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Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don't do it. |
Once again the caveat that I’m not a professional survey creator, this isn’t a scientific survey, rather I wanted to make sure you, the consumer of Wi
[See the full post at: Patch Lady – Results of the consumer survey]
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
Ground-breaking work. Humbling.
Impressive – thank you Susan – but not terribly surprising.
they built an operating system that is driving consumers to ipads and androids
Here’s a “bake your noodle” take-away thought:
What if Microsoft actually WANTS this outcome?
Imagine that you were the most successful operating system maker on the planet, yet even the most optimistic projections showed that there would be less and less money in doing that in the next 5 to 10 years. If you have more than a few brain cells connected together, would you continue to fund your development staff full steam ahead until the company just failed? Or…
So how DO you get OUT of a business you were so successful in? You can’t really just stop, cold turkey, right? Wall Street wouldn’t like that very much.
One way would be to make it SOUND like you’re keeping it going, without really putting serious effort into serious new features. Stop advancing the state of the art, and while you’re at it make it incrementally more irritating and expensive to use. Someone else will surely develop the other major operating system in the world into something consumers then businesses will ultimately want…
All you have to do is make enough money from inertia to keep the lights on in the Windows division for a decade or so…
We see what you did there, Microsoft.
-Noel
Part of me agrees with this theory, but the greater part finds an explanation in Microsoft’s cynical pandering to the stock market and trade press; short-term tactics posing as long-term strategies; management’s readiness to believe their own press releases; and the incompetence and stupidity that take root when a company has gone on too long as a dominant player.
In the financial press there has been no coverage, so far as I know, of the issues covered in Susan’s survey. Think about that disconnect.
I think Noel Carboni’s very much on the right path, but I still have a nagging suspicion that this is Microsoft’s stubborn attempt to introduce a form of control on its users. After all, I have to disable WU every morning after boot-up nowadays, so WS isn’t giving up!
But over and beyond all this, I think we all owe Susan Bradley an enormous debt of gratitude for her very hard work. Without her, we’d all be up a creek, no question!
I’m curious to see if we took all the open ended questions and made statistics about how many times each element has been mentioned. That’s a huge job.
Looking at correlations between some things demanded would probably show different profiles of users. Some that like things simple as in no bloat and no changes, others that have different priorities, telemetry worries scattered around other profiles… work for a statistician.
I wonder if Microsoft do such marketing efforts and chase a certain market they see or if they just think a marketing strategy without looking at what different users want, but rather where they think they can position themselves vs the competition and then they just try it.
My guess is they have Apple envy, associating the success of the early phones to rapid development cycle and the frequent introduction of features and models to look innovative. They are not only late to the party, but the party is gone. Apple got it last year that innovation sells up to a point, but quality and stability can be a deal breaker and that is why they admitted they made a mistake with IOS11 and they committed to make things better for IOS12 on the stability front and at the expense of new features. The thing is, phones and tablets are already much less exciting than they were, actual models are good enough to many, so quality and durability might become more and more important than before, just like the PC. They won’t turn the PC market into the phone market of 5 years ago. You need to adapt to the market, not try to change the market. You can also try to identify an emerging new market, but I doubt that is what Microsoft has been doing.
There was a time when a new feature genuinely solved a real problem. For example, early word processing programs did not have any spell checking. Spell checking was a feature people really wanted and understood its value. Now there are no new features of that type for an OS. And many of the new features can be easily done as as standalone system. But underlying adding new features, users have always wanted a degree of stability and control.
Rather than conspiracy theories and evil schemes on Microsoft’s part, I choose to believe the current Windows situation is just due to a massive disconnect on the part of MS senior management.
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
No need for evil schemes: it’s enough for the top mangers to keep their eyes nailed to their own bottom line every three months, and then draw their own conclusions as to how to keep it profitable. Conclusions that might or might not be right, longer term, but that’s what they’ll go with. And not just at MS.
Then there are also the grandiose schemes that some overconfident captains of industry at times come up with and quite sincerely believe in, particularly in the computing and communications business; schemes that, eventually, fall flat in the real world.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV
Personally, I don’t think the MS management gives a c**p about consumer PC’s anymore. They have moved to cloud/azure and systems for business. All of their actions & statements show me that they have given up on us lowly consumers. MS has had massive lay-offs of the very people that test the WU’s before release. MS has even made statements to the effect that they are more interested in the cloud than personal PC’s.
Anyway, Thanks Susan, for the opportunity to vent in the survey no matter what the outcome is. 🙂
Don't take yourself so seriously, no one else does 🙂
All W10 Pro at 22H2,(2 Desktops, 1 Laptop).
How would you like a job title like this …
“Corporate VP of Modern Life and Devices”
It exists at Microsoft. Last month Microsoft appointed Yusuf Mehdi as “Corporate VP of Modern Life and Devices”. WaaS is not going to make this guy’s job easy. If the results from Susan’s survey were to ever reach his desk, he would understand why.
“… But Microsoft is sorely lacking the services and clever and useful ideas that people might actually use on a daily basis, no matter where they work. Any ideas? It looks like Redmond could use some.
Although I am in agreement with the results, the survey is perhaps biased as it was aimed at users of this forum where people often come when they are dissatisfied. Satisfied consumers probably never come here and would not have been included in the poll.
The survey is not scientific if any really are. But I have talked to proles who detest W10 and are considering switching to something else. People who have never heard of askwoody.com or ghacks.net. So there is quite a bit of dissatisfaction but will it reach a tipping point is hard to determine. I would read the surveys as saying MS has serious problems with W10 even if the results are skewed.
Just having so many dissatisfied customers says something, all by itself.
In my circle of family and friends, the ‘dissatisfied’ customers, not at AskWoody, have had their computers broken by updating. They don’t particularly know enough to attribute it to updating and W10… and if not helped to reinstall a functioning older OS, their machines are just plain broke… and they end up buying new ones, only to have the process repeated. These are not the same as satisfied, happy customers… as much as it may make Microsoft and hardware manufacturers happy. People will be primed to leave to better alternatives (anything that doesn’t BSOD or otherwise break their computers, is a low, low, bar).
Non-techy Win 10 Pro and Linux Mint experimenter
Suasan,
You’re a jewel.
The only surprise I got from a quick glance at the results was that “”Most consultants are satisfied with Win 10 meeting their needs.” Maybe it means they’re constantly on call to fix the thing…
Remember the old “Consultant’s Song”? (To the tune of “The Volga Boatman“)
“On the one hand,
On the other hand,
We get paid either waaay,
We get paid either waaay…”
🙂
Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330 ("The Tank"), Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Newbie
--
"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty
Thank you, @Susan Bradley.
For me, it is helpful to find that I’m not alone, that others are having similar experiences. I’m not hopeful regarding Microsoft, as they seem committed to forcing their way onto Home users for Beta testing (which is entirely different from providing actually increased privacy, security and new and improved features).
It is reassuring to me that someone, so knowledgeable, and who is very pro-patching, is taking time to listen to end users. Hopefully the patterns are clear…
My concern is that increasing Microsoft’s awareness will trigger additional marketing/advertising to obfuscate what the problems are, rather than acknowledging and addressing them… not the tactics of an ethical business, but typical of short-term profit chasing, and a denial of responsibility for negative consequences pushed off onto others.
Microsoft could easily get Windows 7 users to migrate to W10… have a one click, complete privacy option, respect settings, offer a long term stable option, don’t advertise on my OS, and allow finer control of updating so the really bad patches being pushed out could be avoided. There is nothing on W10 worth giving those up for…
I really do love my Windows 7…
Non-techy Win 10 Pro and Linux Mint experimenter
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