Twas the week before Xmas ... not a creature was stirring – except Microsoft admitting its Windows 10 upgrade pop-up went 'too far' Microsoft's marketing boss Chris Capossela has confessed the infamous your-Windows-10-upgrade-is-ready pop-up that tricked so many people into installing the thing was a step "too far." Speaking on this week's Windows Weekly podcast on Twit.tv, Capossela was asked to list his low points of the year for Redmond (it's 17 minutes …
Exactly the statement I was looking for. Perfect match. By hook or by crook MS has achieved their goal (all while justice system/ftc was looking the other way). As the result they've cemented their monopoly on desktop systems while capturing beached in the cloud conquest (I can bet that they convert their captive audience into PAS/SAS serfs). Once the status quo is reached on consumer side it's just matter of time before enterprise will embrace the new way. So convenient it's got to be this way.
Those who believe in forgiveness first require repentance, restitution, and responsibility
http://www.luke173ministries.org/466804
While this twerp may now believe he got it wrong, he sounds more like he regrets failing to serve Microsoft better rather than for messing up millions of customers.
I see little of the three Rs here. My view of Microsoft in general and Win10 in particular are not changed by this.
Merry Christmas to all Regophiles
There was no repentance only an attempt to manipulate the media and fanbois. About the only way the can show they are serious is pay damages to all the users who suffered from their antics and truly fix 'bloat. I do not expect either to happen unless there is massive court case.
I'm actually not as much of a doomsayer as most people about Windows 10, but the reality is that for whatever reason, Microsoft is done with any versions of Windows before 10 and Server 2016. They will not have another XP or Office 2003 moment, period. I know why they're doing it (to gain ad revenue and extract monthly subscription fees for Win10 Enterprise users), I'm not a fan of it, but you're just not going to get anything beyond half-hearted support for previous Windows versions. I'm pretty convinced that they're also done with on-premises software and are waiting to lock everyone into Azure, but that's the next phase.
Taking this as the assumed end state, I'm actually glad they were able to get as many customers upgraded as possible. Millions of consumer PCs are completely unmanaged. They go unpatched, and Windows 7 is no longer being looked at with the same scrutiny when it comes to the less-than-thorough job they do patching it. Leaving these systems out to dry means they'll eventually be a botnet member, get ransomware, get a virus, etc. I don't like the way it was done, but at least they telegraphed that the end was near for Windows 7. I think they should have waited until the official end of life date to allow the free upgrade, but the shareholders would have eaten them alive if they were fully or partially supporting 3 complete release cycles of Windows. For better or worse, Windows 10 is the new client OS for everyone as Microsoft sees it.
I speak as someone who has never awarded either an upvote or a downvote in any online discussion forum because I believe the system is silly and childish and should, of course, be scrapped.
In the case of the Register, I also think that many people click on these because of their prejudices (justified or not) about the subject of the post and not as a balanced assessment of its truth/accuracy etc. But that would mean having to read them all to find out what they actually say.
I speak as someone who has never awarded either an upvote or a downvote in any online discussion forum because I believe the system is silly and childish and should, of course, be scrapped.
Why do you believe it is silly or childish?
In the case of the Register, I also think that many people click on these because of their prejudices (justified or not) about the subject of the post and not as a balanced assessment of its truth/accuracy etc. But that would mean having to read them all to find out what they actually say.
You may be right in that there are some who will upvote or downvote based on things other than the merit of the post, but that is not the case for all of us.I'd believe that while we get many shills from various orgs, most people here do vote honestly.
Anyone relying on Microsoft security is eventually in for a nasty surprise.
To have a chance of being safe, you must run layers of aftermarket anti-everything protective software, and a real, serious firewall. And following this practice you can be safer on an XP machine than a Windows10 machine without additional protection
I'm going to continue with 7 until it either suffers from half hearted support or 2020 comes along, the next machine I buy though whenever that is, will be Linux. Win 10 and it's cloudy service can go and throw itself in a lake. Sooner or later I can see a monumental outage or fuck up coming with Azure and then MS will sink, slowly or rapidly I couldn't say but they will lose whatever goodwill they have and sink.
Maybe the Raspberry Pi OS will develop enough to take over or it really will be the year of Linux.
>>I'm still waiting for the virus that replaces Windows with a linux distribution...
>Virus? In my books that would be a cure to a virus. Sort of like antibiotics are for bacterial infections.
Hm, that would trigger the year of the Linux desktop instantly and most users would not even realize, at least since the Windows 10 nagware .... hmm, maybe even get a nobel prize for writing it .... hm .... which distribution, Mint ? with Redmond theme ? ... hm ... shall I ?
I switched in Linux in 2008 and have never regretted it.
Modern distros for the home market are perfect for Aunt Sally who only uses her computer to send and receive emails, look at photos of her grandkids, and occasionally watches a porn video.
They work very well for a lot else too, but even your doddering old aunt may appreciate a computer that never crashes. (Actually, Linux crashes once in a long while, but the problem is more than I don't know how to recover from a crash without rebooting.)
If that is your use case, a Chromebook (or Chromebox) is even better, even more secure. At runtime, even the running OS is read-only and SHA checksum checked on every boot.
It's essentially a live CD running from your hard disk, but with a read-only OS partition, and it's the only OS that consistently walks away unscathed from hackathon conventions (and often they exclude chromeos, as they know it's too tough to crack)
I have recommended these to many people that just use the internet for mail, browsing, basic office docs, and every single one of them has been overwhelmed by how fast and easy everything is (and how cheap the Chromebook was in the first place). If they don't use Win32 stuff, no need for a PC.
I've wiped XP, Win7 and Win 10 from multiple laptops for people in last few weeks. Replaced with Linux Mint, Mate + Redmond Theme, Firefox (Classic Theme & Noscript).
Two are setup up dual boot win 7 & Linux. One, the Win7 no longer used
Three new laptops ordered Lenovo with Win7 pro not Win10 since Oct (one now used only in Linux).
In last 21 years of installing Linux, Windows etc, I've never seen such a big switch to Linux as this year. IMO Linux Mint, Mate + Redmond Theme, Firefox (Classic Theme & Noscript), LibreOffice, Thunderbird email is now actually better and as usable as XP. It's more like Win9x / NT / 2K / XP experience than Vista/Win7/Win8/Win10 is. LibreOffice is as good as Office 2003, i.e. more usable than Ribbon!
Thunderbird, Firefox, FileZila, Calibre, Audacity, Eagle, Inkscape, Gimp (actually usable now PSP10 is a mess compared to PSP7 and Adobe is rental), Putty, Skype and many more on Windows and Linux now.
Is Sage and Outlook the only reason left to run Windows?
Most people only using Browser, basic Office features, Email, Skype anyway.
It's a big difference even to five years ago,
@Adam 52 - I see a mixed bag of stuff that many home users will never care about. There are plenty of good photo editing software available on Linux (some commercial), virtual machines run on Linux, games are a problem only for gamers. The others seem to be more specialized needs even Excel.
"Is Sage and Outlook the only reason left to run Windows?"
LibreOffice is not fully compatible with my usage of Excel VBA and Selenium - at least it wasn't when I tried moving my application a year ago. Will have another try before W7 is out of support - and possibly see if I can tweak LibreOffice VBA to be compatible. It's well within my skills set - but I don't like having to spend time reinventing wheels - unless absolutely necessary.
VBA etc in Office is evil and a huge source of problems. Solutions without it are more robust, easier maintained and more secure.
VMware and other VM solutions run on Linux.
PC games are now a niche compared to phone/tablet and Console, esp. PS4.
Adobe is pricing themselves out of the market due to rental model except for rich corporates. They are no longer the only solution for photo/video, except for a small niche of professionals with well paid IT support.
Even MS is porting their SQL to Linux. I abandoned MS SQL in 2004.
"PC games are now a niche compared to phone/tablet and Console, esp. PS4"
Like hell. Steam still sells as many copies of AAA_Game_of_the_Month as both console markets combined, and the newest consoles still have no more power than a midrange PC of five or more years ago.
I used to use Linux on the desktop, and quite liked it. Games, however, are the big sticking point. Consoles are not an option, and WINE is still not good enough.
The thing is, even setting aside the general anti-Microsoft tendency, it's impossible to argue away the fact that Microsoft don't ever seem anymore to build software that intuitively suits the ordinary user and makes life easier, or even makes any kind of logical sense. Instead since Win 7/ Office 10 it's so often over-complicated, difficult for ordinary users to manage and often contradictory.
Why did they think that Win 8s hidden away controls that would randomly appear if you moved the mouse too abruptly but then couldn't be found when you wanted them was a good idea? Why do they think that having every damn Office control in the "ribbon" so that the user is stuck in a forest of menu items they'll never use is better than some kind of customisable menu ( with a simple way to bring everything back if you need it).
Why did they think it a good idea to default user work files to a deeply buried folder alongside the settings, so that they were really difficult to get to, reorganise, copy or to move to a better place?
Why did they thing that a desktop full of stupid tiles (many for junk and unwanted links) was better than a manageable list, such as (but not necessarily) the Start menu (win 8)? And why did they think that a forced alphabetic Start menu/ list of programmes, no matter how obscure and unhelpful the programme name, is better than a list that can be grouped into folders according to function if the users so wish. (8.1 onwards)? And if they are going to have such an alphabetic list of individual programmes, why allow install routines to do what the users can't and place a folder of links in that same list no matter how much crap is included within it?
Why the immovable "apps" even when users decide they don't want them in the list,or on the computer? Why make these rather basic "apps" suddenly become ( and frequently revert to ) being the defaults even though the users have opted to use a more appropriate programme of their own?
Why provide a disk management tool so limited that it only lets you shrink or expand a partition on one side,so that you can't use it to move spare capacity in one to an adjacent partition? Why have the various setting controls split up into several different places? Why hide System restore?
The list goes on. All the things that make Windows really difficult for an ordinary user to manage. I could understand having some of these things controlled through system policy for corporate use. But for SOHO use they are at best stupidly annoying and at worse a fu***g nightmare
>hat Microsoft don't ever seem anymore to build software that intuitively suits the ordinary use<
When MS started, all the money was in Business Computing (green screen), or Home Computing (apple, bbc comodor etc). MS identified a small niche, "small business" that was not well served.
All the money is still in Enterprise or Games, but MS's not a small startup anymore. They've got a big chunk of Enterprise and Games/Facebook, and those are the targets. They've abandoned their traditional customers.
I'm one of the legacy users that MS no longer builds software to suit. But my family and my large corporate contacts aren't having the same experience.
Why did they think that Win 8s hidden away controls that would randomly appear if you moved the mouse too abruptly but then couldn't be found when you wanted them was a good idea?
The reasons for the interface design decisions in windows 8 seem pretty self evident to me. The real question is how they managed to write it while laughing hysterically.
" it's impossible to argue away the fact that Microsoft don't ever seem anymore to build software that intuitively suits the ordinary user and makes life easier, or even makes any kind of logical sense."
Sadly Microsoft don't have a monopoly on that. It's these UX experts who get everywhere like a plague of mice. They decide they know what one thing you want to do and tailor the UI to that and only that. The fact that you want to ten other things hasn't occurred to them and the fact that you might want to do at least one of those others at the same time is utterly beyond them (they've been brought up on mobile devices that have tiny screens where you can only do one thing at a time). So they build something that needs full screen to work and their lobotomised UI now makes it a pain, if not right down impossible, to do some of the other things you wanted to do.
>Sadly Microsoft don't have a monopoly on that. It's these UX experts who get everywhere like a plague of mice.
Gnome 3 and Gimp 2.8+, to name but two non-Microsoft pieces of softwarecrap ...
I do not know where these guyz get their weird ideas from, somebody is a head too tall, if you ask me ... worst is, basic immutable software design "RULES" are considered "philosophical verbiage" when one mentions them, such as "principle of least surprise" ... which, imho, is the number 1 rule of software design, if you ignore that, you should not be allowed near digital devices, as simple as that, no, NOT A JOKE ... I try as hard as I can to keep software that does not adhere to that principle/rule off my hardware. Look at the downloads of Gimp ... more 2.6 downloads than ANY OTHER VERSION SINCE, if that is not a sign ... apparently, not to the Gimp team, I have tried telling them and was told about a deity, corporate policy of other BS as the reason (I cannot remember, some standard BS reply), and no, mentioning the number of downloads did not deter them from their foolish decision ... people actually have to go through "heaps" to get the 2.6 version iso the latest, still ... nope, that is how we want to do it ...
"Why do they think that having every damn Office control in the "ribbon" so that the user is stuck in a forest of menu items they'll never use is better than some kind of customisable menu ( with a simple way to bring everything back if you need it)."
I suspect the answer to that is lock-in.
In the ?good old days MS could bring out a new version of Office which would default to writing files the older versions couldn't read so everyone had to buy upgrades because they needed to open those documents and spreadsheets.
Then those terrible people at the Document Foundation pulled a nasty on them. They got their formats made an ISO standard and the big purchasers - i.e. govts. - like specifying support of standards. So they then had to get a standard of their own, a story of its own but not for here.
Having to support their own standard they couldn't play their old games any longer to force upgrades. What was worse, they were having to compete with free and, given that their interface followed fairly standard lines the free competition wasn't that difficult to migrate to for users.
So they changed the UI. All the old users hated being forced to migrate but from MS's perspective this was for the greater good. In the fullness of time there was a new cohort of users who'd been taught the new interface in "CS" lessons in school (Microsoft loves to support education) and if they then joined organisations that had migrated to Open/LibreOffice they found the old-style interface just as difficult as the older users found the ribbon and that introduced pressure to migrate back to MS.
LibreOffice, however, is now fighting back with a move to support for multiple interfaces so that either style can be accommodated. https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/12/21/the-document-foundation-announces-the-muffin-a-new-tasty-user-interface-concept-for-libreoffice/
@Terry 6
I love you and want to have your babies. The fact that I'm in my 60s and male is a mere detail.
Is it just us? Why was there no non-ribbon option after Office 2003? Why does a Windows 10 installation need six different partitions on the HDD? Why has UEFI been so slewed to Microsoft's pre-installed OS that getting your BIOS to accept anything else is a nightmare? Why can't the right panel in Windows 7 Explorer stay in sync when you navigate the left panel with the keyboard? And while I'm on my pet hobby-horse, what happened to the right-click search function after XP? I've paid good money to buy a third party add-on just to get this back. I could go on and on, but it just raises my blood pressure.
Looking on the bright side, in 30 years time we'll all be dead and no-one will know how things used to be and should have continued to be. And they won't care, because they'll all have been absorbed into the MS Borg.
Right: time for my tea. Hope I've cheered you all up a bit.
The other truly annoying thing is that I happily use a Windows phone because it a) isn't Google's and b) works really well. I have no concerns or annoyances from it. I like using it, as it seems do all the tiny group of us who do use one. The one decent thing that Microsoft has produced recently and they well and truly f***ed up their marketing and pretty much put it out of business. At every turn they seemed determined to make the Winphone non-viable. They even managed to screw up the market positioning - jumping between high-end over-expensive might as well get an iPhone and low-end-with-important-bits-missing. without ever covering the middle ground for ordinary users who want function without expensive bling. So, for example, my original had, among other things, no front facing camera. Who'd buy a phone like that in the age of Skype and "selfies". And they failed to make it attractive to devs of the usual "apps" that the competition supported and failed miserably to make alternatives that users might accept instead.
Stopped reading at 'We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective'. Was a big fan and advocate of MS, until WIndows 10..
I am not sure how losing control of my privacy and, more importantly, my young family members' privacy is helping me secure anything..
My next OS is WIndows 7 again again..
> Don't forget that MS have tried to retrofit their spyware telemetry updates to W7.
As a data point, Spybot Anti-Beacon (free util) seems to be helpful for blocking the telemetry bits:
https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/
There are likely other utils which can do the same thing too.
Indeed, the telemetry has been in at least one of the rollups so far... the November one, if I recall. I don't yet know if it is in the December one.
You can get the security only November rollup for 7 from the Windows Catalog, and it won't have the telemetry. This will likely continue for the rest of the time MS is supporting 7 with security updates, as they will get into hot water with their business customers if they try forcing them to take the full rollup just to get the security updates.
Still, MS has already tipped their hand how they intend to "convince" us to install the full rollups... they introduce annoying non-security bugs in the security fixes, but the fix for the introduced bug (not being a security issue, after all) is only in the full rollup, right there next to the spyware. Install only the security updates and you'll have a secure but increasingly buggy Windows until you give in and get the one with the spyware.
Even with that in mind, the telemetry service is easy to identify and disable (or remove) from the Windows services. I installed the full update on one of my PCs and removed the service (not just disabled it) without any issues at all in the month or so it's been since. Windows 7 never came with the spying baked-in like 10 did; it's just tacked on around the edges, and can be removed quite simply, at least for now.
Hmmm, so "Windows 10 is such a substantial improvement over Windows 8" that it is a working environment that "you can live with", eh?
Well, yes, I'd have to agree with that. I'm not aware of a single respect in which 10 is not significantly better than 8, now that they've back-ported all the slurping. (A pity that the important comparison is with 7, because that's what all the corporates are still running.)
"if your hardware can handle it, go with Windows 10 64 bit, w/ at least 16GB of ram."
There's no question of whether the hardware can handle it. The OS and shell works fine with 1GB, even for 64-bit editions if you can trick the setup image into accepting the system in the first place. You'd only need 16GB of RAM if you were running an app that demanded the other 15GB. Also, you will struggle to find an x86-class CPU from the last ten years that isn't x64-class, though they do exist, and struggle to find one from the last five years that doesn't have sufficient graphics on the CPU to handle the Win10 UI. (I'm not sure they do.) You probably *won't* be able to find a system that could run Win8 that can't run Win10 (and rather more efficiently, too). But again, the important comparison for corporates is probably Win7 and there probably are low-end machines running Win7 that would need a RAM or graphics change before the Win10 installation will work.
... I mentally placed Windows 10 in the malware category. If the builtin spyware, forced updates, and dismantling the Pro editions of Windows wasn't bad enough - the Red X Betrayal was the final nail in the coffin.
I even bought a cheap $149 Dell laptop just to run Raspberry Pixel for shits and grins - wouldn't bother before, but now? Fsck 'em.
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