ilago
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| reply to dave
Re: Windows to become Adware and User Data Collection Service
said by dave  :said by caffeinator :If the DOJ and the EU can't fight Microsoft worth a damn, what chance do we have? Stop buying their products? Certainly a market response to any such activity might give Microsoft pause to think a little before acting rashly. They don't really have a record that would indicate they do that very often.
Which of the markets would they respond to? The user market? If the whole of the 15%-20% of machines that don't run Windows was reduced by 10%. They still have a monopoly by the "75% of the market" definition. How badly would that matter? They lose 15% of their corporate users. Might matter a little more, but the specialised systems developed specifically for the Windows environment aren't going to disappear, so that market is pretty solid as well. There's not going to be a mass market shift any time soon. It would take a massive shift in the market to make a dent. That's millions of computers in homes and businesses making a decision to migrate to using another OS in a relatively short period of time. They've got reserves to handle that and may have the marketing power to regain part of it anyway.
They also have shareholders and affiliates, the **AAs, and no doubt others. Their obligations to shareholders, partners and affiliate organisations has to be seriously influentual. A stock market slide of any sort would be influentual. That market would not have a problem with the ethics of something like this and it would increase their revenue stream from the saleable nature of the data that would be available. Microsoft are obliged to continue to improve their income stream to maintain those legal obligations of any corporation in terms of company performance and share price (company value).
I think they could take the chance and see what happens. They can certainly stand a little flack from disgruntled users in financial terms and not risk losing their major and important customers and keep the shareholders happy. |
