alt Hacker NewsWe've really got to stop calling every bad UI a dark pattern. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." Having worked at MSFT I can tell you there's a LOT more incompetence than malice.
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This particular case isn't a dark pattern, but the fact OSes are written under the assumption that users want to create an account for cloud services is.
(Yes, by this definition Google, Microsoft and Apple are all dark patterners.)
Selective incompetence for fun and profit:
Pricing mistakes which make the supermarket money are unfortunate but low priority. Pricing mistakes which cost the supermarket money must be fixed immediately.
The problem is that this incompetence is the result of (bad) choices by Microsoft's management. I'm not even talking about middle managers but the C-suite, who only care about satisfying shareholders, not about creating good working conditions or making sure the product is good.
It's pretty obvious that Microsoft is forcing their cloud services on anyone that doesn't actively fight back. Whether this is because they deliberately expect that they will dupe people into paying for storage they don't need or just because the cloud services team needs to hit their user KPI doesn't really matter much.
Forcing a cloud login for a desktop operating system is arguably a dark pattern.
Defaulting to uploading all locally saved documents to cloud storage is ABSOLUTELY a dark pattern.
The prompts every few months to "change back to recommended defaults" that make it easy to accidentally get into this state even if you made the correct decision previously to turn it off is a hellish black hole of a pattern.
All three are intentional, not incompetent.