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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: 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.