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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: 2) by Geotti on Saturday December 26 2015, @01:37PM
The question for me is "Who will step in to do what Microsoft used to do?"
Uhm, I hope no one. Good riddance!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by istartedi on Saturday December 26 2015, @10:29PM
I know a lot of people think that; but when there is truly no
alternative to a vertically integrated hardware world of Apple, or an
advertiser-driven world of Google you just might change your minds.
It looks like we're drifting closer to that kind of world. Don't say I
didn't warn y'all, because I've been an apologist from Day 1 on "that other site".
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday December 28 2015, @09:18AM
when there is truly no
alternative
So.. Uhm... I could understand why you'd think that about Hurd, but why is linux & bsd and even minix not a viable alternative exactly?
(Score: 1) by istartedi on Thursday December 31 2015, @11:15PM
True, if you sample this particular point in time, it looks like
consumers have viable alternatives. I'm considering the multi-decade
arc of PC development. The Microsoft business model provided consumers
with viable systems considerably sooner than the Free/Open model did.
It was also part of the software-hardware combo known as "Wintel".
With the absence of Win-, the -tel is breaking down also. It doesn't look
bad now, because we're coasting on the inertia of expectations that
commodity PC hardware would be readily available to consumers. If Linux and BSD become more and more difficult to
install on readily available hardware, the loss-leader development departments,
non-profits, and hobbyists don't have the power to sway hardware manufacturers
that MS did. You don't have to win in the software marketplace to kill
Linux, BSD, etc. You just have to make your hardware and drivers
incompatible to the point where it's too much time/money for the community
to jump your hurdles.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Friday January 08 2016, @03:44PM
This is an interesting point, though I tend to think that too much momentum was gained over the past years with even governments preferring open source over commercial software to go down the path you described. There will be enough players in whose best interest it is to offer systems running open software. Additionally open hardware is also steadily humming along, they're at what point now, something like the late 90s?
I also think that Apple will be able to fill MS's niche pretty well, if given the chance. And if Microsoft doesn't get its act together soon, they will probably have to refocus on other areas (cloud, office, ERP/CRM/DBs, etc.) and give up their OS business. It'd be a shame to see them go, even though I don't particularly like their system or behavior.