[addicted]

To be honest, I think it’s as simple as it being a better experience for the type of people who would buy the Home edition.

Forcing them to log in with a MS account allows MS to provide a lot of the services people expect using Android or iOS as their primary devices. For one thing, both those devices pretty much require an online account as well. And they contain far more sensitive data.

But more importantly, they also provide frictionless backups, syncing, and a whole host of online services as table stakes, and MS wants to do the same.

[fsloth]

"I think it’s as simple as it being a better experience for the type of people who would buy the Home edition. ... allows MS to provide a lot of the services people expect using Android or iOS as their primary devices.

This. 100 times.

The main compute device people as a population are familiar with is the cellphone/tablet, and usage patterns that differ from this are becoming the odd man out.

Consumer tech. Commoditization. Etc.

We've come a long way from the 1970's. The computer as a commodity is actually not the same as a computer as a gizmo for the technically minded enthusiast.

[blendergeek]

Android devices give the users this choice. Android devices are definitely made for regular consumers.

Already, on Windows 10, all normal users used an MS account. The only way to get around it was to set up a computer without internet and then click some non obvious buttons while the computer begged for an MS account. If the goal was making it easy for normal users to have an MS account, Windows 10 succeeded.

The change here is that power users no longer have the choice to not use a cloud account. This change provides no benefit to the average user.

[saba2008]

>We've come a long way from the 1970's.

And going for a full circle. No more personal computers, just terminals connected to corporate systems, which have full control over data and usage.

[skohan]

And it's a shame if you ask me. PCs and laptops are so powerful now, and all that hardware is mostly just going toward running chrome tabs.

[bool3max]

... as opposed to doing what?

[skohan]

Native software

[Spivak]

Another big one is being able to reset your laptop password without having to take your PC into the shop for someone to break into it. And if you turned on Bitlocker let's hope that they saved their recovery key or escrowed it to their MS account.

This is the biggest feature for my relatives who no longer feel dependent on a "tech person" to help them out.

[hulitu]

> This. 100 times.

> The main compute device people as a population are familiar with is the cellphone/tablet, and usage patterns that differ from this are becoming the odd man out.

(Smart)phones and tablets are not computing devices any more than a refrigerator. You cannot do any real work on them. Even finding a text editor, let alone editing, is a challenge. Other stuff like SW development or CAD/CAE is the same.

> Consumer tech. Commoditization. Etc.

Nothing to do with it. Just pure control and data collection.

> We've come a long way from the 1970's. The computer as a commodity is actually not the same as a computer as a gizmo for the technically minded enthusiast.

We are back in the 1960 with disabled user interfaces. When you need to search the internet to disable dark patterns is the same like reading the source code to check with which options to invoke the shell.

[matthewmacleod]

You cannot do any real work on them.

This is obviously and objectively untrue, and this attitude contributes to the exact problem that’s being pointed out above.

You can make a decent and convincing argument that consumer devices should be more open without trivialising the (very much real) work that many, many millions of users do with them.

[tpush]

> (Smart)phones and tablets are not computing devices any more than a refrigerator. You cannot do any real work on them.

Nonsense, of course you can. 'Real work' isn't just programming or whatever. Writers, painters and musicians do plenty of 'real work' on tablets and such.

[throwaway675309]

Agreed. However I would just like to point out that since Apple refuses to provide a proper file shell or means to manage your files across applications on iPads (and iPhones as far as I'm aware) without resorting to some type of cloud situation, I prefer to use DAWs that run on native os systems like windows or macOS.

[fsloth]

Agree, my productivity with phone UI:s is near zero. But that's what billion people use.

I agree with the "get of my lawn" sentiment but that's not how the world uses computers anymore.

I don't see how this can work either but it seems it does and shows no signs of returning to sane Xerox-park derivatives I prefer.

There are power users and their needs are catered for but in terms of market share expert users are a diminutive niche.

[blendergeek]

> Forcing them to log in with a MS account allows MS to provide a lot of the services people expect using Android or iOS as their primary devices. For one thing, both those devices pretty much require an online account as well. And they contain far more sensitive data.

The online account option let's MS provide these services. Forcing the account prevents users from opting out. Even on iOS, it is possible to use an iPhone without an Apple account. An iPhone b without an Apple account is severely handicapped by the inability to sideload apps. On Android it is not hard to set up an account without logging in to Google.

MS could (and should) allow the same.

[arp242]

All true, but I also think it's kind of missing the point of the article a bit: which isn't that a Microsoft account is bad in itself, or even a bad default, but rather that they go out of their way to make it as hard as possible for you to opt-out of a Microsoft account as you need to play all sort of non-obvious tricks to do so. They could just have some small text with "no thanks" and a popup "you'll miss out on sync, backup, etc. are you sure?"

The objections are more abstract, as in "it's my bloody computer, allow me to do what I bloody want!" Well... Microsoft says no apparently.

[cmiles74]

Password recovery seems like another big reason to push this. Many consumers don't really have any tech support, aside from vendors like Dell or HP. With an MS account, Microsoft can manage this process.

[hulitu]

How about security ? If MS needs to know your password than you can leave your computer without any password. Security is the same. Or you never heard of Solar Winds ?

[Spivak]

So because you can log into a website with your Google account and theoretically this means that a malicious Google could log in as you this means you might as well let anyone log in as you?

[kijin]

Most consumers buy their PCs from big box vendors who can help with password recovery and whatnot. Microsoft might do it better, sure, but why would they want to pick up the cost of doing it themselves when they've been outsourcing it to OEMs for so long?

[bennyp101]

No, they walk into (or go online to) PC World/Currys/Amazon and buy a computer. Then they load it up and up pops Windows.

The make of the computer is irrelevant to 90% of people.

[cmiles74]

I disagree that most PC vendors are capable or good at helping consumers reset passwords of local Windows accounts. This is not a trivial process, take a look at the HP support page on this issue.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04648973

It's unlikely that people with Windows Home have a password reset disk and there's likely only the one account on the machine. That leaves them with "have a computer repair service recover your local password" or "reset your computer". In my opinion, the majority of people would be better served by a Microsoft account, where Microsoft can handle the reset through their website, rather than a password reset disk or wiping their machine in desperation.

Also note how excited HP is to get out of the business of handling this very situation.

> HP recommends using a Microsoft account for signing into Windows. Using a Microsoft account offers many benefits, including easy password recovery. If you currently have a local user account, consider switching to a Microsoft account after recovering or changing your current password.

[taneq]

> the type of people who would buy the Home edition

I haven't looked particularly into the differences between 'normal' Windows 10 and the other tiers but in the past, 'professional' versions were actually missing things (codecs etc.) that you'd want on a general usage PC.

[staticman2]

As far as I know Windows 10 Pro has everything home has and more. You may be thinking of enterprise editions when you mention missing consumer features.

[Bedon292]

I am sure there are more, but the only things I know of that are in Pro and not Home are BitLocker and full Hyper-V. You still get WSL2 and Docker using Hyper-V under the hood on Home. There is also the Active Directory support, but unlikely an individual user cares much about that.

I can't really think of anything missing from Pro.

[dzdt]

MS terminal services to remote connect to your pc from another is in Pro but not Home.

[int_19h]

It already takes a lot of effort to configure Win10 with a local account; so much so that there's basically zero chance of somebody doing it by accident.

[x86_64Ubuntu]

The issue is that they don't give the user a choice to NOT login.