Microsoft's done a terrible job with its Windows 10 nagware When Microsoft let slip that it had snuck some new Windows 10 upgrade nagware into a security patch, we asked Redmond to explain just what the offending patch was about. The company's response leaves us with a simple conclusion: all the nagware that's been irritating people for months was a botched effort. In fact, Microsoft's …
This is the biggie. Windows 7 is supposedly still being supported. If you can't trust the support or have to do significant work to weed out the junk, then what does "supported" actually mean? And what's the next trick they're going to pull?
Given the huge public concern about the trustworthiness of their computers and phones - and the huge amounts of money that corporations pay Microsoft for the "comfort" of "support" it seems like madness to undermine what you claim your customers are paying for - integrity and reliability.
I don't see why Microsoft have not realised that they can have BOTH their cake and eat it.
Free upgrade for sheeple with all the spy ware and telemetry and automatic updates. (home, or whatever version you want to call it) and sold as the pre-installed version on consumer boxes going forward.
Paid "Boxed retail" and "Volume licence" versions for people who want the privacy or Businesses that need it for regulation compliance where the telemetry and spyware can only be installed by an OBVIOUS and LARGE and "are you sure this is a BIG risk?" separate option at install also options to NOT install stuff like XBOX etc as why would a business want or need these. And updates must be optional and CLEAR. HONEST and ACCURATE and separated in to security, patches, new features, upgrades. so confidence can "slowly" be regained.
free/ consumer version will become the norm and "as a service" version and the other (boxed and volume licence) would be unknown to the masses and would be a pay to upgrade version that MS could resell say every 5 years with a shorter EOL time compared to old versions to try to get people moving more rapidly from version to version.
Office is what keeps a Large number of companies and users attached to Windows and now with versions for MAC and Android and office 365 in the browser there are fewer reasons to stay.
Because they can't.
The writing is on the wall. Windows as we have known it is dead. (As in dead dead, not mostly dead. Even Miracle Max Steve Bill can't save it.) If you look at any established industry it has a high growth curve from inception to wide adoption. Once it achieves wide adoption the curve levels off. There is no magic way to return to the growth curve. The expectation of the stock market AND Microsoft is that their growth rate adoption will continue indefinitely. So by all their metrics their business is failing. On top of this, the market is mature. There's not really a lot you can add to the OS to improve functionality in the way you could before. Which means Windows 7 is all the consumer really needs. But if that's all the consumer needs and his hardware lasts for 5 or 7 years instead of the 3 or 4 which has been the normal until about the time Windows 7 was released, you're taking another hit on the bottom line. So they're trying to switch to the monthly subscription model to sustain revenues. And for that very same reason, the consumer is unwilling to switch to the monthly subscription model. Windows 10 is their last desperate attempt to force people onto the monthly subscription model. So its uptake has been even slower than it would have been for a paid only version that wasn't working to switch to a new pricing model.
The crap interface is jut toadstools on top of the excrement sandwich.
""Windows 10 is their last desperate attempt to force people onto the monthly subscription model.""
Windows 10 WON'T BE their last desperate attempt to force people onto the monthly subscription model, this is but one more of many to come.
There fixed it for you.
Unfortunately as the Masses think OS are either Windows, Apple or Android. Windows will be in a coma on life support for many more years and windows releases to come.
Microsoft needs both Business and Consumer sales. with telemetry they are making it hard or impossible for Businesses to comply to regulations with Windows 10,
Businesses need Users to have windows at home as they then have a base of users who do not need time and money spent on training them to use the basic tools required for work.
If running windows becomes too costly for Businesses either due to regulation difficulties due to telemetry and spy ware or training costs for staff they will change to a product that reduces the cost burden to them.
With so many business tools now being browser based either from a cloud or local server then the OS becomes totally irrelevant and it comes down to what costs less in training, licencing and management. so Linux with OpenLDAP and a MS Office web-tools server on site (or office 365 subscription :-( ) will provide the majority of low level users needs and if a company wants to spend money on user training (and don't have complicated Macro's) then Libre office or other alternatives are available.
The Balance will Tip sometime but i dont think it is the Year Of Linux on the Desktop yet.
Another shite thing is that although W10 wont be affected by WSUS enabled PCs (i'm not even sure domain PCs are safe anymore, I think you need WSUS to be completely free of the nag) this doesn't help when you are creating a golden sample (or updating the golden sample). I had to root GWX out of the beast on our golden sample as it merrily nagged away when I was installing updates to a software package. That is just plain annoying.
"I dont think it is the Year Of Linux on the Desktop yet."
It might be this year. Well sort of - Microsoft apparently plan to support Ubuntu running under Windows 10!
I think the idea is that developers can easily access their legacy text based *NIX command line tools that work well for say AWS and that some prefer over the more modern object orientated Powershell in Windows...The ultimate objective presumably being more Windows boxes and fewer *NIX boxes.
Did it ever cross your mind that Microsoft has to show Wall Street they have a large mass of captive users they can monetize at will in the form of a steady flow of revenue ? This is how Facebook, Google, Apple and others are doing it. In order to avoid being penalized for the loss of revenue generated by giving away a full fledged OS, Microsoft had to convince the analysts they will make hand over fist full of money as soon as everybody will be on board Windows as a service.
I don't blame you. Windows update has gone full malware at this point.
It's basically impossible to uninstall compattelrunner and its ilk and keep them uninstalled, Windows update won't take "no" for an answer. I hope it's possible to take them to court for this behaviour, surely installing things on your computer requires some kind of consent?
I was trying to remove the KB3035583 update from a friend's computer (the update downloads the installer for Windows 10 and keeps nagging to install Windows 10). I uninstalled it 3 times and after each required reboot it reinstalled. I eventually got it uninstalled and hidden, but it keeps unhiding itself, although it is in the optional updates). I've noticed there are 2 or 3 more updates that are there to help in determining Win10 compatibility. I try to keep those away too for those computers I absolutely need to keep on Windows 7 for the foreseeable future.
> I've stopped taking Windows Updates on my Windows 7 boxes.
I haven't, because some of the updates *are* actually beneficial.
However each "Important" update is checked out carefully to see if there's nagware included or, worse, that a previously rejected (and hidden!) update has suddenly reappeared in another guise.
> I've stopped taking Windows Updates on my Windows 7 boxes.
We are required by the FDA to not do windows upgrades .
But we are required by the same agency to do all security updates
Waiting for the first "upgrade to Windows10" popup to appear across the screen in the middle of a surgery.
I used to keep my home computer updated on a weekly basis. I've just given up because Microsoft have made it far too hard to weed out the genuine security updates from the other crap. This is not a good outcome for me, for Microsoft or for the rest of the internet that might get cross-infected by whatever trojan or virus my computer now acquires, but Microsoft have succeeded in making me not care. Some result.
and NOW, "security update" must ALSO be properly vetted, before it ends up on my 7 boxen. I'm a software developer, and I typically need a "stable platform" that does *NOT* accidentally download ~6Gb of UNWANTED EXCREMENT by stealing my bandwidth in the background, nor CHANGE ITSELF without my permission.
For accounting (which I can't use MSDN license keys for) I recently purchased a reconditioned box (for cheap) with 7 Pro on it. Turbo Tax won't support XP any more. I *DELIBERATELY* didn't get one with "Ape" (8) on it, and *ESPECIALLY NOT* 10. I don't *EVAR* use I.E. [it's like the intarweb equivalent of unsafe sex], so I don't need "that" security update [it remains UNINSTALLED]. Its predecessor is a cheap XP box from 2007, which is malware free because I don't surf the intarweb with it (especially NOT with IE).
On the 'new' 7 box, after 2 days of updating, I had to re-hide KB3035583 at least once. yeah, it came back, like a turd that won't flush, after I hid it the first time. Haven't seen it since, though.
I figure that by the time Microsoft *LOSES* their OS near-monopoly to Linux or "something else", Turbo Tax and other accounting software will be installable on THAT OS. I've bought some time.
On the 'new' 7 box, after 2 days of updating, I had to re-hide KB3035583 at least once. yeah, it came back, like a turd that won't flush, after I hid it the first time.
The Git has a wart on his left thumb called Graham (after a cow-orker) and it has persisted through many, many rounds of freezing, burning with acid, gouging etc over the last ten years. Every time I think it's dead at last, it just comes back. KB3035583 is the Graham of computing. Every time you think you've knocked it on the head, zombie-like it reappears. Worse, it reappears in your dreams! MS has created a nightmare... God how they must hate us!
". . . .just install the "GWX Control Panel". And, suddenly, Win10 nagware and downloads disappear."
Not quite...
Whilst "GWX Control Panel" does a very good job at sorting out the mess of W10 update. This last two weeks I've had "GWX Control Panel" flag that among the updates have been updates that have re-enabled automatic W10 upgrades. Fortunately, due to "GWX Control Panel" being able to run in monitor mode as a service, I've been warned of these changes and so can revert them to my preferred settings.
I do hope the guy who wrote "GWX Control Panel" is celebrating a decent sized windfall from those who have made a donation...
NB. The lasted version of GWX Control Panel is:
Version: 1.7.2.0
Date: January 24, 2016
You may wish to check that your installation is up to date.
...thing they've done is to not recognise what their users wanted, namely Windows 7 with modest technical improvements. I actually paid for Windows 7 retail licenses, and would do the same for something similar.
Instead they've got off on the idea that we'd want to put our data in their cloud, be profiled in our usage and turned into lumps of meat for sale in the advertising market to the highest bidder, admire the toy land look of the remaining vestiges of Metro, buy apps from their store, etc, etc, all just to make the OS 'free'.
Bollocks.
The sooner they realise that the old way worked and the new way doesn't, the better for them and their bottom line. The PC market is dead-ish because of Windows 8/8.1, and 10 is demonstrably not the thing to revive it. 14% share and it's free? If anyone wanted it, craved it it'd be closer to 90%.
I'm seeing friends and colleagues drifting of to Mac who were previously the most ardent Windows users. I may go Linux, and if they ever do Office / Outlook for Linux then I'm outahere. (Open Office is just not very good).
Alas there's no equivalent of Outlook.
Th only realistic way of getting a fully integrated mobile/desktop email/calendar/contacts/etc experience whilst avoiding Google and Apple and other data slurping clouds is to rent an Exchange server. Outlook is very good at that kind of thing, and Evolution and Thunderbird just suck in comparison.
@AC - I dunno about mobile - I'm sufficiently Luddite that I don't have email or web access on my phone. But this I do know - Outlook on my desktop at work is an absolute shite pain in the arse piece of crap that hinders rather than helps me to get my job done efficiently. I can't comment about the backend of the thing, but the UI is crap, and insufficiently customisable. Easily my most loathed Windows application.
@Jeffrey Nonken
It is. It's a complete deal breaker. Not because Outlook is any good, it's not. It's horrible but we've got an administrative and secretarial staff here that simply do not know, and will not learn how to use anything else.
Despite the fact that we have people with mailboxes running to over 50gig which completely flummoxes Outlook and makes it fall over about twice a week, we've had people down tools and go home - and then be backed by their boss that this was appropriate! - when we were forced to shut the outlook translator off for an update for a few minutes and it went wrong and we didn't get it back for a day.
They could have carried on working through the web interface, but they just won't and until we can convince certain parts of the world - or at least their managers - that there's more to booking meetings than using Outlooks shared calendars we're stuck with it.
Outlook is like democracy: it's the worst system, except for all others. People who need to manage a lot of emails in some complex way find web interfaces just clumsy and too slow, while projects like Thunderbird are losing traction - because most of those email clients had been targeting the generic use and not the enterprise one.
The Outlook/Exchange combo has many features other systems lack, especially since there are no standards for example for server side rules and the like. Used as simple mail clients they may look average, but it's the integration of all the various parts that makes it useful. Of course you need the very expensive Exchange to take advantage of it - and you also need a skilled administrator, and to train people to take advantage of many features.
For example you don't really need shared calendars to setup meetings - room/resource mailboxes and meeting requests through the scheduling assistant are far better way.
> People who need to manage a lot of emails in some complex way find web interfaces just clumsy and too slow, while projects like Thunderbird are losing traction - because most of those email clients had been targeting the generic use and not the enterprise one.
Of course web interfaces are horrible, and they aren't even email. But I must totally disagree about Thunderbird and "projects like it"; I receive enough work emails to justify about 150 (sub)folders and maybe 60-70 filter rules, and neither Thunderbird nor Evolution have a problem with handling that.
Contrariwise, Outlook is a pile of poop, and such integration as its components do have is both inscrutable and unreliable.
I never meant TB and projects like it are clumsy and slow - re-read what I wrote :)
I just meant they are not very actively developed and improved, i.e. the Mozilla Foundation is letting TB go because it no longer fits its business, Mozilla put too much emphasis on the consumer user, and too little on the "enterprise" one, even in its browser.
Moreover most mail clients never influenced server development for better integration of features. That's a long tale in mail development, where you often have separate SMTP, IMAP and POP servers, and mail clients, each developed separately with little integration among themselves. Unluckily the user sees the "mail system" as a whole, and expects it to work smoothly as such. And it usually expects groupware features as well. That "split" brain situation didn't help at all.
Also, if rules are client-side they are not enforced until you open the client and download emails. Server side rules are processed regardless of the client you use to access your email. Since I access my email from at least five different devices, it's not a small plus.
I've been using Outlook/Exchange since their early releases, and always found it more user friendly and reliable than Lotus Notes, and never found a better replacement to run a company groupware needs. Sure, for email alone it's probably too complex and expensive, and other tools are more than enough.
"I never meant TB and projects like it are clumsy and slow ...I just meant they are not very actively developed and improved, i.e. the Mozilla Foundation is letting TB go because it no longer fits its business"
TB is still being developed. You're right in that it no longer fits well within the Mozilla world. There seem to be moves to incorporate it into LibreOffice.
I have to agree with that. Our agency adopted Google Apps (or at least significant parts of it) as the standard for our organization. And while it is true that 90%+ of our users are happy with the web interface, the power users all want Thunderbird or even better Outlook as their mail client. The searches in GMail might be obvious to an SQL guru, but their not to your mean or mode user. Thunderbird and Outlook both do a much better job for the non-guru types. Thunderbird has a problem (which I expect is all on the Google side). When you move messages to the local folders it leaves them on GMail. The Inbox label has been removed so you won't normally see it, but it's still there in the All Mail folder and counts against your quota (yes I've tried changing the various settings for what to do when you delete a message. None of them work). I suspect the only reason Outlook doesn't have this issue is we install GASMO with it so Google handles the entire process.
And don't get me started on the Calendar. Only people who don't have organizing large meetings like anything other than Outlook for their calendaring tool.
"Thunderbird has a problem (which I expect is all on the Google side). When you move messages to the local folders it leaves them on GMail. "
Have you got the Leave messages on server box ticked? (Server settings in the account settings, not general preferences). If you have then it's definitely a GMail issue because I've never seen this happen on any other server.
Our agency adopted Google Apps (or at least significant parts of it) as the standard for our organization
Judging by your spelling you're US based. Google Apps may well become a problem soon for EU users, and that shakeout is not going to be pretty. If you thought Google had problems, it hasn't seen real problems yet..
"Our agency adopted Google Apps"
Google got quite a head start on Microsoft and got this out the door while Microsoft were napping, and had a lot of initial success while Microsoft were behind the curve. However it now seems to me that Microsoft have leapt ahead and have left Google Apps behind in the dust with the latest releases of Office 365. I don't often hear of Google Apps wining any significant paying business these days.
Google Apps certainty does work OK for small companies, and for start-ups - but I'm not convinced as to it's readiness for enterprise.. It's very sucky in many respects in when you compare it to Office 365 - especially when you want advanced enterprise type features and capabilities. The rental cost difference in the two products isn't very great versus the TCO, so I can't see many situtations these days in which I would recommend using Google Apps.
Why, exactly is Outlook horrible?
What are some things that Outlook still gets wrong?
Well, let's see. It's astoundingly slow at searching "folders" - far slower than grepping through a bunch of mbox-format files would be (and mbox is a lousy idea created to fix the problem of poor allocation policies in old BSD filesystems). There's still no regular-expression search, or even decent Boolean queries. Searching a tree of folders requires toggling multiple UI controls, because that's never a thing that a user will want to do. Though it hardly matters, because nine times out of ten Outlook shows hits from outside the specified search scope anyway.
It still - still - renders some non-text media by default in the preview and reading views. That's been a whopping security hole since the late '90s. (Just respecting the sender's choice of fonts is suspect, given the number of font-rendering bugs in Windows - not all of them Microsoft's fault.)
The "attachment safety" mechanism is idiotic. It's trivially defeated by an attacker, but users who know what they're doing can't override it if they're in a domain and the admin has gotten clever. So people waste time working around it.
No PGP/GPG support. Yes, S/MIME does the same things; but it's much, much less widely used. (And the PGP/GPG PKI, while an unfriendly mess, is not as eye-wateringly stupid as the X.509 PKI used by S/MIME.)
Splitting large message stores apart, for example to improve backup time, is a pain in the ass.
Too many aspects of Outlook are a black box, and too many others are only apparent to the cognoscenti. Yes, you can delete an unsent message receipt using MFCMapi and suitable magical incantations - how many people know how to do that? Why not just put the outbound receipts in the outbox like everything else? Because Outlook was designed by people who Know Better Than You, so fuck you, user.
That's just off the top of my head.
I've used many, many MUAs, on PCs and workstations and minis and mainframes. Most of them have been pretty much crap. The real distinguishing characteristic: those that weren't impenetrable black boxes were consistently less of a pain in the ass. Outlook sucks because the developers have decided they know what users need to do, and that's what they're going to support. If other stuff doesn't work well, too bad.
Michael, you forgot the biggest nuisance with Outlook, (IMHO) Which is contacts. So that if you have more than one email address it stores the contacts for them in several different lists.
It doesn't seem to understand that we might just want one central list, with a choice of email addresses to use.
Nor does it understand that we might want different kinds of category sub-lists, such as friends, work, retailers etc. rather than just according to which email account we use for them.
What? You can have up to three different emails for a contact. What Outlook lacks is a better understanding of duplicate contacts - it could ask if you want to merge information or not if a contact add request looks to be a duplicate. And it lacks a merge contact feature (which exists, strangely, in WP8).
You can categorize contacts and create contacts folders, anyway. You can also mark contacts as private.
"It's astoundingly slow at searching "folders" - far slower than grepping through a bunch of mbox-format files would be "
I suspect you haven't used Outlook in a long while. Searching my local Outlook 2010 mailbox on Windows 7 with well over 100,000 messages and many folders gives an instant response to any keyword - including in messages themselves.
"renders some non-text media by default in the preview and reading views. That's been a whopping security hole since the late '90s."
Outlook stopped rendering active content in preview about 15 years ago. I am not aware of any publically attacked exploits since then that automatically exploit Outlook with no user interaction.
"Splitting large message stores apart, for example to improve backup time, is a pain in the ass."
You don't normally backup Outlook locally - the data is on the server. But VSS can take a near instant snapshot if you want to backup locally regardless of the store size.
"Outlook sucks"
I have yet to use a mail client that even comes close, so would be interested to know what you recommend instead that could practically be used in SMEs?
Actually Outlook can be integrated with Windows Search so you can also look for mails even from outside Outlook - and that with advanced full text search capabilities. The indexer engine needs to be active, of course, and the index itself will take disk space. But queries are very fast.
Have you ever tried to explain regular expression to the regular Outlook user? Of course searching through a database is slower than grepping, yet a structured search is more useful than a grep. Anyway today you can simply type in the search box and then select where to search in the box to the right.
PGP may be widely used among the security and nerd circles, but it's utterly unused in the broader world where the standard is actually S/MIME and X.509 certificates, sorry. While most mail clients support S/MIME natively, not many supports PGP. There are even countries like Italy where legally certified email is built upon S/MIME, sorry...
And, yes, Outlook is more complex than your average mail client. It does a lot more. It is designed to be a groupware client, not just a mail one. If you're using it for mail alone, you're wasting your money and your time.
Why? Why, exactly is Outlook horrible? Or, like many often do on here, are you remembering back to the likes of Outlook 97 which was pretty grim?
I'm with you on this TonyJ. One thing I miss using Linux is the ability to have my contacts and calendar sync automagically with my Android phone. Of course I can by giving all that information to Google, but why would I want to do that FFS? If it's simple to write your own software to do this, why has nobody in the Linux community done so?
I don't understand the comments against Outlook. It's one of the most under-rated pieces of software MS have IMO, and nothing else I have tried comes anywhere close for usability and functionality. Gmail? Thunderbird? Don't make me laugh. It's frustrating because surely it can't be that hard...
I'm talking Outlook 2010 and earlier for the avoidance of doubt - can't speak for the latest incarnations. Word and Excel similarly very good, but their libreoffice equivalents do a perfectly adequate job. Unfortunately I don't see that MS have made any serious improvement in anything since W7, they have gone down so many blind alleys they are only in business because of the inertia of existing investments. I don't see much rosy in their future.
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