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Microsoft's Plan To Try To Win Back Consumers With 'Modern Life Services' (zdnet.com)
It's not a secret that Microsoft hasn't been winning the hearts and minds of consumers lately. Killing off products like the Groove Music service, Microsoft Band fitness tracker, and Windows Phone have left many questioning whether Microsoft's grand plan is to simply focus on business users and leave consumers to its competitors. But at the company's Inspire partner show this week, Microsoft execs told partners that Redmond isn't giving up on consumers. From a report: Yusuf Mehdi -- whose new title as of June 2018 became corporate vice president of Modern Life and Devices -- led a session at the partner show in Las Vegas, Nev., where he outlined the company's vision for what officials plan to christen "Modern Life Services." Microsoft's core value proposition is productivity, he said. Microsoft is targeting so-called "professional consumers" with these services, Mehdi said. Microsoft officials believe because the company already "owns the work calendar with Outlook," that it has a foothold in working to blur the line between consumer and commercial activities. What, exactly, will qualify as a Modern Life Service? Mostly they will be apps, services, and features that Microsoft already makes available or soon will in Windows, Outlook, and PowerPoint, but which officials will attempt to position as well suited to the needs of professional consumers on Windows PCs, iPhones and Android phones.
Microsoft (and everyone else) should remember this when they think about making moves likely to piss a lot of customers off. What can they do to win me back as a customer? Great question... Well, do they by any chance have a time-machine, and the ability to go backwards in time and prevent the company from acting like a bunch of goddamned fucking dickheads? No? Well, then nothing. There is literally nothing Microsoft can do that will induce me willingly to give them another goddamned fucking penny for anything under any circumstance whatsoever.
The way I see it, holding this line (and if everyone else would be so kind as to do the same) could help dissuade other companies from engaging in the kind of fucked-up jackassery Microsoft has indulged in in the past. They need to understand that actions have consequences, that they can be far-ranging, and that if we just forgive Microsoft and start buying their miserable shit again, it will only encourage OTHER corporations, whom, as you'll recall, we have almost no power over since they've bought almost every one of our corrupt, useless, spineless, gutless, heartless, dickless, brainless, feckless, worthless, puppet politicians, the only way we can check corporations and the way they treat us, is to hold the line, and deny them our money (to the extent we can, obviously when they go around us and bribe our public oaf-ficials and get government contracts, that's our money they're stealing and there's nothing we can do about that... but besides that,) especially if and when alternatives exist, and the more we do that, the more alternatives there can be, (and hence, there will be,) and the better the quality and more reasonable the price we will be able to get them for.
Try not to forget there was a time when Microsoft, using illegal and unfair anti-competitive business practices, virtually destroyed all their competition, NOT because their products were better, (they were demonstrably inferior in most respects,) but because their greed was rewarded in a new business/financial/economic sector that due to its nascence, no one knew exactly how it worked or how to regulate it properly for the longest time, before the law caught up with them, and others could adapt to the damage they were doing. The result was the so-called Microsoft Tax, where you ended up paying Microsoft whether you wanted to or not, (hence the term, "tax") whenever you bought a new computer because the company you bought it from (with few exceptions) would have an involuntary arrangement with Microsoft in which Microsoft was paid a licensing fee for their wretched malware by the computer manufacturers when you bought one of their machines, whether you wanted a copy of that pile of fetid, steaming dogshit they called "Windows" or not. (The alternative to a company installing Windows with every system they sold was not being allowed by Microsoft (under the terms) to install Windows on ANY machines they sold, which was an effective death sentence for the company, unless of course their customers weren't drooling submorons who didn't want to use a pile of shit like Windows, which simply wasn't the case with most of the home PC market, or unless the company made its own OS to compete with it... like... Sun Microsystems, for example.
(Hahah, you thought I was going to say, "Apple," didn't you? Yeah, I actually meant Apple. There wasn't a whole lot of space for competing operating systems; the only way for a new one to really get its foot in the door was for it to be offered for FREE, (i.e., GNU/Linux) and even THAT has trouble with adoption, despite it CONTINUING to be free, over a quarter century later...)
Even if you didn't use Windows, such as if the first thing you did with a new computer is slap a new hard drive in it, and install GNU/Linux or one of the variety of flavors of BSD... for quite a while,... you still paid for Microsoft's shitty excuse for an operating system which could be just as well described as a malware delivery platf