered product by requiring an additional bit of hardware to be included that would also require a coordinated documentation for installation instructions and training for customer service.
Right. That there is a top quality suggestion by someone who is savvy and experienced in the ways of the world.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
The crapware is there because the crapware authors pay Dell/HP/et. al. to put it there, subsidizing your low hardware prices. Smart people don't bother booting the default config and just throw an install disk in the drive from the get-go.
If you don't have an install disk and only "restore" disks, you're on your own. Disabling bloatware isn't generally hard.
because, majority of people on this planet - sorry - whopping majority of people on this planet, have never heard of DIY computers, leave aside gnu/linux.
it is also their right to have a properly working pc with the money they pay, instead of bloatware. and hence, this article, complaint and the problem explained, are valid.
try to think further than your horizon. think of other people too.
Read radical news here
It doesn't bother geeks, the first thing I do is image the drive (in case I want to re-sell the machine) and slap on a clean image of my OS.
Why would you save an image of the crap for the purpose of reselling the machine? Aren't you just adding to the problem? Surely, as a self proclaimed geek, it's your responsibility to eventually sell that machine with a clean image.
We already know your opinion, Mr. Torvalds.
Unfortunately, it seems that it's like that for all consumer-level printers (read: ink jets and inkjet all-in-one units in the $200 price range).
My solution to that was to buy a laser printer. It's a Brother 2170, and it sold for around $100 last year. They have some fancy software for it to tell you when the toner level runs low... or just the driver. You actually get the option to install just the driver. And the best part - it's basically just a .inf and .sys file. That's it!
Oh, and it has wifi and ethernet built-in. And supports SNMP, telnet, FTP, web management... it'll send me an e-mail when the toner is low or the paper runs out or there's a problem of some kind.
Now, granted, if you want a laser all-in-one, you'll pay another $100. If you want a color laser all-in-one, it does get pretty expensive ($300-400 at least).
But it goes back to a comment made earlier: If you want to forgo all the bullcrap, get the stuff that's designed for the corporate or enterprise market... or at least the stuff that's not for the general consumer market.
Consumers don't like laser because the toner cartridges cost $75 instead of $35. They don't care that they only get 1/10th the number of pages from the inkjet cartridge.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
What are you talking about? I mentioned that they use it to check facebook, I never wrote that it was a bad thing to do. Maybe you should ask yourself why you thought it was bad to use a computer to check facebook?
c++;
Microsoft tried this over ten years ago... Do people have no sense of history when it comes to computers?
Go look up the monopoly case against Microsoft, a large portion of the case was Microsoft's restrictions on OEMs on what modifications could be made to the OS. Microsoft supported bootup customizations (logos, support info, etc.) but the line was drawn in the sand when Microsoft started requesting 3rd party applications to be something that the OEM did not load and instead the user could optionally install them.
OEMs didn't want to lose this gravy the installed application money they received, and is why there was no lawsuit against Corel/Wordperfect for having the same contract that required the OEM to put Wordpefect Office on all systems sold, yet there was a lawsuit against Microsoft for the same contracts for both Windows and Microsoft Office.
(OEMs only got a better deal of about $5 per copy off of Windows if they included Windows with every system sold, and the greedy OEMs that went along with this, were also the ones that later on were in court testifying against Microsoft for offering them 'cheaper' deal that they willingly took. Smart OEMs paid the extra $5 for OEM copies of Windows and didn't have to bundle Windows with each computer sold.)
Anyway, this won't happen soon, as the money the OEMs make far out weighs the poor image of the crap that gets loaded on their computers creates about their computers.
Microsoft is stilly trying to get OEMs to reduce or make the 'optional' software a user initiated installation, and has even created an installation platform for OEMs and 3rd party software to use so that people get a true Windows experience on first boot, and can add all the crap they want that the OEM gets a kick back for by installing or using the software which initiates the install. (Microsoft's own software even uses this with Office and even Live Essentials which was formerly OS applications are optional installs for users.)
However, getting OEMs to stop taking 'bribe' money for loading crap, dream on... And with the Monopoly ruling against Microsoft, Microsoft no longer has any authority or say in how Windows is deployed. (Go read up on the lawsuit, why it really was a scam, and even people like the former CEO of Netscape later admitted it was a bad ruling, that he had previously testified and supported until he got to see the money and intent behind the ruling that came from the USA and the EU out of it.)
I watched a colleague of mine hand a receptionist a Ububtu CD, show her how to boot from CD on his own PC and that was it. After the weekend she came back in saying how fantastic it was. She emails, surfs and plays games. What more are computers at home for?
The lady apparently got no help from anyone else in her house and did it while husband & kids were watching TV.
I ask again, what learning curve?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Linux was to me, the smart bomb for all that bloatware. It serves more than one purpose, however. Eliminating Microsoft software also reduces the chance that web developers will be enticed to program their site just for Windows. By using Chrome or Firefox on Linux, I'm "voting" for software freedom - freedom to use the software I want, and freedom from bloatware.
This in turn will make Windows server software seem less appealing to those same programmers and their supervisors and the investors in the company. That could mean one less hideously expensive sale for Microsoft.
Before I blew away the partitions on the drive, I made the install DVDs in the event that I would ever need them again for someone who really wants to use Windows if I ever give the machine away or sell it. But in my hands, this machine isn't going to run Windows. See? I believe in freedom of choice.
I'm being a bit idealist here, I know. But I can dream a little, can't I?
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
When I was a kid, we had an XT made by AT&T. It included a hefty set of manuals, on heavy stock, in 3-ring binders, with 5-sided boxes to keep them tidy on the shelf. There was an MS-DOS manual, a GW-BASIC manual, and a system manual -- the latter of which I never tore into much -- and maybe another book, too. (It's been a long time.)
It wasn't anything as voluminous as the set of VMS manuals that a girl I dated later had on her bookshelf, but it was plenty to keep my 8- or 9-year-old brain occupied as bedtime reading.
IIRC, the programming manual for my Soundblaster 1.5 was available separately, for a fee. The manual that was included with the card was pretty sparse by the standards of the day, but compared to now, was a volume of information.
Modems, at least, included real books. Nowadays, winmodems generally work just fine, but trying to find a list of supported AT commands is like picking ticks from the ass of a rhino.
Kid-proof tablet..