Two thumbs down: Capossela’s explanation of the Get Windows 10 debacle

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The blogosphere is abuzz with reflections on Chris Capossela’s explanation of what happened with the “Get Windows 10” debacle. An anonymous poster her
[See the full post at: Two thumbs down: Capossela’s explanation of the Get Windows 10 debacle]

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Fool me once… Microsoft lied to and fooled customers too many times; and the ‘Get Windows 10’ campaign was taken from the playbook of the organized crime.

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Microsoft’s handling of the Windows 10 situation pushed me over the edge and I recently purchased a Apple I-Pad Pro. I would like to have purchased a Mac Book Pro, but they are too expensive for my taste. I love how you navigate through the I-Pad via apps instead of individual programs. At age ’73’ I was concerned about learning a new system, but the I-Pad was very easy to learn. Of course, at my age my time here on earth is limited, but while I am still here I will never go back to Microsoft.

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What’s the fallout many of us are still suffering?

It was only a problem for people who don’t read dialog boxes; “Click here to change upgrade schedule or cancel scheduled upgrade”.

The “X” means close dialog, not cancel scheduled process.

I think it’s reasonable that Microsoft only realized in retrospect that this confused some.

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Why do marketeers have so much say in how a product is designed?

Maybe the smarter people who are qualified to design a high tech product – the engineers – should be setting the direction, and the marketeers should go back to selling what the engineers make.

Who in their right mind would give marketeers so much power? We see time and again that they can’t be trusted with it.

Lastly, who thinks it’s okay to keep pushing boundaries and redefining “normal” to benefit Microsoft and predate customers? Let’s not lose focus on the height and breadth of the pile they’re shoveling!

If we thought it was a practice of malware to shove a foot in the door and download a payload then, why should it be any more okay now?

If the “other guys” are doing it, shame on them! Don’t BE like them!!

-Noel

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+1

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Microsoft confused everybody – and the aberrant “X” was just a small part of it. I spent more than a year covering the debacle. And now they’re reaping what they sowed.

Fallout? A near complete lack of trust in Windows, and to a somewhat lesser extent Microsoft.

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Good choice!

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Not to mention an absolute determination not to have anything to do with Windows 10 ever, under any circumstances. If you try to force something that’s supposed to be optional on me against my will and through the use of trickery then don’t hold your breath in anticipation of my opting to go for it later.

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I am *profoundly* grateful to have found both:

1. Josh Mayfield’s GWX Control Panel in the nick of time. My main PC had not yet been infected with MS’ malware, and

2. Your site, Woody. I come here every day, usually several times, and your site is my first stop after I fire up Chrome and check for any Chrome updates. The information I’ve found here from you and all the contributors here has been voluminous and eye-opening. You are truly doing yeomans’ work, and I hope to be able to help you keep your site “in the black” here in a couple months. I have a new rig I’ve been scrimping and saving for to build first, though. The old gray mare is, well, old and gray. 🙂

P.S. I guess I’ll go back to being an anime princess. 😉

Happy Holidays to all and here’s to a great 2017! 😀

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Thankx!

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Easier to ask for forgiveness afterwards than to ask for permission first seems to have been MS’s strategy with Windows 10.

They knew exactly what they were doing right from the start in my opinion.

On a side note, I actually tried Windows 10 (Home) on a spare SSD I have here a few says ago. It lasted about 2 hours before I ended up wiping it – again. That’s probably about half a dozen times I’ve done that since W10’s debut last year. It is a confusing mess compared with Windows 7.

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As I wrote Woody, a while back, while I wouldn’t call “security” a complete red herring, it was not what drove the push to Win 10. What drove Win 10 was MS’s decision that big data, and AI, are the future and the future of that, for MS in large measure, is tied into Cortana (and later retro-fitting Win 7 for telemetrics). This is why, as we saw earlier this week, via the experiments some of those on this board performed to kill Cortana, Cortana is so baked into Win 10. For those of you who haven’t seen it, watch Morgan Spurlock’s Inside Man, Ep. 1, Seas. 3 Morgan Bot:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXfb5kstCGc (sound is funky) The visit to MS starts at around the 18 minute mark.
MS can talk about security all it wants, but the goal for Win 10 was big data, Cortana and improving MS’s AI algorithms. That’s why they gave it away for free for the first year, pushed hard to get in on as many computers as possible and, when that wasn’t working as well as expected, they changed the protocol for installation.

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@ b ……. Fyi, b4 the April 2016 “sneak-attack” by M$, Win 7/8.1 cptr users who got hit with the GWX dialog box were able to cancel the scheduled Win 10 upgrade by clicking the red “X”. M$ quietly changed this UI in April 2016.

In April 2016, to actually cancel the scheduled Win 10 upgrade, the Win 7/8.1 users had to click a small n non-obvious link for the word “here” in the dialog box.
……. When “here” was clicked, the user would be taken to a new tab/dialog box for cancelling the scheduled Win 10 upgrade.

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“….but finding the right balance where you’re not stepping over the line of being too aggressive is something we tried…”

And therein lies the essence of their problem.

Why was there a necessity to go “”right up to the line”” “without stepping over it”?

Why test the boundaries when you already have 100’s of millions of loyal users?

Where is your professionalism and class?

Any anyone, and I mean ANYONE, within microsoft that says they didn’t know the implications of changing the decades old function of the X from close to ANYTHING else, before they implemented it, is a flat out liar.

What they actually didn’t know was their “stupid” user base isn’t as ignorant as they wanted to believe.

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Aside from the reprehensible GWX tactics that were employed by MS, I think it is fair to point out, at least from my perspective, that MS is generally force feeding a business template on Windows users with a heavy hand. Without warning or discussion, they suddenly dictate a new W10 like patching protocol for W7 and W8/8.1 systems. The new cumulative patching process limits user options in navigating the perils of MS’s tortured patching history. Thais seems all too familiar of late and is part and parcel of a pattern that many long time Windows users do not appreciate. There are folks that post on this site that opine in one form or another, that the typical user is too stupid or ill-informed to manage their own system and that all the force feeding is for their own good. Alternatively, if folks raise any concern about a patch or update of third party software pushed through WU, they are to be dismissed as being captivated in the rapture of FUD. This is mostly BS in my opinion and the behavior of MS has not been in the best interest of Windows users. There is undoubtedly a continuum of users in terms of their general computing knowledge and capability. This is to be expected as many users are using computers in other professional, business or occupational activities. The imputed costs imposed on these users by virtue of time consumed tracking and dealing with MS antics the past few years are not inconsequential. The deterioration in attitude toward MS and Windows is likely to persist until something fundamentally changes. I suspect that until there are significant personnel changes in Redmond, the immediate prospect is more of the same.

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HiFlyer

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Chris Caposella said in this video that the worst thing you can do is offend your fans. The rest don’t even know about it.

Well, he hit the nail on the head in the first part of that statement. That is exactly what MS did. I don’t know of a single MS fan left. But he is wrong about the others. So many innocent bystanders that did not know much about Microsoft were offended right into their pocketbooks.

The get windows campaign was nothing short of malware that was probably the most effective malware ever produced. After all, who would be suspicious of the most trusted company in the world?

I have no way of counting, but I’d bet the number of computers that were turned into useless bricks by this malware, numbers into the millions. Those people are not likely to go back for another Microsoft product. And, by the way, most of them weren’t what he referred to as fans. They were just ordinary Janes/Joes. The fans, like me, changed into experts in protecting against the malware.

From my reading and please correct me if I am wrong, the real underlying problem at MS is the complete loss of the real MS people who made MS what it is.

My conclusion is Windows is dying and will be dead in the next few years. Instead MS will be “selling” hardware (mostly through OEMs) that has something on it named Windows, but it really is/will be a platform to collect data in order to sell things.

Meanwhile the get windows campaign has taken on new clothing in the form of the much respected Windows Update being used to make Windows 7 computers into sort of junior semi-Windows 10 computers.

I do not expect the new Windows to be a useful tool for doing work. It will/is a device for email and searching and a bit of shopping, much like an iPhone.

As far as listening is concerned, from the street, MS “listens” through far off, difficult to understand, people who have nothing to do with MS other than their current contract and certainly are not being paid to tell MS what their “customers” are saying. Bottom line: Microsoft has not met a customer that it considers worth listening to.

That’s the way it is on the street!

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b sez “I think it’s reasonable that Microsoft only realized in retrospect that this confused some.”

“I believe it. My wife says, “Darling, you won’t believe it, but I found the most adorable baby on our doorstep and I’ve decided to keep it for our very own. Now you won’t believe it, but it’s got exactly my eyes and nose.” Why does she keep saying I won’t believe it? I believe it! I believe it.”

Take the red pill…don’t click the red x

??

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HiFlyer

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They not only shot themselves in the foot with GWX, they chopped off an arm, poked an eye out, and murdered their mother and grandmother.

It’s unfortunate that things escalated like they did, because 10 is a very good OS, but at this point, they’ll forever be in Vista and 8-like damage control, only this time, there won’t be a Windows 11 to save the day and divert attention like there was with Windows 7.

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Fallout? Read this thread and a hundred more like it. Pretty much everyone now agrees that Microsoft sucks.

Oh, that’s right, the news is delayed by a few years where you are on Alpha Centauri.

-Noel

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While MS was pushing its malware (AKA Win 10) on millions, Woody’s site was serving as the best anti-malware “program” you could buy. Every time MS changed the way they delivered their malware, Woody told us how to avoid it. Kudos to Woody!!!!

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HiFlyer

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Validation that corporations are evil.

As to listening to customers as I said before monopolists usually dont do that and when they start losing their monopoly they dk anything other than force.

Btw, regarding Cortana being a cog: We got a glimpse abt the future: Windows central reports abt a new oobe PC set up based on it. A monopolist appreciates the value of complete control to save its monopoly.

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Many of my clients are seniors. Most of them thought that they had no option but to upgrade to Windows 10. Microsoft kept telling them that it was free only until July 29, 2016 (hurry, hurry, you must upgrade NOW). Microsoft never explained to them that Windows 7 was still good (officially supported) until 2020.
I can’t tell you how many times that I reverted machines back to the previous operating system within the first 30 days. I can’t tell you how many times I used the fabulous GWX Control Panel to prevent Windows 10 from automatically installing itself on a clients machine.
Woody, you are a gentleman and a scholar. Your professional investigative work is much appreciated and very much needed. Best wishes.

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This tactic was designed to trick people. Their only objective was to PUSH the novice to W10. Once clicking on X (close) the update was scheduled for now or tonight. That is coercion.

I have no problem with somebody saying that they like W10. That is an individual’s personal preference. I do have a problem with somebody who supports Microsoft’s obscene behavior. This poster is supporting the latter, not the value of the product itself.

Blaming the victim is pathetic.

1 user thanked author for this post.

HiFlyer

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I saw Capossela’s explanation.

Comparing numbers to my personal experience, I would guess at least half of the 400M (Microsoft’s number) Users now on Win10 were bamboozled into its use one way or another.

The incident of the “X” was just the tip of the iceberg, certainly just the apex of unethical behavior.

The insincerity and hubris on Microsoft’s part is/was overwhelming.

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@ Woody Engineers are brilliant and there designs are great BUT the engineers DO NOT have to work on what they design. Just like automobiles, the engineers develop them and the developments are put together. They look great and partially run great but when the mechanic has to work on them, the developments are very hard to work on because the “perfect design was not thought thru for ease of service”. Does this make any sense to anyone? MS has done this to all of us!

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This whole episode has also changed me from a mild critic of Microsoft to a vehement opponent.
Will stay with 7 as long as I can ride it out.
Then, I’ll go ABM. Anything but Microsoft. I never liked Apple. But I’ll be willing to set that aversion aside. I step I never thought I would or could make… In the meanwhile, many thanks Woody! You’re helping riding out with 7 into the sunset. Not an ambitious goal, but it’s all I want.

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C’mon b, that’s the kind of absolute crap Malwaresoft shills and apologists have been repeating for months, and clearly disregards the company’s own guidelines for designing dialogue boxes.

You can read the entire description here:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn742499(v=vs.85).aspx

if you’re so inclined, but here’s the most relevant instruction in this case:

“The Close button on the title bar should have the same effect as the Cancel or Close button within the dialog box. Never give it the same effect as OK.”

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To: Woody and all the participants on AskWoody.com: HAVE A HAPPY AND MERRY HOLIDAY SEASON AND A HAPPIER NEW YEAR AHEAD!!!!!

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MS never listened to users because monopolies don’t need to. Over time this is destructive of the monopoly and by the time they start losing it they only know to bully or lie in order to save it

Incidentally, remember the comments that Cortana is a cog in something bigger? We just gotta glimpse of that: Windows Central reports on a new PC set up out of the box experience based on Cortana. There is nobody like a monopolist losing monopoly to appreciate complete control over the use of the product.

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Been a dual booter of Linux and Windows on all boxes until the debacle. Now, only a couple of boxes are dual boot because of legacy Windows only applications. Windows is not allowed on the Internet. New equipment will be Linux only (I build my own).

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Bingo

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Microsoft’s utterly myopic “nothing to see here” attitude to this situation does not surprise me in the least but it’s nice to see confirmation of it. I’ve not seen the Windows weekly episode yet but do they take him to task on this? I suspect not but what’s done is done now, they only have themselves to blame for acting like a malware vendor.

I got sacked during March as a direct result of it though, it was during the latest round of their malware campaign at the time: my seemingly endless battle to keep KB3035583 the hell off 40-50 PCs in a small business. So yes, i keenly felt the fallout from it and Microsoft have successfully obliterated my trust in them, probably forever more.

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In Microsoft’s very own Design Guidelines at:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn742499%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

it actually says:

“The Close button on the title bar should have the same effect as the Cancel or Close button within the dialog box. Never give it the same effect as OK.”

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Woody, I think the “complete lack of trust” is true for a certain number of users, many of them who post here more or less regularly.
I don’t have the numbers of the web site hits, but I am convinced that there are many more readers who have never posted and will never post who come to this site or InfoWorld for pure information, like they would read Thurott or Mary Jo or Susan. We don’t know if those users trust or not Microsoft, but normal consumer behaviour is not to use a product which they don’t trust. The total numbers of Windows users do not show this global loss of trust.
Even more, unlike what we have seen when Windows 8/8.1 were released, government departments and agencies and large multinational companies are moving in the direction of adopting Windows 10 and not Linux or MacOS for desktop.

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Noel, it seems to be much easier to design and manufacture a product than to sell it in an overcrowded market. Too much competition is as bad as no competition, especially for those having quality as an important criteria, because given too many choices, there is no way most consumers would be able to select the best product suitable for their situation. In extreme situations it takes more time to understand all the factors required in making a good selection than is the useful lifetime of the product. Add the fast cycle of production and obsolescence for the products.
So instead of competing for quality, the current competition is for visibility, perceived low price or so called “free”) and who is better at this than the marketing and sales people?

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I disagree, people behave instinctivly and after using Windows for years people have an expectation that clicking the “X” will end the process which instigated the dialog box. Changing that behaviour was a deliberate trap.

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This is a much deeper problem beyond Ms and their unethical behavior.

I proposed more than once that designers should b forced to use what they design for at least 3-6 months.

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Never try to do the right thing against the grain in a corporation if u wanna keep ur job or be promoted.

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You are so right, Brian. I am one of those servicers. I refused to work on Windows 8 computers after trying very hard for hours and days. I was so frustrated because the names of things got changed to new names that made no sense, and they were hidden away in places you would never think to look. There did not seem to be any rhyme or logic to what they did.

So far, I have done next to nothing with Windows 10, but I strongly suspect it is the same.

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I do the same thing here. Linux online. Windows offline.

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This post gets my vote for 2016’s top ten on this site.

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The most disturbing part of that Windows Weekly interview, to me, is the total sellout of Foley and Thurrott. They rely on the good will of MS for their inside info and will not/can not hold Capossela’s feet to the fire on any subject. WW just rolled over and let the mouthpiece go on and on about nothing. Not a word about why MS did these despicable acts, just smile and nod, Paul and Mary Jo, while the snake oil salesman blabs on and on about what’s good for all of us. I guess we’ve only seen the beginning of Redmond’s atrocities.

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Yeah. There was never any promotion potential in that role and, admittedly, i was so worried about machines being taken over with win 10, causing many hours of downtime to get things back, that i did approach it in an overly zealous even aggressive way. I didn’t lose a machine to 10 on my watch though! Ha! Suck on that, micro****. But yeah, guess i should’ve cared less. Meh.

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Yet, Windows 10 has 23.72% of desktop OS market share, second only to Windows 7…

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=214&qpnp=1&qptimeframe=M

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Steve nails it. Is it already too late for Redmond? http://www.wimp.com/steve-jobs-predicts-how-apple-will-fail/

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Conflict of interest of trade media from day one: either advertising income or access.

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https://medium.com/@searls/giving-windows-a-chance-39f4d7f1b93c#.rvgixxvp5

To laugh or cry?

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Not just easier, but profitable.

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Indeed. Check out the first evidence on Windows Central: Automation of PC setup via Cortana.
The time for controlling your PC is over.

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Get used to it, it’s the future.

The only way to avoid it is massive revolt. Kvetching here won’t do it, as you can see.

Don’t hold your breath.

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As this year, and the past 21 months, come to a close, it is amazing to me how my impressions of Microsoft as my operating system provider have completely changed. I now know that it is extremely unlikely that I will ever in the future have a desktop or laptop computer that runs a Microsoft operating system made after Windows 7 x64 SP1. I have been a loyal fan and user of Microsoft operating systems ever since MS-DOS 4.01 and the days before the mouse. I have had pc’s with every Windows OS from before Windows ME through XP and Vista and now have Windows 7 x64 SP1 fully updated (Group A) on a desktop and a laptop, as well as a high-end desktop pc running Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS Linux OS, which had previously been purchased with Windows 8.1 and upgraded to Windows 10 (first 1507, then 1511, then 1607). I hated 8.1 and had so many annoying problems with 10 that I gave up and switched to Ubuntu. The amount of disk-thrashing alone that goes on in Windows 10, and the constant daily updating involving hundreds of megabytes of downloads is enough to switch to Linux. Microsoft really needs to consider and think about why someone like me, after the last 21 months, and after nearly 30 years of using Microsoft operating systems and software, will now never have a computer that runs a Microsoft operating system built and sold after 2009. What went wrong Microsoft?

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They developed the Win10 UI to conquer the phone market and they had to drop it for several billions loss, with their universal strategy down the drain and serious professionals Win users in a lurch, losing all trust.

You can’t get more incompetent than that.

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Not caring is ingrained in the corp culture and instittionalized via the rewards and punishments system. You can either make a living or protect your integrity, but not both.
Those who deny this fool either others or themselves.

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Btw incompetence or dishonesty by Ms mgmt is newsworthy. Dont ppl have to know?

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@ ch100 ……. The US Dept of Defence just awarded M$ a nearly US$1 billion contract for Win 10 support likely as a reward for collaborating with the US govt in setting up Win 10 as an NSA spyware.
.
Since early 2016, cptr buyers could only find new OEM Win 10 cptrs at the stores.
……. On top of that many Win 7/8.1 cptr users who had upgraded to Win 10 had their cptrs bricked by M$’s forced auto-updates n upgrades = most of them had to buy new OEM Win 10 cptrs.
……. Such adoption numbers for Win 10 bc of lack of choice does not equal trust in M$.

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When Marketing gets it wrong in so many ways, as MS did with the GWX Campaign, it usually results in a loss of sales and an opportunity for the competition to realize some gains. The media criticizes and all hell breaks loose. The corporation’s CEO is expected to step forward and issue an immediate mea culpa to save the company’s reputation. That did not happen with Microsoft. Why not?

The obvious fact that MS is a monopoly played into it. Giving the new product away for free to their low-end segment users was another factor – there was no hit to the bottom line. The Executives at MS were 100% behind the aggressive push to W10 as they did not want another W8 or Vista fiasco. They were also not going to tolerate W7 becoming the new XP.

For a full year it was as though the MS Executives were in the witness protection program. The mainstream media was distracted and MS had its bots operational on social media. All was under control as far as Redmond was concerned.

This interview with the head guy in Marketing who believes that MS got it right by saying ‘a good balance except for a two week period of unnecessary pain due to a step too far’ is an ivory tower view of reality. He would have been better off maintaining his vow of silence.

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Woody, I think the whole situation can be summed up in four words.

Microsoft just doesn’t care.

Seasons Greetings to all !

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+1

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I don’t see any indication of a quid pro quo.

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I’m going the test machine route. Once I’m happy with that machine’s Linux config, my desktop will convert, and any key data will go to an offline Win 7 machine.

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@ T ……. That means yr SMB employer wanted the free upgrade to Win 10 Pro very much = saved about US$10,000 for 50 Win 7 Pro cptrs.
……. U should hv just created Win 7 Pro System Image backups n let yr employer do the free upgrade to Win 10 Pro, in case he/she regretted the decision later.
……. Just saying.

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Many of the regular readers and posters on this site and others have personally noticed sleazy behavior by MS on machines they or support. We are typically supporting SOHO type users who are eligible for the enterprise licensing. We have been burned anywhere from a 1st to 3rd degree burn and did not like the experience. Enterprise users have not yet been burned nor has there been a nasty data breach pinned on MS’ telemetry yet. Like many, I cannot unequivocally recommend W10 to any SOHO user who is a current MS user. For most I would strongly recommend other options after evaluating each situation.

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Spot on. Talk to your actual customers and listen to their gripes, concerns, complaints, likes, and praise. Be humble, no one knows what all the needs and nuances are unless you ask and listen.

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@ woody ……. There r a lot of things we don’t see but that does not mean some secretive n bad things r not happening, eg whistle-blowing by Edward Snowden, Wikileaks, etc.
.
“….as a reward for M$ for collaborating …”.
……. Beside this reward, M$ may also be a “protected class” of collaborator-companies who are free from being prosecuted by the US govt for abusive business practices.
.
With the DoD contract n endorsement of M$’s Win 10, the US govt may also be trying to act like Pied Piper, ie to lead others into foolishly trusting M$ n their Win 10 = pulling wool over people’s eyes = more Win 10 cptrs for the US govt to spy/eye on.

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@ b ……. Fyi, in April 2016, M$ had also sneaked GWX KB3035583 into the security update for IE 11, ie KB3139929.
……. B4 April 2016, many tech-savvy Win 7/8.1 cptr users who had rejected Win 10, hid the GWX KB3035583 “security” update.

On/after Patch Tuesday April 2016, when these users installed KB3139929 for IE 11, they inadvertently also installed GWX KB3035583. This led to the scheduled Win 10 upgrade dialog box appearing on their Win 7/8.1 cptrs. When they quickly clicked the red “X”, thinking they were cancelling the scheduled upgrade n closing the dialog box, instead they were auto-upgraded to Win 10 about 2 hours later or after a shutdown.

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Louie, I could not agree with you more. I stopped watching it when I realized that it just about a Microsoft commercial.

I swear, Woody is just about the only tech writer that is willing to call that stinking pile what it is. I admire and respect that in Woody, immensely.

The emperor has no clothes and those two were admiring his fine clothes. REALLY!

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Mine too, Jim

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messager, many of those bricked PCs were not replaced by PCs of any kind, but were replaced with pads and smart phones. Many of them were replaced with Win7 new or refurb machines as well.

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@ JNP ……. That may be true about M$ n Win 10 but not everybody wants AI, Big Data collection, a self-driving car, self-flying plane, Tesla, speedy Porshe, big SUV, virtual reality, 3D graphics, 60″ 4k OLED TV, 1Gbps Internet speed, etc.
……. IOW, most of these “advanced” features inside Win 10 should hv been made optional n removable by M$, no matter how “good” they may be = eg less bloat n bandwidth usage.

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Doug, I could not agree more. After 30+ years of being a MS booster, I cannot recommend a single product they sell, and am embarrassed at having previously recommended MS products to my clients.

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Microsoft is to operating systems what Hola is to VPN’s – have a safe and happy christmas y’all!

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What a perfect summary of the failure of Microsoft to have ANY sensitivity to the concerns of end users. Maybe the marketing segment thinks they can market anything, but in the long run a good product is necessary for long term success.

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So, how many people are like my daughter, who has simply turned to her smart phone and given up on using a computer, only because being updated to Windows 10 (she was “smart” and kept auto-updates on)and its updates has bricked her laptop- a newer and better computer than mine? Capossela talked about OEM partners. Hopefully some of those partners are realizing that they are losing sales because of Windows 10 and following Microsoft’s lead. She, and others in my family, aren’t interested in Windows 10 any more, and don’t know how to get back to 7 or 8.1. Technically she is a Windows 10 user… but has gone from using it daily, to sighing and wishing it would work… She had “invested” in programs for her photograpy, her writing, and her gaming… and all of them were made useless. She is half a continent away… and has a busy and meaningful life. Right now, and maybe never, it doesn’t include a computer… and she grew up with them… but having to start over and over and over with “new” everything is no longer enticing in any way. Lots of people in her shoes. Yep, they go with the newest apps or games, but the investment in a computer as a tool to work with is gone. Microsoft has downgraded their product to a toy for end-users. May the business crowd be more fortunate.

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Worse, the very things that you relied on and found useful have not just been renamed or moved, but deliberately removed.

It would be different, maybe, if Windows 10 provided what I needed… but it doesn’t… and it provides too many things I don’t want or need… and is fixated on updating to change what I have found desirable or useful, subversively.

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The cloud is here! 🙂
What is new?

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Yes, it is remarkable. 🙂

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@T
A single Group Policy would have resolved it.
Are you a Systems Administrator?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3080351

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Jim, I’m assuming you mean this entire article of Woody’s and the sensible comments in it? Or even just CT’s admirably succinct summation?

If so, then easily top ten if not top three.

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Yet, Windows 10 – free and pushed ultra aggressively – has, after a couple of years gotten up to HALF the market share of an OS that people had to pay hundreds of dollars for and is out of support.

Color me NOT impressed.

-Noel

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Couldn’t agree more gentlemen.

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Same. I’ve been using MS operating systems since MS-DOS 3.3 (and I did have a mouse back then… Logitech serial mouse with a DB9 connector), and to me, Windows on the PC has always been the platform for regular people (as opposed to often snobby Apple users with their costly hardware).

I learned to loathe Apple back when I was using the Commodore 64; the snooty Apple II types were just intolerable, and the premium prices they charged for fairly mundane hardware (it was still a 6502; my Commodore’s 6510 was a small step up from there). So when I built my first PC in 1990 and inadvertently joined the Mac/PC debate, the attitude coming from Mac users just fit right in with what I’d already come to expect from Apple users, and Apple’s prices for hardware and arbitrary restrictions (one button mouse only! ‘Cause I say so!) were right in line with that.

I remember seeing an ad on a bulletin board from someone selling a slightly used Mac 1.44MB floppy drive for $200… I’d just bought a brand new Teac one for my PC for $30 at the time I built it. No doubt it wasn’t an apples to Apples comparison (har har), as the Apple drive I think had some on-board electronics my PC drive didn’t, but a used one going for more than six times what I’d paid for a new one really seemed nuts.

I still don’t care for Apple or its products. The locked-down iOS devices would drive me crazy if I owned one, and Apple’s efforts to thwart people from jailbreaking their own hardware (and other assorted things, like DRM chips on charging cables and bricking phones that had unapproved touchscreens installed as replacement parts) are again right in line with all the reasons I’ve always considered Apple to be bad guys.

Now, though, after more than a couple of decades of evangelizing Windows, I’m in a position where I’d have to recommend buying a Mac to anyone who was looking to buy a PC and didn’t know where to start. I cannot and would not suggest anything Windows 10, and 7’s days are numbered, if you can find a PC that has it preinstalled anymore (and for ordinary users, it has to come preinstalled), and it’s getting a lot of what makes 10 unusable for people not ready to screen their updates.

I don’t know of any PCs offhand that come with Linux preinstalled, and if I suggested such an unusual OS (we’re talking about people who need a PC recommendation in almost 2017 here; for them, Linux is esoteric and weird), I’d end up being the on-call tech support team forevermore.

What a woeful time it is for operating systems! Windows 10, Android, and iOS are, IMO, all unfit for purpose, and I don’t much care for Macs (or their high prices for old hardware). I do like Linux, but it’s not going to work for everyone.

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So as I said, X means close not cancel; and only people who don’t read were confused.

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You mean that 10 managed to beat the failure known as Windows 8, the other failure known as Windows Vista, and the dead-man-walking Windows XP?

Considering what it took to get to that point… making it free, the adware, the unwanted downloads, the forced upgrades, the dark patterns to trick people into installing it when they were obviously trying not to, having it as a Windows Update… that they managed to beat two failed versions of Windows and a 15 year old obsolete version really isn’t anything to crow about. It’s more of a show of the effectiveness of Microsoft’s malware-like “marketing” than of the acceptance of Windows 10. If you want to know how 10’s really doing on its own merit, look at the gain for the months when MS was no longer forcing it down everyone’s throat.

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“If Microsoft had anything like a “listening system” in effect, they would’ve heard the screams starting Apr. 7.”

They heard them. Picture Monty Burns from the Simpsons putting his fingers together in that way he does, saying “Eeeeexceeeeleeent.” This was not overdoing it, being tone-deaf, or failing to understand what their customers wanted. This was a deliberate act of aggression by MS against its own customers.

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@ Elly ……. About yr daughter’s laptop being auto-upgraded to Win 10 n then being bricked by Win 10’s forced auto-updates, if it was an OEM Win 7 laptop n the BIOS settings can be accessed, it can still be restored to Win 7 by a helpful tech-savvy cptr user friend.
.
That is, with another working Windows cptr, download the appropriate Win 7 Edition iso file n burn it onto a DVD+R or USB-stick, eg by using the ImgBurn or USB Universal Installer program.

Via the BIOS setting of the bricked Win 7 laptop, eg by pressing F12 or F9 immediately after power-up n the display of the OEM logo(eg Dell/HP/Acer), change the Boot order to boot the laptop either from the just-burnt Win 7 Install DVD+R or Win 7 Install USB-stick. Then install Win 7.
……. Activate Win 7 by entering its Product Key, which should be found on a sticker attached to the bottom of the laptop or inside the battery bay.
.
Alternatively, do the same to install Linux Mint 18.1 or Ubuntu 16.04.

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Louie, I just clicked on that link you provided. It really hit home for me. I was with Xerox for 15 years (1967 to 1982). I lived what he described. Xerox was truly a marketing driven company born out the ideas of a genius techie.

What Steve did not talk about was the incident at Xerox when they bought a computer company and completely trashed it in about 2 years. They trashed it because the people who ran Xerox (marketing types), had no idea how to manage or do anything with their new acquisition.

When the first early PC that Xerox manufactured came along, I was in IT. I told the IT manager that this little box was the future of IT and that she had two choices. Either figure out how to make the conversion or get lost in the dust. She thought I was insane. I left shortly after that.

The marketing folks at Microsoft have fired all the people there who have any idea of what the “product” of Microsoft is, and they are in the process of trashing it.

You are witnessing the failure of the biggest tech company in history, due to utter mismanagement.

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With the advent of Win10 Microsoft began to view non-corporate users as an exploitable resource useful only for free beta testing, intrusive data mining and advertising revenue generation.

Microsoft no longer sees individuals as a customers deserving of quality products and service.

I haven’t yet decided what my next OS will be. I’m still evaluating several Linux distros, including Mint, Debian and Centos.

However, I can say with absolute certainty that my next OS sure as hell won’t be Win10!

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I meant CT’s post. Likewise, would give this entire thread a top 10.

Both accurately reflect the long period of suspicion, frustration, and consequences/conclusions that users have endured/adopted. Marshall Field (and others of his era) “advocated that customer complaints should be treated seriously so that customers do not feel cheated or deceived.” (wiki)

MS has violated that and, as CT states above: “… the real underlying problem at MS is the complete loss of the real MS people who made MS what it is.” At this point, I feel it’s more like “made MS what it WAS”.

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That’s why they hedging bets and support Linux and apple devices.

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Nadella did.

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?

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The real problem is that tech companies are in general monopolies have way too much power including over govt (the so called liberal sillicon valley CEOs rushed to ask trump for favors) and they are increasingly lawless. A time is coming that what Ms is doing will be nothing.

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Noel, I understand well what you say, but let’s not confuse the less informed users even more and push them into Windows 10. 🙂
Windows 7 is out of mainstream support, but for most if not all purposes, it is well within support until January 2020.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet

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Rarely I have to agree with you and I do this time. 🙂

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http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=First%20World%20Problems

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Regarding Linux and ending up “being the on-call tech support team forevermore,” I have an anecdote to offer.

In 2009, my neighbor’s XP-based PC died of a fried motherboard. However, the hard drive still worked, so I transfered his photos and other data onto cd. Then, perhaps foolishly, I cobbled some scrounged parts together, added an Ubuntu partition to that drive– since Windows was going to refuse to boot on an alien mobo– and presented my neighbor with the result.

Now, I fully expected service calls at least monthly, if not weekly. But once I got the printer drivers working, I was surprised at the subsequent quiet. Every once in a while, I’d ask, “How’s that computer working for you?” “Great! Boots quick, I start the browser, do my email, it runs like a bat outta.” Hmm. Okay.

Cut to seven years later.

“Hey, that computer croaked. I bought a new one, but can you get the pictures off it again?” “I’ll give it a shot.” This time, both the display adapter and the mobo had passed away, but The Hard Drive That Would Not Die willingly offered up its data for dvd archival. Once that step was complete, for laughs, I plugged the drive into an appropriate vintage pc and powered it on…

… To be greeted with the startup screen for Ubuntu 14.04 Long-Term Service.

Somehow, this non-technical end user had quietly shepherded his system through three LTS upgrades, without a whisper of help from the tech next door. I was stunned.

Admittedly, this is a statistically insignificant sample– but still, when I hear how scary Linux should be for an ordinary user, I have to wonder. And heck, an xfce desktop has to look a LOT more familiar to an XP or 7 user than that Windows 8/8.1/10 interface, right? 🙂

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@b

Deliberate misinformation. You should read the Microsoft Design Guidelines more closely.

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I completely agree with Canadian Tech’s comment about admiration and respect for Woody. Woody speaks his mind openly and honestly on tech issues. I have immense respect for that. Keep up the great work, Woody!! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

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I really doubt Microsoft cares whether you are impressed or not…

Bottom line…more people adopted Windows 10 (free and paid) in those couple of years than any previous version, in spite of the GWX fiasco.

I would be interested in the percentage of users who rolled back to a previous version after upgrading.

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It’s a repeating cycle…

The same things were said about IBM before Microsoft came along.

Microsoft has been in business for 41 years (founded in Albuquerque in April, 1975), so I’d say their chances of long-term success are pretty good.

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This clown lost all credibility when he decided that a ton is a unit of time!

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I sure do not have a count, but I do a lot of lurking on the Answers forum. There have been a very high number of people asking for help in restoring Windows 7.

The “reversion” button in Windows 10 that gave them 31 days to roll back to Windows 7, sometimes left their Windows 7 computers not working correctly. Consequently they had to re-install. A lot of those had this happen to their “refurb” computers they had recently bought and the Product Key was not valid. Consequently, bricks.

If they were lucky enough to have a re-usable key, they still had to go through the long slog of a re-install, then the long and troublesome updating process.

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To: messager7777777, ch100 and fp,

I came to computers, and Windows, through my work as an attorney and not wanting to deal directly with what my office was offering IBM’s AS400. So, I purchased a laptop from Radio Shack, Deskmate days!, and a bit later installed WordPerfect to do my legal work. Of course, back in those days, one had to start to learn some things about DOS and then the later Windows operating systems. So, I guess I fall under the category of nerdy lay-person when it comes to computers.
ch100 asks “what’s new?” and messager7777777 says these advanced features in Win 10 should have been optional and removable. Being an attorney (a retired public defender), in answer to ch100 and messager7777777, I come to the legal question as to whether what MS has done with Win10 is a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act? There was a lawsuit, filed along these lines years ago by Netscape, and the EU had a similar case. This is what should be done here: Look into the legal remedies available to stop MS’s march to “progress”.
I actually contacted one of my friends, who is the managing partner of a very prominent firm, but his firm has a conflict of interest in suing MS. I may send out a few more e-mails along these lines. In any event, if we want to stop MS, this is how it quite likely could be done. Admittedly, most courts of review are pro-business, and the Supreme Court is likely to become more so. But I firmly believe an attack on MS for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act must be filed. Ultimately, MS settled the Netscape case. If enough pressure is placed on MS, and the right law firm represents the plaintiffs, good stuff could happen.

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JNP, that is exactly what is needed.

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Can u blame them? That’s what all the tech companies are doing they produce essentially nothing their entire business model is spying and selling data. The problem is govt that permits them bcoz its in their pocket.

Google funds all of its failures and fun for page with ad money from search.

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Consider the last number MS touted about active installs (or something like that) was ~400 million in August. Four months later there has been no crowing about the this number. This suggests the ~400 million is basically unchanged. Since August ~80 million PCs/laptops have been sold with a Windows license. Thus (a rude and crude analysis) there should be about ~480 million active installs. This would imply about 5% of the W10 users migrate to something else (earlier Windows version, Macs, Linux, etc.) each month.

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The adage “history repeats itself” is an observation that many times the same basic pattern of mistakes are made at different times by different entities. Xerox could have owned the PC market in the late 70’s/80’s but for management blunders. Kodak could have owned the digital camera market (they invented it) but for mismanagement. MS appears to be throwing away whole market segments for the Cloud and SaaS; areas where they face strong, competent competition from others.

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Like Allan H. I have a similar experience. I converted an aging laptop to Linux Mint to be given by a friend to another friend. The only “service call” was to get his network to work better (wifi was weak but the modem was handy). Otherwise crickets for support calls.

On the same line, had a friend ditch MS to avoid fighting W10 for a Mac and again the phone calls are crickets.

These are not tech savvy people but ordinary users.

Now in both cases above neither needed a specific Windows only application only a generic equivalent.

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I’m not an attorney, but I am wondering how Windows 10 unfairly restrains trade, which is the main purpose of Sherman.

There is also a difference between being an owner of a product, and a licensee, which is what users of Windows are.

When users installed Windows 10, they agreed to the terms of the licensing agreement, whether they actually read it or not…

There were other options, such as using a previous version of Windows, or another operating system such as Linux.

An argument could also be made that a reasonable person would have backed up their systems before upgrading to Windows 10, in case this “new method” of upgrading Windows did not go as planned. That advice was given to many on several help forums (I lost count how many times I posted that advice).

There were certainly those who were adversley affected by Windows 10, but I’m not sure that falls under Sherman.

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@ JNP ……. M$’s abusive business practices can only be legally stopped by the US govt or EU, n not by ordinary folks/citizens suing M$, except thru a massive consumer boycott of Win 10 n M$.

Problem is, M$ hv likely gotten a “Get Out of Jail Free” card from the US govt by collaborating with the US govt/NSA to integrate spyware/backdoors into Win 10 = the US govt refuse to prosecute M$ for abusive business practices or refuse to enforce the Law against M$.

[Edited. -WL]

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To jmwoods:

Admittedly, Sherman is not my area of the law, I am only raising an issue to be investigated and I don’t have Win 10 installed on my computer. That said, I think you’d start with Cortana, with it baked into Win 10, pretty much impossible to turn off unless you dig deep, and then ask the question: How/why c[w]ould any other company attempt to create a non-Cortana personal assistant for Windows based computers? If memory serves, Netscape based its argument on MS putting the Internet Explorer Icon on the desktop and making IE the default browser. Cortana goes way, way, way beyond that and, each day that MS mine the data from Cortana, and improves Cortana’s performance, makes it that much more impossible for a startup to try to enter the market for a PC based personal assistant. MS used an OS to bootstrap into a monopolistic position for PC based personal computers. I think that at least raises Sherman issues.

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@ jmwood …….
https://www.ft.com/content/cba37560-e529-11dc-9334-0000779fd2ac
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-microsoft-idUSBRE92500520130307
.
(The EU fines M$ for anti-trust practices in 2008 n 2013)

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@ jmwood ……. Also, M$ hv a market monopoly with Windows OS, ie after dethroning Apple Mac’s during the 1990s.
……. It is anti-competitive or anti-trust behavior for M$ to leverage on their dominant market position to disadvantage other non-OS software developers, eg if M$ integrate their own software, eg IE/Edge, Cortana, Bing, Windows Defender, OneDrive, etc into the Windows OS and/or make it difficult or impossible for Windows users to install n use other competing software.
……. In comparison, do Google abuse their market monopoly position in smartphones.? Instead, seems it is profit-gouging Apple/iOS who did the abusing of their willing iSheep.
.
Similarly, the US Constitution prohibits the dominant or powerful US govt from prosecuting or persecuting any of their citizens based on his/her religion, race, gender or national origin, for making legal free speech n bearing arms/guns.
……. IOW, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” ~ Mahatma Ghandi

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Here are a couple of articles on how to turn off Cortana…

http://www.howtogeek.com/265027/how-to-disable-cortana-in-windows-10/

http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-tip-turn-off-cortana-completely/

There are third-party products such as O&O ShutUp10 and Spybot Anti-Beacon to help manage telemetry.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon

BTW, telemetry has been a part of Windows for a long time…for example, read the license agreement for Windows 7 Professional.

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Post your evidence to support your accusations.

Right…you have none.

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Why do you think they migrate their software to Linux and apple, go into hw, stress the cloud? Why is win10 “last” version? Why WaaS?

They saw the writing on the wall and made a last “what do we have to lose” push.

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Never touched an apple in my (very long) life and I dont think I will. As to Linux I looked at it several times and gave up.

I suspect this is what Ms relies on disregarding win users.

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@ jmwood ……. Pls refer to this 2013 news report …
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data
.
Excerpts; …. part of a statement from M$, … “Finally when we upgrade or update products legal obligations may in some circumstances require that we maintain the ability to provide information in response to a law enforcement or national security request.”

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Consider them all blamed.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that questionable behavior is acceptable because other companies follow the practices.

It’s a remarkably bad and childish attitude – “Why can’t I do it Mom? All the other kids are doing it!”

And calling it “Industry Standards” doesn’t change a thing!

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Despite the GWX fiasco? So you’re saying Windows 10 adoption rate was high despite the fact that MS was making it nearly impossible to not have it?

Like the Titanic sank despite teh fact that it hit an iceberg?

Windows 7 had 19% market share at the end of the first year. Windows 10 managed 21.13% in the first year. Thing is, 7 was never free. It was never offered as a Windows update. There was no adware exhorting people to download it. There were no unwanted downloads of the full installer. There were no unwanted upgrades. There were no dialogs asking when to upgrade that conveniently didn’t include a “cancel” button, and when people figured out that X meant cancel, no one changed X to “accept” with Windows 7.

There was, in fact, no concerted Windows 7 upgrade push at all. People who upgraded had to do it the old-fashioned way– pay for Windows and do it themselves. Very few people ever did this prior to Windows 10… most who adopted new Windows versions did so by buying a new PC with it preinstalled. Windows 7 STILL managed to have an adoption rate a stone’s throw from that of Windows 10.

So, now it’s almost January, a few days short of five full months from the end of the Windows 10 upgrade push. How much has the market share changed? It’s gone from 21.13% to 23.72%. Wow. Anyone have any statistics on the Windows 7 market share from months 12-17 after its release?

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Nvidia has gone Dark Side too. Their Geforce Experience application (installed by default with the driver) now requires signing in online for it to work at all, which had never been required previously. The EULA informs the user that yes, there will be data collected… surprise, surprise.

I’m not loyal to Nvidia in any way; I’ve had ATI/AMD and Nvidia GPUs. I do it on an assessment of cost vs. benefit (including things like driver quality, Linux support, stuff like that, as well as the more usual performance metrics), and this is a negative for team green. At least there’s more competition in that market than there is in operating systems!

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Change this from fp says to Louie says and, word for word, exactly my experience and belief.

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Suffer no longer Windows 10 users you are “Caught”! Windows 7, 8.1, Vista, just watch out for ambushes along the way and pay your greatest ‘attention’ to Woody and friends. you’ll turn out on the + side of things!! The ‘democratic’ way is not for MS. MS is looking towards the ‘dictatorship’ of the internet complete.

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“Nvidia has gone Dark Side too. Their Geforce Experience application (installed by default with the driver) now requires signing in online for it to work at all, which had never been required previously. The EULA informs the user that yes, there will be data collected… surprise, surprise.”

– Ascaris.

At least you can do a custom install and choose not to install the GeForce Experience. For the moment at least. That’s what I’ve always done and will continue to do on the rare occasion I update my Nvidia drivers (usually when I do a clean install of Windows).

That’s why I always keep a copy of the Nvidia driver that I’ve last used so I can use it again in the future if I see no reason to install the latest one or they start including telemetry, etc. Bad enough that you need at least .NET 4.5.2 to install Nvidia drivers these days.

Same applies to the Samsung Magician software for my SSD’s. I have version 4.9.7 saved and it is likely the last version I’ll ever use. It includes data gathering but you can decline the agreement (not sure if that was intentional on Samsung’s part or a programming error) but you can’t ‘opt out’ in the new version 5.

The other odd thing (sorry if I’m getting sidetracked here) is that I have three 250GB Samsung 840 EVO’s and the new Magician version 5 told me they’re UNSUPPORTED DRIVES !!! Huh ??? Version 4.9.7 works perfectly. Go figure…

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Brian, surely they are not aiming at complete internet dictatorship. No chance! Google is so far ahead of them. Google and many others have assured the independence of the web.

Dictatorship of the OS world, yes. That is what they already have.

As a Win7 advocate and attendant, I have found the way to avoid the death of Win7, chancy as it is, it is total abstinence of Windows Update, except for .net and Office.

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You did not understand me. I did not excuse them, I placed the blame where it belongs: A failed political system that allows corporations to exploit the public. They should not be allowed to do this. Expecting ethical behavior from for profit corps is a fool’s errand.

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I rest my case. Even those who produce smtg are now starting to do it.

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Your comment about Xerox management brought back the foolish history of Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center. Xerox management told PARC that they wanted them to invent the office of the future and when they did the same management did not recognize what they had in terms of intellectual property. When Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs invented Ethernet to connect computers over short distances they were not interested. He left Xerox PARC to found 3Com circa 1980. Xerox first showed Steve Jobs the early GUI they had developed and basically let Apple use it for free. IBM let MS control the OS for the early IBM PC because they thought it would be a distraction from their primary mainframe business. Big mistake! One could go on and on with stories of major strategic blunders and though history may not exactly repeat itself, it often rhymes.

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“An argument could also be made that a reasonable person would have backed up their systems before upgrading to Windows 10,”

Funny that MS never suggested this to people then, isn’t it? I backed up my system twice to two separate external HDDs before I tried Windows 10… but are “normal” people who simply see the “get Windows 10 now! It’s safe and easy, and fully reversible if you don’t like it!” message expected to glean from that the real story, that in-place upgrades are potentially risky and stand a small but definite chance of rendering your PC completely unbootable?

They could have told people that, but they didn’t. If that’s what a reasonable person would have done IF he understood the risk inherent in what he was doing, why didn’t MS make any effort at all to let people know that this action that MS was pushing posed a danger?

The answer’s obvious. MS wanted everyone possible to get on board with 10, and as MS employees have told us, “it’s expected that a few PCs will die on the table, so to speak, during the upgrade,” give or take a few words. The goal of getting every possible Windows 10 upgrade was worth the risk with other people’s PCs, and letting people know of the danger would have undoubtedly convinced many of them that it wasn’t worth it and that they should simply stick with what they already had.

Back when Windows 95 came out, there were a lot of sales of Windows 95 Upgrades. They still didn’t amount to very large numbers compared to the preinstalled W95 sales, but as boxed Windows went, they were sold in large numbers.

If a customer went out and bought a Windows upgrade and took it upon himself to perform the procedure, MS would generally be off the hook for any mishaps.

That’s not how it was with Windows 10, though; the upgrades were initiated by Microsoft, pushed through their adware that gave no mention of the risks and assured customers that their PCs were compatible and that it could be reversed. It was later offered as a Windows Update and performed automatically for a number of people.

Microsoft is very much at fault for every case of a working PC being turned into a nonworking PC by the Windows 10 upgrade process. The vast number of computer novices who didn’t know that clean installs are better than in-place upgrades and that backups are important would never have attempted such an upgrade on their own, and the Pollyanna-esque view of how easy it was going to be was misleading. When GWX reported that it had scanned the PC and found it compatible, that was naturally going to be interpreted as expert advice from the very makers of Windows– if you can’t believe their opinion, who CAN you believe?

And about the EULA– MS and other copyright holders would love for everyone to believe that the entire thing is valid as written, but that’s never been tested in court, and many legal opinions exist to the effect that many of the provisions are probably not valid. MS will only get the benefit of the doubt as long as there is some doubt, and they are very much aware of this, I am sure. They’re not going to be eager to dive into that pool.

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IMO, going right up to the line without crossing it would have precluded using the Windows Update system to install adware. The line was crossed the moment GWX was pushed out as an update that was claimed to “resolve issues with Windows.”

That just goes to show how far over the line they went. From where they ended up, the line was invisible, long since obscured by the curvature of the earth and by atmospheric dust, several time zones back.

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They claim to have done that with the Windows Insider program– but only after they purged the forum where people discussed those opinions of anyone who had any criticism. After MS turned the insider forum into an echo chamber, they really started listening to people’s opinions about how great Windows 10 was and how it was pretty much perfect as it is.

MS didn’t listen to dissenting voices because they don’t much care if people don’t want it. In the new paradigm with the last version of Windows ever, customer satisfaction isn’t required; it apparently isn’t even much of a concern. When you have a monopoly, you can do what you want, and MS is using that monopoly power to its full extent for the first time with regard to Windows.

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Well, Windows 10 wasn’t designed to serve your needs. It was designed to serve Microsoft’s needs, and it does that quite well.

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I think you don’t have to install or use the Cloud service associated with GeForce Experience. That one is only required for getting new game “definitions” because NVidia cannot produce a reliable good for all purposes hardware.

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Good points Ascaris.

About upgrade. Most experienced Windows professionals have known for years that using the “upgrade” process was risky and fraught with problems. The rule has always been a clean install.

Microsoft went against that knowledge by forcing upgrades. Those upgrades produced a very large number of problems for a lot of people. That fact alone is one of the reasons for the hidden number of Windows 10 upgraders who fled back to Win7.

The upgrade process did not adequately assess the viability of the upgrade on the particular machine and frequently caused failure.

Their promise for a roll-back in 31 days with a click of the “reversion” button, frequently left owners with a bricked PC.

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This ^ really gets my goat. I *have* had brand loyalty to Nvidia, having never personally used any other brand of GPU in 30+ years. Color (heh, no pun intended, I think) me blindly stupid, but I’ve just been much more familiar with their setup, drivers, and performance.

But with the 3.x version of GeForce Experience that now requires a login *and* collects data in order to install updates, I’m now leaning toward AMD for my next build.

Then again, how long until AMD decides it is in their best interests to collect my data?

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“Finally when we upgrade or update products legal obligations may in some circumstances require that we maintain the ability to provide information in response to a law enforcement or national security request.”

Nothing new here…

Been done for years…not only by Microsoft, but banks, phone companies, ISP’s.

A breakdown of Microsoft from January to June 2016…

https://www.microsoft.com/about/csr/transparencyhub/lerr/

Still no evidence of a mass conspiracy.

Best thing for you would be to stop using Microsoft products, ditch your computer, bank, phone, ISP, and live off the grid in Alaska.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/life-below-zero/

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There’s always Linux…

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That’s what happened to my friends and family… killed interest in bothering with another computer.

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It sure doesn’t say install… no confusion there.

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I don’t know what kind of data they want to collect. If it is personal stuff, you do not have to give honest answers.

For example, I have a Yahoo address and my personal info says I am 99 (oh that was 15 years ago), have 18 autos, make 20,000,000 a year, etc. For some web sites that demand an email address, just make up one.

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Ascaris, I believe you are exactly correct. And, that is the most important thing to keep in mind when purchasing this product. They want you to spend your money to meet Microsoft needs.

Referring to your statement: “Windows 10 wasn’t designed to serve your needs. It was designed to serve Microsoft’s needs, and it does that quite well”

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@ jmwood & Ascaris ……. Also, the GWX KB3035583 free Win 10 upgrade would not hv caused as many bricked n irrecoverable Win 7/8.1 cptrs if the OEMs had not stopped providing free Win 7/8.1 Install/Recovery DVDs n Product Key stickers in 2012 = less need for users to make a Win 7/8.1 System Image n the Win PE Rescue CD(= more costs).
……. What happened in 2012.?
.
Well, Win 8 was launched by M$ in 2012. Likely, the OEMs were “ordered” by M$ to stop providing free Win 7/8 Install/Recovery DVDs(that cost only about US$0.50 each), in order to suppress sales of new OEM Win 7 cptrs n push cptr buyers towards Win 8. Fyi, the OEMs had been providing such free Install/Recovery DVDs to their customers when they bought new OEM Win XP, Win Vista n Win 7 cptrs. This practice stopped in 2012.
……. As replacement, the OEMs just provided a Recovery Partition on the internal hard disk of new OEM Win 7/8 cptrs for the user to do a Refresh or Factory Reset, similar to smartphones. In post-2012 new OEM Win 7/8.1 cptrs, the Product Keys were embedded in the internal hard disks. To retrieve the embedded PK, the users had to use a 3rd party program or type some complex Command line instructions.
……. Hence, a failed Win 10 upgrade thru Windows Update or a failed hard disk often resulted in bricked or irrecoverable OEM Win 7/8.1 cptrs, ie could not reinstall Win 7/8.1 and lost Product Key. A good solution was to install Linux.
.
Also, Win 8 was also launched by M$ in 2012 with mandatory UEFI n Secure Boot enabled by default that were required to be implemented by the OEMs for certification purposes. This gave M$ more control over new OEM Win 8/8.1/10 cptrs, eg M$ hv the latent power to disallow other OS from being installed in certain OEM Win 8/8.1/10 cptrs bc M$ control the signing of platform keys/KEK.

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Sorry it was just a warped thought. I know that they can’t takeover the internet because there are too many players for that to happen. I, too am a Win 7 SP1

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Didn’t finish I am also a Win 7 advocate and I just had a system crash 30th Nov. and am now sorting out my files from that crash.

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They usually collect behavioral data analyze it and group users into categories and sell them as target groups to advertisers.

And despite their denials it is now clear that they both sell and give data to govt which they exploit to get policy favors and prevent and escape laws.

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If they don’t already do it via backdoors. But if not they will. They see that the big profit is in data not products.

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@ CT ……. On top of that, upgrades to newer Versions of Win 10 hv been coming via Windows Update about twice a year, ie Version 1511, Version 1607 n the coming Version 1703. These upgrades r downloads of about 3GB.

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Linux is a heavy price to pay to escape windows. Prohibitive.

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It was Win 8.1 Home, but maybe it has a similar rescue?

I’m on Win 7 Home, and haven’t tried Win 8.1, so I don’t even know what the differences would be. She was so upset she csn’t even talk about solutions yet. I’m not even sure when the disaster occured, as she just accesses her e-mail from her phone. She took it as a personal failure, but I’ve reassured her that lots of people have had problems. She was so proud of having the best computer in the family, and now she is so discouraged…

My mom moved to an ipad… and it does allow her to keep in touch.

Another daughter has stopped updating her Win 7 Home altogether. I did give her an external drive to back up to, and she is waiting to get infected or whatever, then plans to reinstall.

One brother did try and reinstall his Win 7, and got stuck on endless updating. I’ve referred him here, so he can work his way out of it.

Too many others to list… but I can say this, not one of them is happy with Microsoft and Windows…

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Here’s a sampler for the tech corps who just want our money — simply greedy:

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/10/silicon-valley-ayn-rand-obsession

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/5key3e/facebook_knows_my_surgeon/

http://qz.com/870681/online-surveillance-will-give-trump-a-lot-of-information-on-us-heres-what-you-can-do-to-resist/

Very few Americans understand what is happening to this country. By the time they do it’ll be too late. That’s how it always is.

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@ jmwood ……. So, u agree that Win 10 is likely an NSA spyware, created by M$ supposedly to fulfil their legal obligations to the US govt/NSA.?
……. Seems, this new development, wrt the Win 10 spyware, is a new normal for you. U may be OK with it but others r not.

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I’ve got 7 Yahoo addresses, 2 Gmails, 1 of a max of 30 with my ISP, plus my work address.

I rarely divulge any “honest” information unless absolutely necessary.

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Starting with Geforce Experience 3.0, none of the functions are available until you’re signed in, even if those functions are 100% local in nature.

The only purpose for me to use Geforce Experience (GFE for short) was/is Shadowplay, which is hardware-accelerated recording of game play. With it, I can record what I am doing in any 3d-accelerated application with no performance hit. I can even go into the past and start recording five minutes ago to capture something unexpected that happened when I had recording OFF. How it manages to cache 5 minutes of play, all the time I’m playing, with no performance hit, I don’t know, but it works.

I don’t care about streaming to or from Shield mobile devices, sharing on social media, or downloading the latest and greatest configuration shims for whatever game I’m not playing anyway, which is the rest of GFE’s functionality. All I want is Shadowplay.

I think that if Shadowplay is already set up, you can continue to use the already-defined hotkeys to toggle recording or dump the last 5 minutes (by default), but to change any of the settings, or to enable Shadowplay if it is not already enabled, you have to go through GFE.

As another poster noted, yes, you can skip GFE and still install the drivers without issue… but one of the features of the Nvidia GPU is then disabled for no good reason. If you didn’t care about Shadowplay, or (as in the case of my old laptop’s GPU) if your hardware doesn’t support it anyway, I’d just skip it anyway (as I have on the laptop). If you bought the card because it had Shadowplay, though, having no choice but to sign in to retain the functionality that always existed before without signing in is pretty obnoxious.

It’s also not super simple to stop GFE from self-updating to 3.x. If you install a driver containing a 2.x release of GFE, it will first update to GFE 2.11 (the latest 2.x), and after it restarts, it will check again for any GFE updates, then present you with an accept/cancel choice on upgrading to 3.x. Cancel exits; Accept installs 3.x.

From that point forward, you still have no access to any GFE functionality even though you haven’t yet installed 3.x, since all you get is the demand to accept the upgrade every time you run it, and there’s no way I could see to tell it no on the upgrade and still keep working with the current version.

What I did was to cut off net access after the update to 2.11 when GFE was restarting, so it never checked and found the new version. I went to services.msc and disabled and stopped the Nvidia Network Service, then restarted GFE. Now it tells me “Try again later” each time I start GFE and it can’t connect to the Network service, but at least it works. The menu button for Shadowplay is absent, but I can still get to the Shadowplay settings dialog by appending -shadowplay to the command line of the shortcut.

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I keep several generations of backups and consider what I read here on askwoody.com and other sites before updating. Even with the update rollups, at least they are uninstallable (so far).

If a given update proves to be the feared unremovable trojan horse update that cedes control to MS once and for all, Win 10 style, we will hear about it before it’s too late… and even if one sneaks by, I have my backups.

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Here are a couple of Dell laptops which come new with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled:

http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd?oc=cax13ubuntuh5133&model_id=xps-13-9360-laptop&l=en&s=bsd

http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd?oc=cax13ubuntuh5103&model_id=xps-13-9360-laptop&l=en&s=bsd

Both are quite expensive.

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Much more reasonable prices for new Linux machines (the Acer one is $300):

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-cheap-linux-computers-can-buy-today/

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I think Woody’s lounge might become a ray of hope into the future of all this.

I managed Unix servers for more than 20 years. One of them lasted 13 years with only less than 15 hours of maintenance per year and almost no downtime except for the occasional replacement of parts. I know how good stability feels, where you can do stuff with the computer instead of loosing time tinkering with it.

This year, I am learning Linux server, then desktop and then maybe I will be able to contribute to Woody’s lounge. I dream that normal users could have guides to replicate as much as they can the experience they loved using Windows but without the problems.

A long time ago, I started to read Minasi’s book about Windows server. One thing that struck me was he said that Windows is much more complex than Linux and people are surprised by that. That is not a small detail.

Now the Internet is powered by a simpler system, Linux, not Windows. It is easier to stay secure with a simple system, easier to maintain. Windows can’t compete with that. There’s lots of good things about Windows, but as they add too much things too deeply embedded in it, compatibility, security, stability and maintainability suffers.

So, what is Windows? It was maybe the best UI and set of tools to do your work, on top of a complex system that was quite manageable by specialists. What is Windows becoming? Nothing like that except for big businesses. Microsoft has ported SQL server to run on Linux because they have to. Expect Office at some point to be truly multi-platform. Office is the anchor point that kept so many on Windows. Microsoft had an incentive to make it very difficult to run on anything else, and provide a half-baked version on the Mac for the undiscerning user but that would help keep a lot of folks in the MS ecosystem. Now, I bet that MS will have to provide the real deal on other platforms as people stop using the traditional computer because of MS’s own cluelessness, or buy Macs or successfully use Linux.

The world is changing. Microsoft is self-destructing. My feeling is they lost a lot of good people inside and now they are just doing one dumb thing after another. They have proven their incompetence through the failure of their continuum idea, their lame app store, their non-existent mobile business, how can they succeed? They just don’t get it. They devote resources to play apple copy-cats but don’t understand their differentiation in the market and they don’t even copy very well. They have a strategy deficit.

So I just hope we could make some kind of Linux wish list with all that we love about Windows and maybe create an inspiration thread in Woody’s lounge for some Linux folks to take a look at. I for one would be very happy to contribute. A guide to go on Linux, with suggestions for different types of people (the bleeding edge type, the more conservative LTS type…).

I don’t think there are much other way out of this nonsense, unless Nadella gets fired and someone else brings back some sense to this company before it is too late. Remember MS, business will rent your OS, but not the consumer. If you loose the consumer, you will start by loosing the one person home office, then the small offices, then small to medium businesses that will not see the value anymore compared to what they have been comfortable using since their startup. It’s not good for business.

They wanted us on 10 for security… yeah right. That sounds like an insult to everyone’s intelligence, unless they meant bricking your Windows computer makes it more secure.

I believe the future would be better if more businesses used non-proprietary software. Imagine the costs sunk at each stage of the supply chain through the Microsoft tax. One could argue it is less costly to use proprietary software and be right about that, but at some point it is not necessarily true in all contexts, as IBM recently found out when they realized they saved a lot of money having 33 000 users on costly macs instead of PCs…

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What a great summary… and looking forward to Woody’s Lounge having a place where “normal users could have guides to replicate as much as they can the experience they loved using Windows but without the problems”.

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Office runs well on Mac and iOS.
On iOS you have to use the Cloud though.
The iOS does not have local storage suitable for the purpose I believe.
https://products.office.com/en-us/mac/microsoft-office-for-mac
https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/microsoft-word/id586447913?mt=8
http://www.apple.com/shop/product/HKJC2LL/A/microsoft-office-home-business-2016-for-mac

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I have helped a lot of people out of that mess through the Answers forum.

The Win10 install process usually deletes the factory re-install partition, so that option becomes unavailable.

I will give you a couple of links to guide you:

http://www.canadiantech.info/for-techies/re-build-windows-7/win10-back-to-win7/

http://www.canadiantech.info/for-techies/re-build-windows-7/new-hard-drive/

The second one is for a new hard drive, but you can just ignore those steps. It is a fairly detailed step by step.

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NetMarketShare shows active installations of Windows 10…

The numbers for adoption of Windows 10 have exceeded those for any previous version of Windows, during the same time period, after release (now at 17 months).

Many people chose to roll back to previous versions, so they would be counted in the percentages for those versions.

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“Funny that MS never suggested this to people then, isn’t it?”

It was suggested all over the Internet…for over a year.

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Enjoy your new normal in Alaska…

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NetMarketShare doesn’t exactly show active installations of Win10. The folks there monitor a large number of web sites (with the site owners’ permission) and track which browser and operating system is being used to access the site. (Both browser version and operating system version is included the header of every access to a web site.)

NetMarketShare counts up the hits, then massages the numbers in a way that’s supposed to reflect usage in different parts of the world. For example, historically, NetMarketShare has only monitored a small percentage of Chinese-language sites, so the weighting boosts the hits on their monitored Chinese sites.

What we see is the percentage of NetMarketShare monitored hits, as modified for geographic differences, of Windows 10 versus other reported operating systems.

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http://www.infoworld.com/article/3094008/office-software/back-on-top-microsoft-owns-the-modern-office-again.html

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“NetMarketShare doesn’t exactly show active installations of Win10. The folks there monitor a large number of web sites (with the site owners’ permission) and track which browser and operating system is being used to access the site.”

The operating system being used would have to be active to be measured…

NetMarketShare doesn’t claim to represent the global total.

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Woody, Galen Gruman is clearly writing for the corporate market. In the consumer market, most of what he writes about is of no consequence or interest. The vast majority of people do not need or care about document sharing, hell they can’t even contemplate it. They sure don’t write them on their smart phones or co-write documents.

To the consumer, their purchased/owned copy of Office, 2000, 2002, XP, 2003, 2007 or 2010 is just fine and suits all their purposes.

I do not know of single person (consumers) who are even contemplating the purchase of Microsoft Office, let alone a computer or Windows 10.

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Check out my 3 links I posted below one of which shows how they can get personal data without u giving it to them. Another shows that its much worse than just greed, which is terribly naive to reduce things to. Particularly with the immature dropouts that are empathy and morally challenged.

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How is it prohibitive?

It’s been done, and is being done.

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+1 and I agree that Nadella as MS CEO has been a disaster for the evolution of the Windows OS. All decisions are being driven to make the growth in Azure look good and so W10 becomes an environment of constant “phone home” to Mr. Nadella’s cloud. The $26 billion LinkedIn acquisition might prove to be his Waterloo. A $10 billion or more impairment charge would certainly take the bloom of the rose, I suspect.

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Which is NOT the case for lots of old Windows users: decades of using the same apps and UI is not substitutable so late in the game by different ones. The calls will not be for support but for figuring out how everything works, what are the equiv. apps, configurations, etc. The disruption is not justifiable.

Which is what MS counts on when it disregards us. But new users have options so we’ll see.

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Good analysis of ARM Windows:

https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-on-arm-win32-x86-emulator-could-change-everything-or-not/#ftag=CADf328eec

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Yet, we see quite a few people who sign up for Office 365. Odd, isn’t it?

Galen’s definitely a corporate guy. He knows nitty-gritty corporate computing better than anybody I know. That said, I don’t think real-time collaboration is a big deal anywhere. Either that, or I’m hopelessly out of date.

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Yes, the operating system is included in the browser header. (Unless it’s being spoofed, which is another discussion entirely.)

There’s an explanation of so-called “country level weighting” here: http://www.netmarketshare.com/faq.aspx#Methodology

The Net Market Share data is weighted by country. We compare our traffic to the CIA Internet Traffic by Country table, and weight our data accordingly. For example, if our global data shows that Brazil represents 2% of our traffic, and the CIA table shows Brazil to represent 4% of global Internet traffic, we will count each unique visitor from Brazil twice. This is done to balance out our global data. All regions have differing markets, and if our traffic were concentrated in one or more regions, our global data would be inappropriately affected by those regions. Country level weighting removes any bias by region.

Bottom line is that NetMarketShare and StatCounter have very, very different approaches to estimating internet use. Neither can count active installations of a particular operating system.

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Most new PCs come with Office 365 pre-loaded. Very few people have any idea that it is a rental deal. When they get the first bill, they forget it. They do not uninstall 365, they just install their old standby Office they already own.

I have seen 365 co-residing on a lot of PCs. Its there, but they do not use it.

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Maybe I didn’t get the latest update, but an Excel version without pivot charts just doesn’t cut it for me. I use them all the time and I couldn’t do my work without them…

http://blog.parallels.com/2016/01/21/differences-microsoft-office-mac/

Both versions might look similar, but last time I tried working on the Mac, my productivity dropped dramatically. Of course, I would have to learn the equivalent keyboard shortcuts and I would get better with time, but still, no pivot chart? I realize most users don’t use them, but my point was for business users, although a lot of those don’t use them either even if in certain fields, they are mandatory. Maybe Office reached that point where it don’t matter to most people whether they use it on the Mac or Windows, but I would bet that those people could learn to use LibreOffice or OpenOffice in a way that would be sufficient for their need too. I understand though that the familiarity of Office is more appealing for them and compatibility issues can be a problem when exchanging documents in a business context.

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No one can count “all” active installations, but as a point of reference, NetMarketShare seems to be referenced more frequently in tech web site articles than StatCounter or analytics.usa.gov.

Net Applications is a paid analytical service.

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@Canadian Tech
Some people, especially the young ones, cannot afford to miss the train, as otherwise someone else will catch it instead. Sometimes the train passes only once and if hesitate, then it is too late. It is a very competitive world.
Your customers are typical for their own situation, but let’s not generalise.
Maybe this is good reading for a lot of people posting here, and applies to employees too.
https://www.amazon.com/Free-Agent-Nation-Working-Yourself/dp/0446678791

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Failures are orphans.

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@ Elly ……. According to here…
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/four-places-find-windows-8-product-key/
…. yr daughter should be able to reinstall OEM Win 8.1 Home on her bricked laptop n it would be activated automatically, unless the failed Win 10 upgrade process had wiped away the Win 8.1 Product Key embedded in the UEFI firmware(= motherboard). If so, yr daughter may opt to buy a new OEM Win 8.1 Home Product Key at Ebay or Amazon or Newegg for about US$40.
.
U need a valid Product Key to download the Win 8/8.1 iso file from M$’s website but there r other less restrictive websites available to do this download.

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@ jmwood ……. Net Applications Wiki excerpt, …
.
Criticism
While the statistics released by the company routinely place operating systems sold by Microsoft (Windows) and Apple (Mac OS X) with a high market share in the desktop computer category (through 2013), Vincent Vizzaccaro (EVP – Marketing and Strategic Alliances, Net Applications, 2002–present) has stated that Microsoft and Apple are among the company’s clients.[2] The company has also admitted that their statistics are skewed.[3] These admissions and the fact the company doesn’t make their data sources or processing methods public, has led some to criticize the company,[4] questioning their impartiality and the reliability of their statistics.

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Given the outright hostility MS has shown toward non-enterprise users, I can’t help but conclude that their business plan includes intentionally alienating home/SOHO users (and milking them for all they’re worth before that) as part of an exit strategy from the general-purpose OS market. I would tend to agree with you, that alienating the home users is not good for business, but what other explanation is there for how they’ve treated home users?

MS has undoubtedly been making some mistakes of late, but are they really dumb enough to think they’re not, in effect, telling home users to “get lost?” I mean, I know MS can be obtuse at times, as all megacorporations can be, but this aggression is so well-focused on the market segment least likely to accept the subscription model, and it’s been going on for well over a year even as the tech sites and blogs fill up with comments like the one I’m writing now.

I just don’t see how any company can do what MS has done to their home/SOHO customers if it was not part of a plan to get them to leave.

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@ jmwood ……. Like u said, there is Linux.
……. Enjoy yr Win 10 crapware.

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I believe those are all valid criticisms.

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I don’t know about Xfce, but I know for sure that Cinnamon looks more like Windows than Windows 8 or 10 do. I’ve never actually experienced switching someone else over to Linux (just myself), so I’m extrapolating from my Windows experience, where so many things that should have been simple for regular users of Windows end up flummoxing people.

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LinkedIn is a piece of c..p. Its just an ad generating machine masquerading as some sort of professional network. I used to participate and contribute but stopped even logging in. They have algorithms that delete legitimate posts and allow commercial spam. Garbage.

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It could b both a plan and incompetence, which is extremely likely.

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+1. I use pivots all the time as well, and also couldn’t do my job without them.

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+1. I hope something, anything, will be Nadella’s undoing as boss of MS. The “culture” he’s built has to go, as well. Wishful thinking on my part, I know.

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Agree with most of what you’ve written, fp, but try finding a job in today’s market without a LinkedIn account/profile. 🙁

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To quote from “Apocalypse Now:”

Col. Kurtz: “Are my methods unsound?”

Capt. Willard: “I don’t see…any method…at all, sir.”

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HARRRRRRRRRR!

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It is even more concerning than Nadella. He has cleared out most of the real talent and management. Even if he is gone, will there be enough of Microsoft still there to figure out a right course???

I am convinced that a lot of what is going on is not so much intentional as much as pure incompetence.

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Yet you have to balance that with the observation that Microsoft is enormously successful, its stock is at near-record highs, and its market capitalization may approach $1 trillion before too long – even more than Apple.

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I long ago concluded that the stock market and the businesses whose stocks sell there have no correlation whatever with the quality of the business, nor its performance.

That is the fundamental problem with most corporations today. The C suite guys are paid huge sums of money to raise the stock price and their actions or non-actions regarding the management of the business do not correlate with the stock price.

The C suite guys are NOT being paid these huge sums to improve the business, nor do they care a whit for the long term (defined as more than a year). Their pay correlates with stock price and to raise that has nothing to do with their products or customers.

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+1

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But for how long?

In the late 1990s, any idiot who had a half-baked idea for a web site could hang out a shingle and have investors come out of the woodwork to throw money at you– even though there was never any product, any business plan, any direction at all, other than an idea that (in retrospect) wasn’t all that good in the first place.

If such an “entrepreneur” sold the idea at the height of the hysteria, he could be instantly rich without ever having had a product, let alone one that is worth selling.

Of course, it all came crashing down, as all pie in the sky bubbles will.

All around the web and on those cable news financial channels, investor types are talking about how Microsoft has its mojo back and how it’s become such an innovator… but if you talk to nearly any of Microsoft’s long-time customers, it’s the worst Microsoft has ever been.

What, exactly, is innovative about Windows 10? All of the new ways it seeks to usurp control rightfully belonging to its users? The “Jack of all trades, master of none” UI that stinks equally on desktop PCs and mobile devices? Was it the unprecedented use of malware techniques to force their “wonderful” product on people who were desperately trying NOT to have it?

What’s innovative about “the cloud?” “Having your data on someone else’s server” is nothing new or innovative (or particularly safe)… it’s just a rehash of the “thin client” craze of years past, or even further back to the mainframe-and-terminal days, only now with new buzzwords. Calling it “the cloud” does not change anything except the name (and the level of excitement of novelty-seeking but apparently dimwitted investors).

Hopefully for me, MS will complete the cycle and crash and burn before the three years left on Win 7 are up. That’s the only way I can see that we’ll ever see a version of Windows again that we’d want to use.

If Microsoft’s direction is as bad as we think it is, it has to come back to the ground at some point. That’s when Nadella will take the fall and we’ll have a chance to see MS restored to sanity. Now, though, everyone’s head is in “the cloud,” and they can’t see the ground truth from that vantage point.

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I don’t use or refer anyone to Net Applications, so…

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I don’t use Windows 10, so…

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Thank you, will have her try that, much simpler than buying a new maching…

Is this the new Microsoft business model? Reselling old product keys again and again?

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By people who were not Microsoft, and not from within the GWX adware program, which instead gave users a the idea that this was absolutely painless and risk-free. After all, MS itself had just checked the system and found it to be compatible, and they said it was a good idea! What more could a person possibly want before accepting their offer?

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The processes described in those links presume you have the original product key that was installed. It should be reusable.

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@ Elly ……. Those OEM Win 7/8.1 licenses available online r sold by 3rd-party resellers, n not by M$.
……. But if yr daughter had bought a new OEM Win 10 Home cptr to replace her bricked Win 8.1 Home laptop, M$ would hv made an extra US$30 or thereabouts. That’s the business model of M$ = Planned Obsolescence, eg their mostly premature or alternately unnecessary upgrade cycle of about 3 years, ie Win XP/2001, Win Vista/2006, Win 7/2009, Win 8/2012 n Win 10/2015 = Vista n 8 were unneeded n duds.

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@ Elly ……. According to Martin Brinkmann at ghacks, OEM Win 7/8.1 Pro licenses r now going for less than US$10 each…
http://www.ghacks.net/2016/12/29/windows-7-to-windows-10-upgrades-still-free/

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@Ascaris Let’s not generalise. I don’t normally backup but I started using File History recently to protect my data against hard-disk failure, not Operating System failure which for me does not exist. I can recover from any OS issue, not easy sometimes, but I can do it.
I used my main computer since January 2015, 9 months before the release of Windows 10 as Insider and I have never done a backup during upgrading from Windows 7 and during each successive upgrade in place. This was Beta to be clear. It was not smooth sailing, it was time consuming but I am telling you not that this is an example to follow, but that it is possible to move between versions if you know how, without concerning too much. I use 2 computers with first and second generation i7 and did not have compatibility problems. They are one 6 years old, the other one 7 years old. They both had RAM and SSD upgrades.
I rolled back to 7 (clean install) few months after 1511 because I got sick of too much trouble with 10, but now I am back on Windows 10.
I don’t claim 10 is better than 7, because it is not, but I cannot bet on a dead horse forever. A lot of people here prefer to complain instead of taking action and helping themselves, as there would be anyone to listen, maybe except for Woody.

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Martin’s observations match what I’ve seen and heard – the “free” upgrade from Win7 or 8.1 to Win10 is still working. When installing Win10, you only need to enter a “genuine” Win7 or 8.1 key.

The part about buying keys on eBay – I’d be very cautious. German laws make it legal to buy and sell OEM keys IN GERMANY. That’s the only country I know of where keys can be bought and sold, independently of the software.

See Point 4 of the Software Licensing Terms:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Useterms/Retail/Windows/10/UseTerms_Retail_Windows_10_English.htm

4. Transfer. The provisions of this section do not apply if you acquired the software as a consumer in Germany or in any of the countries listed on this site (aka.ms/transfer), in which case any transfer of the software to a third party, and the right to use it, must comply with applicable law.

Whether you CAN buy keys on eBay is another question altogether – as is the question of what happens to you if you get caught.

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Thank you for clarifying. She doesn’t want to start anything until the holidays are over, and can sit down with some time to work through it. She had a valid license key… so it sounds hopeful. Thank you.

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Why? You are missing out on all the fun 🙂

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She had one of those unfixable accidents (car backed over) her Windows 7 laptop… and she has been less than satisfied with the “newer” and more expensive ones (she has had two) since then.

Just my question, because it is hard for me (who has the time) to help her maintain a Win 8.1, would it be possible to buy a legit Win 7 product key to install instead? I’d pay the extra money to get us on the same page. She went to Win 10 and although initially happy, the updating and resetting of her settings time after time has made it miserable. Unlike me, she doesn’t care about the privacy, she just wants it set up the way she likes it… and to work, not to work on it. I’d been looking at refurbished Win 7 Pro machines for her… but it sounds like a less expensive alternative is to have the key and install on her machine.

It is so frustrating not to be able to put hands on her laptop! Talking her through, check this or that is HARD. Woody, how you guide us through all the updating on different systems using different components and different group choices… well, I have utmost respect for you… and the others here that are helping us through this “transition”.

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Ch100,

I’m sorry, but I have missed your point here.

I’m referring to the masses of Windows neophytes that would never have attempted an in-place upgrade if Microsoft hadn’t pushed them into it. GWX told them that it (Microsoft itself!) had scanned their system and found it to be compatible with 10, and it said it was fully reversible if they didn’t like it.

This was far from an accurate portrayal of the actual risk involved. Computer novices may have given their consent, but it wasn’t informed consent, and that distinction was far from an accident on Microsoft’s part. There can be no doubt MS knew the risk, but they chose to keep it under their hats. Their goal of 1 billion Windows 10 devices was more important to them than the continued usability of their own customers’ computers.

I don’t agree with your strategy of not backing up, but it’s your choice; you’re not a novice, and ultimately, you can recover from anything short of catastrophic hardware failure (and even then you can fix it). People who knew the risk and upgraded without a backup, only to see things go sideways, will get little sympathy from me; they made their choices knowing the risks, and whatever happens happens.

Not having any backups may have proven not to be a big problem for you, but that doesn’t mean it was that way for everyone. There have been huge numbers of people complaining that the upgrade to 10 left their PCs unbootable and unusable. It’s a relatively small risk, but when you’re doing millions of upgrades on PCs owned by less tech-savvy people, even a 99% chance of success equates to huge numbers of botched upgrades.

The customers I’m talking about here are not people who can rescue a PC that failed to upgrade; being able to operate backup software and restore an image is pretty advanced stuff for them.

Since those people never would have attempted the upgrade if MS hadn’t pushed adware onto their PCs assuring them that it was a good idea, they bear full responsibility for every case of a working PC being turned into a non-working one during the upgrade process.

As for compatibility– I have not found any issues with that with regard to 10 either. When an Apple fanatic on another discussion site was crowing about how s/he had a 7 year old Macbook that still worked fine and ran the newest version of iOS, and how impossible that would be with a Windows PC, I decided to put it to the test. I put Windows 10 on my approximately ten year old HP/Compaq laptop with a single-core AMD Turion 64 CPU.

I installed Win 10 x64 because I had the DVD on hand already. Had I intended this to be a halfway serious upgrade, I would have gone x86, given that the laptop has only 1 GB of RAM (and some of that was shared with the onboard GPU).

It installed and worked, though it clearly wanted more memory. The hard drive thrashed mercilessly if any application was opened. It never crashed or malfunctioned, though, and it found drivers for everything except the ATI RADEON Express 300 integrated GPU. It was so old that AMD had not released a Windows 10 driver for it… but I did find a page that claimed that the Vista driver could be made to work quite well.

I wasn’t interested enough to give that a try. I declared the operation to be a success; with more memory and the x86 version of Windows, I’m certain it would have run far better (and that particular laptop is rated to handle 2GB of RAM).

Win 10 also ran fine on my Core 2 Duo laptop, which is about 8 years old.

Finally, as for complaining rather than taking action… there is no action that I can take that would make Windows 10 palatable for me. All I _can_ do is complain and hope that others who are on the fence will refuse to give in, and that by means of the poor adoption rate of 10, MS will get the message (since they’re clearly not listening to the customers themselves)… well, that and hedge my bets by getting used to Linux.

Windows 10 to me is in the “no way, no how, never” category. Using it is not among the options I would consider. I’d sandbox 7 and use it until the cows came home before that.

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@ Elly ……. Yes, u can buy a legit OEM Win 7 Product Key n install it on yr daughter’s bricked OEM Win 8.1 laptop, ie if the BIOS/UEFI settings can be accessed. Secure Boot may need to be disabled n the Boot Order has to be changed so that the laptop can be booted from a DVD-drive or USB-device(eg USB-Flash-drive) to do the Win 7 installation…
http://www.zdnet.com/article/seven-perfectly-legal-ways-to-get-windows-7-cheap-or-even-free/
.
Normally, the Win 7 Install Media has all the essential device drivers for nearly all cptrs, eg to drive the motherboard, internal hard-drive, display, Ethernet, keyboard and mouse. One or two non-essential or peripheral device drivers may be missing, eg for the Wifi, sound n printer. Any missing driver is usually installed automatically thru Windows Update. If not, it has to be manually installed via the laptop OEM’s website.
……. Last resort is to engage the services of a cptr tech repairer or cptr retail store to solve any installation or driver problems = may cost a bit. Free if u hv a cptr tech-savvy acquaintance.

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My Win 7 Home OEM came with an upgrade for free to Win 8 (which I haven’t used). I was trying to follow posts about downgrade rights from different operating systems. At Newegg there was a question whether the full 8.1 Pro could be downgraded to Win 7 Pro. The answer there was no. Is it the OEM downgradeable, rather than the full, with install disk, version? I have no qualms about buying an OEM version since Microsoft bricked the OEM version it came with… and Pro is what is available right now. I’m trying to have the best of all worlds… matching us together on Win 7, so that we can both (all- other family and friends bonding together over this)upgrade to 8.1 when support ends for Win 7… just in case I can’t migrate us to a suitable Linux system.

It appears that I am misunderstanding posts in other places about downgrade rights and upgrade rights, or looking in the wrong places.

Since the answer appears that I can, and will, buy a new OS for her laptop, is there a down-gradable to Win 7 version of Win 8 available?

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ELLY, Take a look at this Microsoft page. It pretty much explains how to do the Win8 to Win7 downgrade.

Likely all you need is any Win7 pro install disk, that matches the bitness of the Win8 licence.

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I should probably come back to what I said before few times, as unpleasant it may sound.
Computers have become too difficult for your “masses of Windows neophytes” to handle, unless they put extra effort and become at least half pros. This applies to Windows and has always applied to Linux which has never pretended to be different, except for the most recent times when they try to emulate Windows user interface. Why a Windows interface if Windows is such a bad thing?
Maybe it is the right time now for your “masses of Windows neophytes” to get some terminals or other suitable simpler devices and move to the Cloud and forget about managing already too complex devices.
Too much complaining for the sake of it is counter-productive for those who complain in the first place but for those who read too.

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… and I have an article coming up in InfoWorld on Monday that addresses many of the clean-install issues.

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@ Elly ……. New OEM Win 10 Pro cptrs come with downgrade rights to Win 7/8.1 Pro, but u must hv an existing Win 7/8.1 Pro Product Key to activate it after installation. This should apply to previous new OEM Win 8.1 Pro cptrs that were sold = had downgrade rights to Win 7 Pro. The downgrade rights r mainly used by businesses to upgrade their cptrs but keep the previous OS.
……. It’s likely that those OEM Win 8.1 Pro Product Keys being sold online, do not hv downgrade rights to Win 7 Pro bc they r from 3rd-party resellers, n not from the major OEMs, eg Dell n HP.

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Ch100. They have.

“Maybe it is the right time now for your “masses of Windows neophytes” to get some terminals or other suitable simpler devices and move to the Cloud and forget about managing already too complex devices.”

It is called a smart phone or an iPad. They are leaving the computer at home and pocketing their communications device.

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It’s also a powerful argument for Chromebooks. I just pulled out a little-used Surface Pro 3 and fired it up. And waited. And waited. Wanted to show a friend a little park I know about. I finally just grabbed the Chromebook and, boom, Google Maps was at my beck and call.

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Reply to Ch100’s message of December 30, 2016, 4:38pm here:

Computers have always been too difficult for novices to use optimally– that’s nothing new. It’s a whole lot easier for someone who isn’t a computer person to use one now than it was 25 years ago, so it’s not really an issue of how they’ve “gotten” too difficult.

Many of the people who were blindsided by the upgrade-to-10 failure were using their computers just fine until Microsoft came along and suggested that a risky upgrade was a good idea for them to attempt without telling them the risks.

Everyone started out as a beginner, and I don’t agree at all that we should just shut the door behind us after we’ve made the transition and say, “Nope, too complicated for you, go use something else.” If they were getting along fine even with their meager skill sets until Microsoft intentionally gave them bad advice to serve Microsoft’s own needs, that’s on Microsoft, not the novice user.

I don’t know what you would have them use terminals with. Those are a relic of the mainframe era, and they were definitely not easier for beginners than a modern Windowing OS.

As for Linux adopting a “Windows” interface: Well, it’s not a Windows interface. It’s a graphical interface, which Windows and all of the other operating systems now use. The objection to Windows was never that it had a GUI… there were and are a lot of objections, but that was never one of them. The GUI of Windows 95 and beyond was a triumph in usability that is still the gold standard for many of us today; that doesn’t mean we’d be open to use Windows 95 itself. There’s a lot more to an OS than its GUI.

As for too much complaining… Well, I don’t think we’re there yet, so no problemo …

Seriously, though, I don’t think it would ever be counterproductive in the Windows 10 era; it would be impossible for Windows 10 to get worse than its current “I wouldn’t touch it with a [ahem] ten foot pole” status. Microsoft is a monopolist, and where you might just say “Go use something else” with any other product, it’s not that simple with Windows, where large numbers of people are tied to Windows by virtue of software they need that won’t run on anything else.

Thus, at worst, it would simply be ineffective to complain about it and try to convince others to not use it in the hopes that it will convince MS to get their heads out of… er, the cloud and give us something decent. I don’t think it is guaranteed to be futile, though; Windows 8, in its original form, was built to advance the same agenda as Windows 10, and complaints about that (and the resultant lack of adoption) resulted in the 8.1 update (which addressed many of the concerns) and then Windows 10.

In this case, the cure is worse than the disease; Windows 8’s issue was its strange UI, but the “fix” insofar as Windows 10 introduced many much worse evils along with its partial UI corrections. “We have too much control over updates” wasn’t among the usual Windows 8 complaints, and neither was “I feel like it’s not spying on me enough.” Windows 10 partially fixed some of the UI complaints people had about 10, then added in a dump-truck load of toxic features that were a hundred times worse.

Windows 10 is an unacceptably and intentionally abusive product from a monopolist. I don’t see the virtue in accepting the product as they want us to while trying to mitigate the nasty things it does with each successive update. They will always have the upper hand in this; any technique we come up with to soften any given rough edge can and will be patched out as soon as MS finds out what’s going on (and with the telemetry built-in that is hard to keep turned even to “just a little spying,” since “none” isn’t one of the options, they will find out plenty). One example of this is how MS patched out the ability to change a registry setting (I believe) and use Cortana with Google. It was better for users, but not better for MS, so of course, MS decided to take action to thwart its users for its own benefit– again.

We can figure out (for another example) how to break the forced updates in a limited enough way to leave the rest of the OS functional, but they can just as easily change the game so that what we’ve broken either does not work or renders the entire OS unusable. The same’s true for every other “feature” Windows 10 brings to the table that most of us wish it didn’t.

Getting us on-board with the thought that we can stop Windows 10 from acting in Microsoft’s interest instead of our own is still a win for Microsoft. Look at how abusive they are of their customers with only 24% market share… how bad do you think it will get if that ever gets up to 90%? Does anyone really think it will get better at that point, not worse?

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Woody, (Reply to Dec 30, 1:29 am message)

The EULA isn’t the law. If it gets to the level of parsing the EULA, It’s a civil matter… for it to be harmful to the buyer, MS would have to sue the user for buying a key against the terms, and they’d have to show that harm was done to them by not following the rule, which would be hard to do, given that MS no longer issues Win 7 or 8 licenses at all (so all sales of existing licenses have no benefit to MS at all anyway).

It’s a lot more likely they’d go after the seller, but even then they’d run the risk I mentioned before of having to test the validity of the EULA as a whole, and that’s not somewhere they want to be. There are questions about how far the provisions can go in a EULA and remain legally binding, and MS only gets the benefit of the doubt as long as there is some doubt.

I am not a lawyer, but I think what I have written here is a pretty good approximation of the actual situation with regard to such things.

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Yep. The situation’s murky – with very little case law.

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This is exactly what I tried to say: iPad/iPhone, Chromebooks, Android devices easier to manage and more portable.
I am not suggesting that Wyse terminals or equivalent are to be used by home users instead of Windows computers.

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Good arguments on both sides.

Lemme toss in my two cents: For folks who don’t absolutely NEED Windows, and those who aren’t overly upset by the snooping, I still recommend Chromebooks.

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We are at Windows 12 already 🙂

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This is correct. Windows in itself will be just a platform for connecting to Cloud services. There was enough warning, but only few understand how to read between the lines.

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I think it’s inevitable. Chrome is there already. And we’ll all be fighting over browser patches. 🙂

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Yes, especially the failed ones 🙂
Google Chrome had one of those not long ago when a programmer did a change in the switches for launching Chrome and pushed the change in a regular auto-update. Next day he went on leave. This affected every Citrix XenApp installation which published Chrome as it runs on Citrix only with that switch, otherwise it would not launch.
It took few days for the other developers to understand what happened, because the developer on leave could not be reached.
http://discussions.citrix.com/topic/381860-published-google-chrome-fail-after-ver-54-update
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=659026

Not only Microsoft fails automatic updates.

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@ ch100 ……. Fyi, after about 2 years, the Cloud-based M$ Office 365 has only garnered about 200 million users out of about 1.5 billion M$ Office users = less than 20% adoption rate.
……. Basically, Cloud means rental of software or cptr equipment(eg hard drive storage, data servers). Most people, ie home users n business users, prefer to own or buy their software or cptr equipment. Presently, Cloud revenue comes mostly from tech start-ups bc they could not afford to buy their own business software n cptr equipment.
……. Similarly, most people prefer to own/buy their own house, instead of renting. But most young workers hv to rent first.
.
ChromeOS will likely end up nowhere.

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@ Elly ……. Are u saying that yr daughter still has the physical 25-character Product Key for her bricked OEM Win 8.1 Home laptop.?
……. If yes, then less problem n expenses for her.
.
When new OEM Win 8.1 cptrs were on sale a few years ago, the PK were embedded in the UEFI firmware(= motherboard) = not visible. U needed a 3rd-party program, eg ProduKey, to extract the 25-character PK n record it on paper bc the PK was needed to create a Win 8.1 Install Media, ie a DVD+R or USB-stick, to do a clean reinstall. Sometimes, a Refresh or Factory Reset is of no help, eg hard disk failure or malware/ransomware infection.

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“Cloud” means you’re running on another company’s computers.

I wouldn’t say most of Microsoft’s cloud revenue comes from startups. It comes from large organizations. That 20% Office 365 adoption rate (not sure where the number came from) is still a billion bucks a year.

ChromeOS is changing rapidly. It’s been enormously successful. Ten years from now, let’s check and see how ChromeOS adoption has changed, compared to Windows…

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Point well taken.

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Assessments of Ms “innovation” ignore windows. They refer to hardware, cloud, apple support.
In fact, getting away from windows is part of it.

The fact that nadella does not ever refer to the problems w windows speaks volume. Yuckh.

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Absolutely

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Intentional and incompetence are not mutually exclusive. If you’re a mediocre CEO u dont want too many talented ppl around you for contrast. Incompetents surround themselves w incompetence intentionally.

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I’ve been using 2000 since 2000. Its much better than all the bloat that followed.

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Its been done by whom? Not consumers and not in mass.

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Its prohibitive in app terms. Over the years I accumulated dozens of apps that do exactly what I want. Finding equivalents and figuring them out — forget it. Who has the time or the motivation?

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… but Nadella talks about Windows all the time.

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I posted this URL before.
https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2016/05/04/citrix-customers-put-google-chromebooks-to-work/
Chromebooks appear to be excellent terminals, endorsed by Citrix, one of the main partners of Microsoft. Microsoft and Citrix work so closely that Citrix endorsed for a specific application Hyper-V against their own virtualisation product XenServer (now donated to OpenSource, but Citrix is still the main developer and maintainer).
http://microsoftandcitrix.com/

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@ woody ……. Cloud revenue is via subscription, either monthly or yearly = similar to rental of software n cptr equipment.
……. Large organizations like Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo and Twitter do not use the Cloud. Some large non-tech orgs hv moved to the Cloud to save capital costs = able to show more profits = similar to CEO Nadella laying off workers in the Quality Assurance Dept of M$ = more buggy updates.

The actual numbers are about 100 million Office 365 users out of 1.2 billion M$ Office users = less than 10%. …
http://www.windowscentral.com/there-are-now-12-billion-office-users-60-million-office-365-commercial-customers
https://www.petri.com/office-365-85-million-monthly-active-users
https://www.itunity.com/article/years-office-365-prospers-3430
.
Bear in mind that Office 365 Home which costs US$99 per year allows the subscriber/renter to install it on 5 cptr devices at home, eg used by other family members in the home. Also, many new OEM Windows cptrs came with free 1-yr Office 365 subscriptions. So, yr one billion bucks number could be on the high side.

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They didn’t change the X from close; that’s what it did.

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“……. Large organizations like Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo and Twitter do not use the Cloud.”

They don’t USE the Cloud. They ARE the Cloud.
It is the difference between those who READ what other people WRITE.
Or those who FOLLOW those who LEAD.

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🙂 🙂 :=)

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This is devolving into a semantic argument.

Clearly, Microsoft made a switch that confused one whole heckuvalot of people.

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@ ch100 ……. So, u, jmwoods, b n woody are also the Cloud.?

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“Cloud” is a squishy concept. Basically, if you’re running on a computer that belongs to somebody else, you’re using the cloud.

By any definition, YouTube is a subsidiary of Google, Facebook has an enormous network, and just about any program you use these days (including this one!) is in the cloud.

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I think you may be right about the future success of Chromebook, Woody. However, for me, if I do go Chromebook, it will be because Windows as I would have it (ala Windows 7), has died.

Office 365 comes pre-installed like lots of other pre-installed garbage. Nobody who buys their new computer realizes that it is for rent and that their documents are not even stored on their computers. In effect the buyer is not aware of what he is using.

There is a phenomena at work here. People assume that a later version of software is better than the earlier dated one. When it comes to Office, in my opinion, this is simply not true.

When I explain this to people, they usually say why would I want that? What are my alternatives? I usually then help them install their previously owned version of Office.

By the way, I see this happen to people when it comes to webmail all the time. When people decide to change email providers, they are always incredibly disappointed when they learn that all that email they stored in custom folders is not on their computers and cannot be easily moved. This is when they opt for programs like Windows Live Mail or the like.

As Messager says, when people make knowledgeable choices, they prefer to own their stuff, not rent. A lot of cloud acceptance is actually due to trickery.

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I am curious as to how these numbers are put together. I know 365 exists on a lot of computers and it is rarely if ever used. Simply because it came pre-installed and the owner never uninstalled it.

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Not about the mess.

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That’s an illusion.

Be that as it may ppl get a LI profile and forget abt it. Connections are worthless.

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I wonder to what degree the euphemism of “the cloud” contributed to the “hacking” of Apple accounts and the subsequent leakage of photos of young celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence. If the photo storage server was entitled “Apple photo storage somewhere out there on the web,” non tech savvy people like her probably would have thought twice about letting such intimate and potentially embarrassing photos be sent there– or at least they’d been more aware of the importance of a decent password.

That’s not what it’s called, though… it’s “the cloud.” What could be more benign, harmless, soft and fluffy, and otherwise completely unworrisome than “the cloud?”

If they really knew that “the cloud” was just a euphemism for “someone else’s server out there on the internet,” I think things might have been different.

Even with the “simplified to the point of frustrating anyone who knows anything about computing” iPhone, the lack of knowledge of the neophytes can show up and bite them on their exposed butts.

That’s one reason this “Cloud first, mobile first” push by MS is frustrating. The cloud is nothing new… all that’s new is the name for it. Storing data remotely on someone else’s server and having computation done remotely and displayed locally are not new concepts! If they could drop the paradigm shifts and thinking outside of the box and all of the other boardroom buzzwords, perhaps all of the breathless investors who think MS is “innovating” by trying to bring back the concept of the thin client would see they’re being had.

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@ ch100 ……. Fyi, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo n Twitter hv been operating long b4 Cloud businesses became vogue, eg Amazon Web Service, Microsoft OneDrive(= Nadella’s Cloud first/Mobile first strategy), Google Cloud, Dropbox, etc.
……. 10 years ago, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo n Twitter were just called the Internet. The Cloud terminology was not yet “invented”…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

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“Cloud” is a marketing term and, yes, we’ve been using cloud services at least since the time of CompuServe….

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@ woody ……. Excerpt from Compuserve Wiki …
.
CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service, also known by its acronym CIS) was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major influence through the mid-1990s. At its peak in the early 1990s, CIS was known for its online chat system, message forums covering a variety of topics, extensive software libraries for most computer platforms, and a series of popular online games, notably MegaWars III and Island of Kesmai. They are also known for their introduction of the GIF format for pictures, and CIS was a very popular GIF exchange mechanism.

AOL’s launch into the PC market in 1991 marked the beginning of the end for CIS. AOL used a monthly subscription instead of hourly rates, so for active users it was much less expensive. AOL also used a GUI-based client, and while such systems existed for CIS, they only supported a subset of the system’s functionality and were purchased separately. In response, CIS lowered their hourly rates on several occasions. The number of users grew, peaking at 3 million in April 1995. By this point AOL had over 20 million users in the US alone, but this was off their peak of 27 million due to customers leaving for lower-cost offerings. CIS finally introduced monthly pricing in late 1997, but by that time the number of users leaving all online services for DIALUP INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS was reaching a crescendo.

In 1997, CIS’s parent company, H&R Block, announced its desire to sell the company. A complex deal was worked out with WorldCom acting as a broker, resulting in CIS being sold to AOL. While continuing the original service, renamed CompuServe Classic, AOL also used the CompuServe brand for several low-cost offerings; CompuServe 2000 was a rebranded AOL client with separate services, while CompuServe Dialer was a low-cost dialup ISP. CompuServe Classic shut down in 2009, Compuserve 2000 followed suit in 2011. CompuServe Dialer continues to operate as an internet portal.
.
.
.
U said, … ““Cloud” means you’re running on another company’s computers.”
.
I do not think, subscribing to Compuserve, then AOL, later Dialup ISPs n now Broadband ISPs is considered as the “Cloud”.
……. Maybe DirecTV n DISH Network satellite TV subscription services could also be considered as “Cloud”.

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*Drives the last nail in the coffin known as Capitalism*

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Too bad that React OS is Dead OS. They just do a few lines of code and go “Ohhhh this is cool!” like Fred and George Weasley doing the programming.

Like a broken clock it works right twice a day!

If Linux Mint was mainstream designed for serious graphics and gaming it would be a huge thorn to MS and we would get new developers to replace the now defunct ones.

The PC industry is just a shell of it’s former self and for gaming all we get is crappy indie games stuck in the Sega Genesis era or crappy ports from companies like UBI Soft that have a monopoly with DRM Inside DRM Inside DRM.

That’s all good PC’s are for now is violent shooting games loaded with DRM which is also loaded with DRM.

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