The fuckery Microsoft has been doing with trying to outright trick people into signing in to the OS with a Microsoft account and using things like OneDrive combined with just how good Proton has gotten pushed me to make the switch full time a year or so ago for my personal usage.
I don’t have any hard numbers, only what I have seen out in the world. But a good number of POS systems, embedded things like MRI machines, tire balancers in mechanics shops and ATMs run some flavor of embedded Windows.
It is not nearly as huge as *nix is, but it is not exactly uncommon either.
Smartphones are actually a good window into what computers in general would have been like had the IBM bios not been reverse engineered and survived a bunch of legal challenges.
If they aren't going to charge for access otherwise then I don't think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.
Whats crazy is Hangouts is still going (in the form of Chat and Meet). I've had the same group chat going with a few buddies on it for years and years now. And it is still better than anything outside of Signal in my opinion for messaging.
I still don't understand how Google thought it had a chance at success. They had the same model as Onlive had 10 years prior. It ended up failing for much the same reasons.
If you have to constantly manually intervene in what your automated solutions are doing, then it is probably not doing a very good job and it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board.
Disclaimer: The below rant does not include things like healthcare where choice in the market is either not a thing or not possible. Lest someone think I am being absolutist. It is purely railing against the average consumer widget, not grandmas oxygen tank refills.
That depends on how many people want them.
Companies will make, or stop making/doing, nearly anything if the money for doing it goes away. But not enough people want "dumbphones" bad enough to stop buying "smartphones".
Just like not enough people want small phones to stop buying the big ones. Or not enough people want the price of Netflix to go down to stop paying for Netflix, etc. Consumers in general need to learn the power of and build up the mental discipline to do without when the available options aren't what they want. Apple, Google, etc can't force you to buy it from them after all.
Companies prey on the inability of the consumer to go without when they find the terms of the deal distasteful to great success. Large chunks of every companies marketing department think about nothing else.
The real "sin" in all of this is there not being enough smaller players around to fill those smaller segments, because we kept buying from the company that bought up all of the competition years ago despite finding those practices distasteful.
Companies, and politicians, have figured out that the average majority is all bark and no bite. And the average majority would be wise to start to figure that out.
I agree. The world requires way to much subtlety to function well for everyone for single truth ideas and ways of doing things to work at large scales.
Crypto is a textbook example of why we as a society can't have nice things. To many people are selfish and self serving, and not enough people are willing to ostracize those types of people from society for such actions.