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Right now, Microsoft is inspiring horror stories with "forced upgrades" and/or incessant nagging to upgrade to Windows 10. Yet more horror stories are being generated with the invasive "telemetry", and the personalized advertising found within the OS.
In recent weeks, the wife has complained about the Windows 10 nag. She runs Win7 Home Premium, and got the nag until I "fixed" it. I run Win7 Pro in my virtual machines, and I don't get the nag. I got the telemetry updates, but not the nag.
Those of us over a certain age remember the original separation between enterprise grade Windows NT (NT3, NT4, Win2000) and the consumer grade Windows (Win 1, 2, 3, 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE and Millenium) until they were joined together with WinXP. With WinXP, we saw the same OS used for consumer and enterprise, with advanced features enabled in Pro and Enterprise, and the same features disabled in consumer versions.
So, here we are today, with MS trying to phase out Win7, and force feeding Windows 10 to the world.
Going forward - is MS also going to force feed Win10 to the professional/enterprise world? Or, will they send the consumer and enterprise OS's down divergent paths? Are we going to see insecurity built into the consumer line of products, and better security and features built into the professional lines?
What does the future hold? Any guesses?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2015, @01:08AM
I think that we need to start at least one layer higher:
What is Microsoft trying to do?
The innocent but technically adept user would guess that they are deliberately trying to be as intrusively annoying as conceivably possible, but since that would be counter to their business practices (and actionable, to shareholders) that cannot possibly be the explanation. This implies that what they are trying to do is in the service of a different vision, that they believe will be profitable.
Corporate customers are a huge cash cow for Redmond, because they regularly (well, semi-regularly) refresh their installations, install expensive premium versions of Microsoft software, and generally manage their own patching and other maintenance with a minimum of drama. This new regime isn't for them, and in fact in many ways it bears no resemblance to what they need.
Home customers are problematic. They usually aren't directly Microsoft customers; instead they get OEM versions, don't maintain them, and bitch about how slow, unstable, and messy Windows is to work with. They resist paying crazy hourly amounts for technical support, and finally throw up their hands and either bite the apple or embrace the penguin. A few rabid fanboys and monomaniac gamers excepted, here.
This is bad for Microsoft. It looks bad, it creates bad press, it continues a cliche that is very damaging to Microsoft. Microsoft is in a fight for its very justification, and its golden days are long past. What Microsoft needs is for the typical user to stop being stupid and ignorant.
Unfortunately, half of people are below average, and most people are bottomlessly ignorant when it comes to computers.
So what's the next best thing? Make the computer work better so that Microsoft can stop worrying about people (not) updating, (not) upgrading, and (not) maintaining their systems. This way Microsoft can tell the world everybody could use a Microsoft system (because telemetry helped them sort out the problems), Microsoft systems are (more) secure (because of unavoidable updates), and Microsoft systems are up-to-date (because of unavoidable upgrades).
Result: Microsoft mends its reputation. All it has to do is crank up the evil a bit from its general baseline levels.
If they can be evil enough, they can reduce the clamour of hipsters whimpering for Apple crap in the corporate world.
That explains pretty much everything.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by driverless on Saturday December 26 2015, @01:56AM
Corporate customers are a huge cash cow for Redmond, because they regularly (well, semi-regularly) refresh their installations, install expensive premium versions of Microsoft software, and generally manage their own patching and other maintenance with a minimum of drama. This new regime isn't for them, and in fact in many ways it bears no resemblance to what they need.
Which is also why the corporate version of Windows doesn't get the forced downgrades to 10. I'm perpetually jealous of friends of mine who run corporate installs and just get left alone with Win7 while I have to keep disabling the forced-downgrade stuff they slip in.
And that's the problem with retail versions of Windows, the buyers are essentially guinea pigs for Microsoft, who can do anything they want to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:16AM
I have Windows 7 retail, and I never received any of the GWX nag screens. Most likely it's because I disabled the "Recommended" updates (i.e.: optional, previously known as "not security updates"), and left the "Important" (i.e.: critical security updates) enabled. After the August 2014 font patch fiasco, I disabled automatic installation of updates. After the GWX updates started to appear, I disabled automatic download.
I remember back when Microsoft said that they would never add features via service packs (back when the main method of patching a Windows system was to install a service pack), and later that they would never add features via "critical updates". With Windows 8, they threw that separation of church and state out the window, and with Windows 10, they went whole hog into "waaaaah, we don't want to deal with spaghetti test cases anymore" (despite the fact that the various Linux distros have "Long Term Support" programs, sometimes to the point where a major version will be supported for 10 years). This is alongside the marketing force-feeding agenda to attempt to make Windows 10 look like a more successful launch than Windows 8. I have a feeling that without this force-feeding, 10 would have tracked worse than 8.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2015, @04:35AM
This could be interpreted as a form of "disruptive innovation", in more ways than one. However, as any party disruptor knows, they will eventually be asked to leave, by force if necessary. If only the marketplace could work so swiftly.
Their strategy seems to be to lean on Azure and ad analytics. Which is funny, considering that aQuantive was a massive writeoff (and that was Microsoft's first ever reported quarterly loss), and that Google is eating their lunch in the ad market. So they took it internal, to spy on Windows users. The FTC and DOJ are still in the equivalent of the 9-track tape era in terms of technology law, but hopefully they eventually catch up. As for corporate customers, well, they're getting sick of paying per-core licenses, and Windows Server 2016's licensing plan takes a page out of Oracle's playbook, in a time where a single Haswell EP CPU package can have 18 cores. I'm guessing that very few companies will dare to try installing Windows on such a system.
Or to put it less mildly, Microsoft laid off most of the testers in the Operating Systems Group" [zdnet.com], and turned public users into software testers via the "Early Access" program. As Ars Technica puts it [arstechnica.com], "Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to 'Quality.'" Hmmm, I guess the "Q" stands for "uality". [dilbert.com] An operating system is one of the most complex software systems you can program, and one of the most critical (aside from true mission-critical applications like automotive ECU programming, nuclear reactor controlling, life support systems [...but then again, some of those run on Windows... eek...]). It's lunacy to throw the testing of Windows to the developers who are overworked enough with creating new code and fixing old code, especially if they have far weaker experience in full system "field testing" than they do on simple "unit testing". We've already seen the first couple major Windows 10 update fumbles, first in November, with an update overwriting previously configured privacy settings to the default of "no privacy at all" [winbeta.org] (which also resulted in the November 2015 "Threshold 2" ISO being pulled from the Media Creation Tool until this could be fixed), and the accidental deletion of Normal.dotm for Word 2016, which erases previously configured macros, autocorrections or auto-text [theregister.co.uk].
Video blogger Barnacules Nerdgasm was one of those OSG testers who was laid off, and talked about it back in July 2014 [youtube.com]. One of his most telling statements: "I don't know what this new direction that Microsoft's taking, but it scares the hell out of me. I'm definitely scared for the people that remained and stayed behind, because I don't know how they're going to be able to keep things going with this massive loss." One month later, KB2982791 was pulled from Windows Update [pcworld.com]. The root cause was tied to fonts that were installed in the system, but not installed in the "%windir%\fonts" directory. Yes, there are programs that do this, and it would've had a better chance at being caught via a proper near-real-world test plan.
The assault on hipsters has already begun, being spearheaded by the Surface Pro ads, complete with mirror-finish Windows logos on the back screen, held by anyone aside from a clean-shaven Caucasian male. Bonus points for the appearance of far Eastern calligraphy, a Pioneer CDJ / DJM setup, and airports (because you're stuck telecommuting if the business isn't worth multiple times the price of airfare). Microsoft has dumped their prior annoying Surface marketing plan, though the Surface is a success (after being a billion-dollar writedown in 2013) DESPITE these marketing changes, not BECAUSE of them. Also, despite the high-profile marketing tie-ins to Azure (particularly Lotus, Electronic Arts / Respawn Entertainment, and other trendy, BuzzFeedy company names), we'll still have to see if big businesses will budge away from Amazon or VMware.