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For experienced IT veterans—and PC enthusiasts—there is a common wisdom about the latency between when a version of Windows is released, and when those releases become reliable. Windows XP is the primary example of this, as the original release of XP lacked a variety of important security protections—a rebuilt firewall enabled by default, support for NX bit, and finally disabling the Windows Messenger service abused by spammers, were added in Service Pack 2, three years and a day after XP was first released.
And so, that leaves us with our present circumstances with Windows 10. Roughly seven weeks ago—on May 21—Version 1903 (or 19H1), otherwise known as the May 2019 Update, was released. This marks three years, nine months, and 22 days since the initial release of Windows 10. Reception has been politely positive, though problems with the launch have prompted Microsoft to require users to remove USB storage devices or SD cards before upgrading; likewise, the update was blocked on the Surface Book 2 because a driver problem renders it incapable of seeing the NVIDIA GPU in the base of the high-end model.
Given the positioning of Windows 10 as being essentially the last version of Windows (similar to the way Mac OS X has been around since 2001), it is potentially unwise to declare this exact point in time "as good as it gets." Microsoft's track record is likely to back up this claim, though—at best, Microsoft can deliver iterative changes on top of Windows 10, but the biannual release cadence does not lend itself to massive changes, and further iterative changes are not going to convince the skeptics. If you don't like Windows 10 now, you're not going to like it in the future.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-10-three-years-later-why-this-is-as-good-as-it-gets/
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:19PM (2 children)
You seem to be explaining the company philosophy. I can explain my own company's philosophy. Avoid liability, at all costs. For that reason, all of their machines are Windows, and administered by a third party. Pretty much everything is subcontracted out, so that when things go bad, it can be blamed on someone else.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 17 2019, @01:20AM
Yeah, I let the company put an agent on my personal phone - once. It was less than a week before it was bricked - hard reset back to nothing and start over. So, now I don't get audible meeting or e-mail notices on my phone, really their loss more than mine.
They do seem extremely trigger happy about attempting to destroy information as desired. E-mails kept no longer than 24 months, remote kill switches in all devices (that they control - as a developer I have 2 of those and about 10 other machines that they don't have any control over...)
When the company gets big enough, a lawyer in the upper ranks pushes out a policy like this - pointing to the potential losses if such a capability is not available. I don't necessarily blame the lawyer, any more than I blame all lawyers for participating in a broken world as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Pragmatically, if you want big company job security and benefits, the big company BS comes along for the ride.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @10:48PM
I was at an almost identical shop. Everyone was structuring their work where the buck would stop with an outside contractor when something went wrong. The IT dept was soooo bad. Paying millions in licensing and other crap to numerous companies and especially microsoft. All to point the blame at someone else for outages that could maybe have lost the company tens of thousands of dollars.
Pretty much the bosses were dumb as fuck and if they can't figure out linux then certainly nobody else could. These days I feel like linux machines are the only ones I can depend on.. followed by osx, with windows being absolute shit. Can't say how many times I've had to reinstall that garbage. Now that I think about it I own more windows machines than anything else... but only because they break and I run into issues with the UFEI bios or microsoft's stupid licensing schemes and now I have a stack of broken windows laptops under my couch. My gaming box is slated for a reinstall because it's flaky. I recently bought a used laptop for a family member and it arrived with corrupted windows updates. The only windows machine that works right is my wife's thinkpad that she uses for watching movies and dev work. Her old one is awaiting a rebuild after she installed MSSQL server and then when she was done she uninstalled it and it never booted again.