We all know that Microsoft doesn’t actually make computers. It makes the software, and then lets an almost infinite amount of manufacturers build computers that can run its software. These manufacturers often make a mess of things, delivering computers filled to the brim with crapware. What would happen if Microsoft made computers? Well, for one, they would be void of crapware. Two, they would help users install the software they want before leaving the store – including software from competitors.
Recently, Microsoft has become a computer retailer with the opening of the first Microsoft store. Apart from selling its own products, like the Zune, XBox 360, Windows, and so forth, the company also sells computers from HP, Acer, and lots of other computer makers. However, there are distinct differences between machines sold in the Microsoft Store, and those bought directly from OEMs.
First and foremost, they are crapware-free. There’s no trial software, no silly games, no crappy launchers, and no boatloads of crap tucked away in the system tray. However, it does come pre-installed with a number of Microsoft applications – Windows Live Essentials (Mail, Writer, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and Messenger), Zune 4.0, Flash and Silverlight plugins, and Security Essentials. In addition, Internet Explorer 8 has Bing Search as its default search engine.
While you may classify these as crapware too, the fact of the matter is that many of them are unobtrusive, useful applications. Windows 7 ships without a mail client for instance, so Live Mail is a must for many users. While we geeks and nerds may dislike Flash and Silverlight, average users can’t live without them. Security Essentials is a very light and well-made antivirus/malware program – the first of its kind to ever find a way to my computer.
All this is part of Microsoft’s Signature PCs initiative. It is no secret that Microsoft is unhappy with the way OEMs ship their products, and through this initiative, the company is showing OEMs how it believes computers should be shipped. Signature PCs can be bought through the two Microsoft Stores, or online. The online store looks nice – I’d love to have that in The Netherlands. Whoopsie, it actually exists – just no computers yet.
On top of the signature initiative, Microsoft also helps customers installing the software they need – or removing what they don’t need – before they leave the store. This includes installing iTunes, or setting up a different browser and/or search provider. “We want to give customers what they are asking for, so they leave store 100 percent satisfied,” Microsoft retail unit chief technology strategist Kevin Eagan said.
A very welcome move by Microsoft, because I personally believe a lot of the headaches with Windows are, in fact, not caused by Windows itself, but more by OEMs preloading their machines with massive amounts of crap. I hope OEMs take the hint Microsoft is sending out here.
OEMs are battling each other over razor thin margins. If they can get someone to pay them to install their crap, they will, to increase profit margins.
Well, they add a lot crap themselves. A friend of mine had a cheap 1 GB Acer laptop and it had a lot of Acerstuff for updates, wireless etc running. Totally useless shit on a 1 GB Vista machine.
I doubt that’s the only, or even primary reason. Sony installs a ton of crapware, but a lot of it is stuff they wrote. I.e. Sony has likely spent quite a bit of money in developing their software, thus making their computers more expensive to produce. Mind you, they must use the cheapest programmers they can find given the lack of quality, but the sheer amount of software indicates that it is a real expense for them. I suspect they feel they are adding value by installing it.
I suspect that there’s also some marketing mumbo-jumbo in play – E.g., “who cares if the software is crap, just as long as it has our logo and our company name plastered all over it.
purely from a marketing perspective this is kind of clever. get customers used to having all this crap on their pc for years and then offer to “fix” the problem and give them a smooth system free of junk. while this seems like who it should have been from the beginning I know a lot of people are going to flock to this going “finally! this sounds like what I want”
…it would come with Windows…
So if I walked in and said I wanted Ubuntu pre-installed they’d do it for me?
yes in the same way if i walked into an apple store and asked them to remove Mac OSX and install Windows 7. If you wanted Ubuntu why would you go to a competitors shop? Microsoft Sell the OS with support from third party hardware. It’s not like going into PCWorld or the sony shop.
I think this is a welcome move, more OEM’s need to take notice, if there is a razor on profit then offer crapware supported software deals and non crapware laddened PC’s I have seen buried sony did add the option to have crapware removed for a fee.
I think the primary thing which will define the success of the Microsoft store is there ability for resolve problems. A bonus to the apple store is that when something goes wrong i can walk in and see someone about it, a bonus which has big pulling power, the complete support package.
What would happen if i were to purchase a sony / toshiba etc.. laptop and it breaks down after 6 months? Are they going to say, please find the sony / toshiba helpline or are they going to try and resolve it for me. If joe public brings in his laptop which is crashing etc because it has a windows problem, will Microsoft fix it? If the answer to the above is yes and yes then i think the Microsoft stores have the potential to do very well.
I doubt it; why cripple a brand-new computer?
Exactly – why cripple it with Windows, even Win7.
if they want to make the customer happy, they’d give the Windows Refund there in the store and help the user put Linux on it. if they really don’t care about customer satisfaction, well…that’s a different story.
I think that’s a good idea, offering basic dual-boot installs as an option. They couldn’t possibly offer every single Linux distro, but a couple of the most popular would be sufficient.
At the least they should offer pre-partitioning so customers don’t have to re-install Windows when they get home in order to dual-boot.
Unless Microsoft offers a license of their OS to OEMs at a reduced rate in exchange for crapware-free PCs, the trend will continue.
Another reason why I prefer buying PCs from Apple.
Edited 2009-10-29 18:04 UTC
My solution is to build my own PC. I have control of what goes into it and what does not, from both a software and a hardware standpoint.
Definitely. The only computers that I’ve ever bought pre-assembled have been laptops, and even then I’ve ended up reformatting them and installing the OS from scratch. I won’t put up with any of that extra junk that OEMs throw on. I insist on an entirely fresh install of the OS.
In the US, that will be illegal – it goes against the antitrust settlement Microsoft agreed to. The only discounts Microsoft could give is volume discount.
What if Microsoft adopted Apple’s strategy and either sold their own hardware or picked just one vendor to sell their software? Maybe everyone else will either go out of business or switch to Linux.
Well, the EC would get a massive collective hard-on and dance naked through Brussels, singing “Daddy’s gonna get that new Maserati!”
The DOJ would set up a massive legal case, only to get bored 4 years down the line.
Edited 2009-10-29 18:12 UTC
“What if Microsoft adopted Apple’s strategy and either sold their own hardware or picked just one vendor to sell their software?”
I know nobody here would like that idea as this site likes to perpetuate the notion that single vendor platform management somehow = evil but personally I feel that the benefits far outweigh any disadvantages which really are only fewer models to choose from.
Though I think its inevitable that Microsoft will eventually transition to this business model, it will start by offering both options… but that doesn’t work. The advantages only come about if a single entity orchestrates the entire experience.
Edited 2009-10-29 18:17 UTC
I’m hoping that day finally comes. So OEMs would be released from their ties to wintel and that will trigger innovation. But that won’t happen, it’s just a dream.
Edited 2009-10-29 19:05 UTC
Not evil, just stupid.
Dell or HP can only afford the Windows license on cheap computers because of the fees they collect from the crapware vendors in exchange for putting it on their machines. Without the crapware, how are they going to afford to pay $50 to $100 for the OEM license, let the shop add a 40% markup, and still sell the machine for $500?
This is also why Dell doesn’t charge less for Ubuntu; the crapware fees cancel out the cost of the Windows license.
Without crapware, Microsoft would have to cut its prices.
Uhm, OEMs do not pay 50 or 100 USD – it’s more like 15 or 20 USD. Those 50 and 100 USD are for individual OEM licenses – HP and the like get massive volume discounts.
“Uhm, OEMs do not pay 50 or 100 USD – it’s more like 15 or 20 USD. Those 50 and 100 USD are for individual OEM licenses – HP and the like get massive volume discounts.”
Thom, what JoeBuck was saying is that the margins on those PCs are so razor thin that even paying $15-$20 per license massively cuts into any semblance of profit these companies manage to eek out of sales of PCs. Remember, the average PC sold from most PC manufacturers has a margin of only 3-4% and even less than 1% on their lowest-end PCs.
If these companies did away with the ultra low end and not sell any PCs under $600 then it might make it more reasonable to license without including crapware.
But the PC business is a race to the bottom. So it’s unlikely to change.
Edited 2009-10-29 18:26 UTC
I know, I was just correcting him on his figures.
On top of that, I doubt the margins are that low. I’d guess they’re more in the 5-10% range.
Poof: Acer says its margins are 10%.
http://in.biz.yahoo.com/091022/137/bauelg.html
Edited 2009-10-29 18:30 UTC
Actually the margins are that low on PCs that are $400 and under.
Acer is among the few PC manufacturers bucking the trend of selling fewer and fewer PCs above $600. As a result apparently their overall margins went as high as 10%. But that’s a figure for ALL their PCs combined. It’s not a figure for all their PC models. Lower end PCs have lower margins and higher end ones naturally have higher ones. The average price of a PC these days is about $400 which would cary the 3-4% margin.
People here often harp on Apple for example for supposedly gouging their customers for their PCs and point to the 25-35% margins they collect. It’s important to recognize that they only sell a single PC below $1000. If any other PC manufacturer followed the same business model they too would be collecting the same margins. It’s not that Apple prices their PCs out of sync with the rest of the industry but rather that they don’t sell low end PCs.
Edited 2009-10-29 18:42 UTC
Uhm, do you know Acer at all? They are the epitome of cheapness, and much of their recent revival has to do with the Aspire One netbook series – often the cheapest Atom netbook available.
i have to agree, my acer computer died pretty much right after the warranty went out. motherboard failure. got a dell now, and much happier with it. much better from a quality standpoint.
Not that it’s relevant to the article, but my $1400 at-the-time Acer Z96J is still going strong after about 18 months. And it’s survived enough drops, bumps and other abuse to crack the case. And it works almost perfectly with Ubuntu 8.10.
Vaguely on-topic, I always find it extremely funny when OS vendors or partisans start boasting about the level of functionality provided by a clean install of their OS, or criticizing the level of crapware that comes with a competitor’s OS. Most Linux distros have far more functionality built in, in terms of useful and productive applications, than either Mac OS X or Windows, and never come with crapware. (Go ahead, someone complain about Mono being crapware, and feel all witty; I mean “useless trial software and demos”.)
Not that Linux distros don’t have problems, but lacking useful software, or coming loaded with boatloads of garbageware aren’t one of them; this is one area where Linux distros come out waaaaay ahead of the competition.
Edited 2009-10-29 20:08 UTC
Except that if everyone did that then the number of PCs sold would go WAY down. If nobody sold a personal computer for less than $1000 then there would be a lot fewer people with computers. That wouldn’t exactly be a healthy position for the industry to be in.
…or mid-range PCs, or even upper-mid-range PCs (except all-in-ones).
For less than $1k USD, I can buy a quad-core PC with 4GB RAM, a 250GB drive, and a *real* GPU with 512MB RAM (not the el-cheapo onboard crap that Apple uses in everything but the Mac “Pro”). You need a serious perspective check if that’s your idea of a “low-end” PC.
How come that Dell (Netherlands) refunded us 70 Euro for Windows Vista (Home) plus Works? And this was for a sub-500 Euro machine (if I recall correctly – ~400).
Edited 2009-10-29 19:14 UTC
As an aside, I think Works is a good solid piece of software, with an undeserved reputation.
I’d like to add that I don’t want any fugly Intel, ATI, Nvidia or Windows stickers …
.. but it will never happen. OEMs are super mega cheap and don’t get stylish products with a great out of the box experience .. you have to enter the RDF for that.
If they weren’t we would be still paying so much for a PC…
Just how fundamentally bad Windows can be. Really, should having a lot of software installed slow your machine down? Unless all of the software is launching items at start up, it should not make any difference. It does not happen using Linux or OSX. It’s funny when not techies look at my Windows machine and see how much better it runs then their own. I of course build the PC and install the OS myself. Others don’t have that luxury.
Just how fundamentally bad Windows can be. Really, should having a lot of software installed slow your machine down? Unless all of the software is launching items at start up, it should not make any difference.
It isn’t really the amount of software. You apparently haven’t seen a crapware-loaded PC in a while. Crapware is called crapware exactly because it usually insists on running in the background all the time, is hard to remove, starts up automatically at boot, and it does all kinds of “smart” tricks for you, like scans all your files all the time in the background and uploads the list somewhere.
That is what makes the Windows PC so slow, it’s not in most cases Windows in and of itself doing that.
True. Problem for me has been that often once you remove it, you don’t get all your speed back. I still wiped clean and reloaded all my Windows PCs, even those with XP, every couple years or so just to restore performance and remove anomalous behavior.
This could (and maybe should) be blamed on substandard installers. But I don’t think even Microsoft knows what everything is in that monstrosity they call the registry.
Of course programs not running don’t slow a computer down. How can they? This crapware is probably designed to run in the background all the time.
Well, there are probably some ways software packages can interfere with Windows itself, making certain tasks take longer. Maybe installing a crapload of fonts that Windows have to enumerate.
Edit: Oops, took too long typing my post…
Edited 2009-10-29 19:50 UTC
I was referring more to the registry. Having a lot of software installed on your machine can slow it down when the registry becomes really large.
I was referring more to the registry. Having a lot of software installed on your machine can slow it down when the registry becomes really large.
But this topic was about the crapware. And there just isn’t THAT much crapware installed that the slowdown would be because of the registry getting too large.
Besides, I’ve gotten the impression that they’ve more or less fixed the issue in newer Windows versions, though I haven’t bothered to try that myself as I mostly run Linux. Maybe someone with more experience could shine some light on this.
I don’t know, have you ever seen some of the Sony Laptops? They have sooo many apps pre-installed its ridiculous.
The problem is that most of the crapware is written in Java… and loading those monster processes at startup, while windows is struggling to show a desktop, plus (vista) is starting the boot of crappy services, is what helped to increase the perception that Vista was/is a bad OS. Vista is, to the end user, a Windows XP, with a Black Theme, and more slow.
I’ve seen lenovos take 10 minutes to have a barely usable desktop from cold boot. All the Tablet PC lenovos are crap when using the default installs.
Adobe Premier Standard, Photoshop Elements, Sonicstage, WinDVD. Picturegear. And Acrobat.
Ridiculous?
This was a real issue back in the 90’s. Causes: Very limited memory and the 9x kernel. Thankfully, those days are long gone.
“It makes the software, and then lets an almost infinite amount of manufacturers build computers that can run its software.”
For future reference, the correct word here is number. Amount is only if what you’re describing is better described as a whole, like an amount of sand, rather than a number of apples.
http://www.writing.com/main/books/entry_id/318060
And the number of manufacturers who provide Windows is not comparable to that of the grains of sand on the beach? Isn’t that the real problem?
I can’t help but agree with Thom on this one. “amount” is the proper term.
Edited 2009-10-29 20:28 UTC
You didn’t catch the “infinite”…?
I think he meant to say that ‘amount’ is for mass mouns, while ‘number’ is for count nouns.
Mass nouns are mostly for things that are physically impossible or nearly impossible to count, such as water or grains.
It all comes down to whether you can stick a number in front of it. You can have 5 computers, or infinite computers, so you talk about the number of computers. If you have sand, you can’t have 5 sands or infinite sands, so you can’t talk about the number of sands. Instead, you talk about the amount of sand (at which point it would be infinite sand, not infinite sands).
Now, you can talk about 5 grains of sand or infinite grains of sand, so it’s the number of grains, not amount of grains, even though it would be amount of sand.
In any case, all grammar – English or otherwise – can get quite complicated, though English is probably worse than many since it combines so many languages while other languages tend to be more consistent since they aren’t derived from so many different sources.
Doesn’t matter. Even an infinite number of items is still a number, and not an amount.
You generally use the term number when the items in question are countable – denumerable – and amount when it’s not countable/denumerable. So, you’d talk about a certain number of cars or computers but a certain amount of flour or water. In this case, manufacturers are countable – be they countably infinite or just countable – so the correct word would be number, not amount. It’s the same issue which makes it so that people frequently use the word less when they should be using the word fewer – e.g. fewer computers, not less.
You mean Microsoft will sell computers without Windows?
Haha. Would have modded you +1 funny if stupid OSNews didn’t prevent past commenters from modding up/down.
I rarely mod anyone down but I would have modded him down for being obnoxious and arrogant. Even if you support some other OS/software doesn’t mean you have to troll around saying childish, and often untrue, things about competing solutions. That is just immature.
Definitely It’s one of those things that funny to think but not so funny to say. Sure, I don’t like Windows and it definitely occurred to me to say that it counts as crap-ware, but saying so doesn’t really add anything to the conversation.
And really, I think that Microsoft is doing a good thing here. If I do put Windows on a box (and I’ve frequently ended up going dual-boot with both Linux and Windows for those few times that I need Windows), I want it free of all that extra junk that OEMs put on it, and if I was actually going to buy a computer instead of building it, all else being equal, I’d definitely go for the manufacturer who gave me a clean install. I may not really like Microsoft, but they’re doing a good thing here.
I wholeheartedly applaud MS on the idea of crapware-free Windows PCs. This is a true service. In the meantime, PC Pro has an article comparing amounts of crapware on laptops from 10 OEMs and review of three crapware removal options: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/352927/the-crapware-con
I wonder what the Microstore employee would do if I went in and said, “Can you remove Windows and install [Linux|*BSD|MacOS|Minix|QNX]”. And he replies, “Well, why?” And I say,
“Because I want a crapware-free PC” 😀
OK, enough trolling. Seriously, I do wonder what Microsoft is thinking here. It believes it is taking a reputational beating because of all the bloatware on most PCs today, but is it doing anything for the PC vendors to compensate them for the loss of crapware revenue? It doesn’t seem so. All you PC vendors, thanks for the support, now take [another] one for the Microsoft team. The dollar amount is not really the point; Microsoft is still stepping on their heads to some extent. I wonder how many lawsuits/antitrust investigations this will stir up.
Edited 2009-10-29 23:47 UTC
Once they get into the hardware game themselves they will start charging oems more and more for licensing driving most out of business = more hardware sales at the ms stores and more control. Eventually youll have 2 or 3 oems besides ms and they will be paying HUGE licensing fees wich will only make their pc’s more expensive and driving customers to ms for the cheaper pc leaving everyone with ONE company to go to for their hardware and software. so they will have a monopoly on both hardware and software in the end. YAY
In the infinite wisdom of the judiciary system, part of the antitrust settlement was the prohibition of any Microsoft rules or discounts for OEMs *not* to install third-party software.
The idea was that without this restriction, OEMs will install Netscape. Or, if they had a sense of humour, Opera.
They didn’t. In fact, I don’t think any OEM installs another browser other than Internet Explorer (companies like Mozilla Inc and Opera don’t have the financial incentive to pay OEMs to do that, unlike crapware makers).
I dare say though a percentage of Apple sales can be attributed to how ghastly OEMs ship Windows-based PC… so yeah, it worked.
Crapware has been a problem for a long time. I remember working in an Access Centre years ago where we had these eMachines P3 600 PCs – with all the crap they pre-installed, Win98 ran slower on the eMachines than 2k did on the P3 450 I had at home.
And it was about 4 years ago that I started running into PCs (Dell, HP & Acer laptops mostly) where uninstalling the crapware took more time than wiping the drive and reinstalling from an OEM CD.
I wish they would go a step further and start yanking the OEM licenses of PC makers that include crapware. But I doubt they will unless there’s enough of a customer backlash – for the same reason that major ISPs/telcos hosted spammers for so long (the cheques keep coming in every month…).
As a desktop support technician, I have two main streams of revenue: people with teenagers in the home, and people who have bought PCs from a hardware/retail channel (which means just about everybody).
Like Vondur said, people are amazed by how well Windows runs when it isn’t clogged up with useless apps that load automatically every time you boot. Keep it lean and mean…
… besides Windows, of course.