Anyone who thinks "Embrace Extend, Extinguish", amongst other bad business practices, are a thing of the past for Nadella-helmed Microsoft, this should be a tall frosty glass of reality.
I'd say they weren't as anti-consumer back then as they are now. In particular, backwards compatibility was highly valued and I don't remember much in the way of forced "upgrades" or aggressive feature-removals/UI changes in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Now, locking the Windows RT bootloader was a bad practice to begin with, and it's a good thing Microsoft stopped doing that. Then again, it's hard to blame them, seeing that Apple keeps locking down everything they can lay their hands on with virtually no criticism outside the Slashdot crowd perhaps. Everyone just keeps nodding and saying "This is the right thing for protecting their users and ecosystem. Look at all the fragmentation and malware mess that Android suffers from".
And what is with that "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish"? It's 2016. Next thing, IBM will come selling their Watson SaaS and everyone would have to buy it because "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM "?
now, let me channel dang for a second here:
HN looks down on these types of posts filled with logical fallacy (ad hominem, appeal to ridicule, moving goalposts). You would have made your point with the first two sentences alone.
Surface RT tablets were sold as locked down devices from the start, just like many other tablets on the market today. You can't really apply EEE if the 'Embrace' part is missing.
> An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could disable code integrity checks, allowing test-signed executables and drivers to be loaded on a target device. In addition, an attacker could bypass the Secure Boot Integrity Validation for BitLocker and the Device Encryption security features.
So if Microsoft didn't patch this, you could equally accuse them of leaving bad security flaws in Windows 8.1.
Damned if they do...
Users also had the choice to buy something different - like any of the other ARM tablets with broadly similar hardware specs that already run linux.
Especially within a hacker culture that has seen their right to hack their hardware as self-evident.
After all, what is a Surface RT except a large screen phone that doesn't make phone calls.
after all, it was only an old platform that only sold a few million units.