Windows 10 Tip: Turn Off File Explorer Advertising
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I feel bad for the MS employees who are making awesome products but then have to deal with all the ridiculous fallout of Windows 10 decisions. Sorry for the rant, but these actions are honestly making me think about discontinuing my use and support of Microsoft's products, and I hope that someone somewhere is listening to us geeks.
Operating systems are abundant nowadays. Something has to be really good to not switch away from based purely on its own merit.
The real problem is compatibility with applications. I bet the real thing holding most to a single OS is that availability of their applications on a given OS.
And then convince the company to move to non-proprietary tools.
I'm glad I extricated myself from their ecosystem when I did. As much as I loved C# and wanted Microsoft to succeed, it felt very much like being on board a sinking ship.
I will say the .net core stuff is looking really nice to work with though.
.NET Core is looking nice, but I'd rather not risk being burned twice.
If they just focused on the feature delivery and stopped trying to push their crap, it would be a legitimately great OS. Every time something like this happens, I get a little closer to jumping to a Linux desktop for good.
Edit: I do have Windows 10 Pro, which other users mention does not show ads.
W10 has multi-desktop support, which is great when you're doing distinctly different things with an overwhelming number of programs open. It also has better use of windowing if you use those features (snap works by quadrant, etc). So by pressing Win+Ctrl+D it creates a whole new desktop (empty taskbar), and you can switch between them with Win+Tab. I don't use this often but it was amazing the few times I reached for it.
Another small thing which bothered me but I've learned to rely on in W10 is if you have two monitors and are moving your cursor from the left monitor onto the right monitor near the top of the screen, it will be "blocked" at the rightmost edge of the left monitor, preventing your cursor from changing from the left monitor to the right monitor. This is useful for quickly minimizing or closing applications on the left monitor without mistakenly moving the cursor onto the right monitor.
I have not yet found anything which I've "lost control" over except item-level customization of the left-hand side of the start menu, which is where pinned programs would sometimes end up. Having the entire right-hand side of the start menu plus the task bar is really sufficient though so this isn't a big deal.
There are some other welcome improvements like the process list and/or performance monitor are improved, I can't remember specifically what wasn't available before though.
But on the other hand, the list of things that a typical power user or privacy-conscious user needs to tweak continues to grow, and some of them can only be disabled on editions that aren't available to consumers.
Where's the one big switch you claim covers everything of potential concern?
the only real problem I had with setup was sound: emulated sound had buffering issues, as did USB
I would suggest buying a cheap soundcard, giving it to the VM and running a cable between its output and line-in on your host (which hopefully has hardware support, so the sound doesn't have to be touched by the CPU by the host system)
be careful though, the hardware selection relies on trial and error quite a bit, devices have to support things like MSI interrupts, the board has to have proper ACS support, bios support has to be there, and so on
even picking things like graphics cards is a problem, some AMD cards support hot-plugging properly, others of the same generation don't
(and just because it's on the datasheet doesn't mean it works in practice :/)
With regards to usability and customizability, IMHO Unity seems to get worse with each release, so eg. now it no longer supports screenlets, and even the "Unity Tweak tool" no longer seems to work for several useful "tweaks".
But, I just don't get why do people assume it's either "plain" Unity or back to Windows. Have you ever tried Kubuntu? Or MATE, Cinnamon, Xfce flavours? I personally find KDE Plasma 5 the best DE ever, period - that is, once you invest those few minutes customizing it / fixing its few oddities here and there. Why don't you try it out?
For me, my biggest beef with Unity was a death from a thousand papercuts. EG: i wanted to open a file in a program and had to navigate to the location, and couldn't just copy the folder path as I did on Windows. Or when I wanted to Alt-Tab between two windows of the same program, I couldn't do it with Alt-Tab. To remove it, the forums told me to launch a program which then for some reason didn't open when I double clicked on it. And then I realized that Sublime Text was not longer called Sublime Text but Ubuntu somehow renamed it to the last file opened as admin, which was aparently a well known bug with Unity.
Then I read that the next version of Unity is a rewrite from scratch, with usually means many new fun bugs, and just said 'forget it'.
Now, is any of these DE simple to use and with well-thought defaults? I can try out a few ones (after all I will do a clean wipe of my desktop) but sadly don't have the time to test more than a few DEs.
Pro does show adds (like app suggestions in the start menu or add on the lock screen). Enterprise is the one that doesn't (if you configure it properly).
You have windows 8 to thank for that, they figure this out designing their "hot corners" feature. There's a 5px angle at each corner to catch the mouse. This idea is users learn to hit the top and slide across to get the corner, rather than try to nail the corner perfectly all the time.
near the bottom: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/b8/2012/05/21/enhancing-win...
I also disabled Cortana and most of the search features beyond basic indexing and likewise don't use sync... I don't like the occasional Edge browser ad above my Chrome icon in the taskbar though. I'd still rather W10 than Linux... I use Ubuntu on my HTPC, and really like Unity, but it's just not quite as good, and there's the pretty regular quirk after updates run that I spend hours hunting down a solution for a few times a year. I also happen to mostly like my macbook, but there's not a viable solution to replace my main desktop.
All the same, I would much rather have macOS with a start/taskbar a little closer to windows... the instance previews are nice, and it's a bit easier to work across multiple monitors... Most of my time is spent in VS Code and a couple browsers, so as long as I have bash (comes with git in windows), I'm pretty much good in any OS...
Page compression for low memory PC's is nice to have too.
I actually measured the difference. My Windows 7 used to boot in ~20-22 seconds. With Windows 10 it went down to ~15-17 seconds. Sure, Windows 7 was a bit slower. However, it also didn't have forced reboots like Windows 10 does, which in my eyes more than makes up for it.
Unexpected reboots with awful long "installing updates" screen is an issue however.
- Windows Subsystems for Linux. I don't think this needs any further introduction.
- Client Hyper-V. It's a type-1 hypervisor that just works out of the box with completely seamless GPU passthrough (only to the root OS, i.e. the Windows 10 instance with Hyper-V enabled, but it's enough for gaming and running neural nets). Docker for Windows depends on this.
- Storage Spaces. A storage pooling system that supports thin provisioning, mirrored and parity redundancy, tiered caching, bit rot detection and correction (when used with their new ReFS filesystem), and works seamlessly with removable drives (I use a cluster of 2 2.5" external 4TB drives in mirror mode because I travel a decent amount, and 2 2.5" external drives are so much more pleasant to travel with than any NAS on the market).
- Huge improvements to window management, including virtual desktops, arrangement by snapping to all 4 corners on every monitor on multi-monitor systems, a super intuitive UI that lets you choose a different window to snap to the other side with 1 additional click, along with keyboard shortcuts for everything.
- First class pen support. I have a convertible laptop with a Wacom pen, and some of the features in the ink workspace like sketchpad and screen sketch have become indispensable to my workflow, and so damn convenient to use.
Windows 10 really is an excellent OS in its own right. It's such a shame that they keep undermining all the progress they've made by pulling crap like this.
I love Linux, I love Linux desktops, but they cut into my productivity because I spend time fighting <esoteric edge case> rather than getting my work done. Windows (mostly) just gets out of my way. It's cases like this - when it gets in my way - that make me reconsider it.
(You'd think there would be an answer to this somewhere, but I haven't found one that is more than a puff piece.)
FYI you can still get the control panel, just hit windows key and type "control panel". (Note, it appears for me after just CON, so you probably won't have to type the whole word, depending on what you have installed)
WIN+x, e for Explorer
WIN+x, c for CMD (but configurable to launch Powershell instead)
WIN+x, r to bring up the Run dialog.
And so on...
Learn to love WIN+X+Key... until Microsoft takes it away or otherwise nerfs it.
My advice - do it all by script and keep the script because you are going to need it again when Microsoft decides to re-install all of it.
I wonder how bad Windows has to get before Linux on the desktop takes off? It's kind of depressing that as good as most Linux distributions / window managers are, they aren't compelling enough.
I have been dissapointed at Epic and Valve for not investing a bit more resources into the linux ecosystem, but I think they are just playing a longer game. While a freedom geek like myself will force myself to get used to the sometimes more difficult ecosystem, the genpop needs an excuse to chase the medium... I think gaming is it, and vulkan is the thing that should help linux gaming.
Ryzen and it's low cost will also lower new pc barrier to entry, which should help, boosted along with lots of people wanting to dip into VR and therefore upgrading. More and more reasons for sections to move.
If the CIA/NSA leaks keep up and MS keeps alienting users like they have since Vista/8/10, gnu/linux userbase will continue to rise.
What would really make it though... is a killer AAA game or program that's on linux only. No port for windows, no bad windows gamers, you don't get to play, sorta thing.
As for distros, I just want to make a quick plug for (xfce) Manjaro... normally I distrohop very frequently, but I haven't had such an easy linux experience ever. Really worth trying at least in a VM.
By that, I'm not really talking about the touch-based UI (although that's part of it). I'm thinking about the app model. The model used by Windows is too complex (and Linux is even more so).
There are a lot of things Apple got right with iOS, but I'm especially fond of the security measures. Apps are sandboxed, they hide filesystem details, inter-app communication is mediated by the OS, and updating happens mostly transparently. The tight integration between iOS and the hardware for security reasons is also something that should be copied but will be difficult to do.
As a software developer, I couldn't use something like that to do my work, but most of the non-developers in my life could. Microsoft's current approach where they half-ass everything isn't going to work (IMHO). They are in no real danger though, because nothing else is challenging them today.
Potential challengers are around though. Apple is pretty close with the iPad Pro. Valve's Steam box is also on that path.
Quality is not the thing keeping most people away from Linux. It's not even software availability (although that is still relevant). It's PR and forced Windows distribution.
Now it makes perfect sense why the Windows 10 upgrade was "free", and they're giving away/opening up so much other software. They want to become like Google or any other ad-supported company, luring users in with the free/openness but then "monetising" them in this way. And I do not like that at all.
I think using ad-based monetization was short-sighted and will damage their brand in the long term, but presumably they did the math and decided it was a good idea anyways.
Can you give me some examples of ad-based monetization, please? I'm on Windows 10 Pro with suggestions turned off, so all I've seen is a popup that suggests using Edge.
I don't see this as being particularly different from Google showing me an advert for Chrome every time I do a search....
It's a very useful 5GB, given that its part of the OS and you can save to it like an internal drive.
Of course, in the long run, Microsoft wants people o sign up for Office 365, which provides 1TB per person. That way you get 5TB of storage for peanuts, as well as the full desktop Office and integrated smartphone and tablet apps.
If you're a normal person then you'll probably use 200MB (my wife) to 1.5GB (me) shooting jpegs. I checked my folders.
If you think 5GB of OneDrive is a suitable option for a pro/semipro/serious photographer shooting RAW then I suspect you may have more serious problems than OneDive...
I double-checked to be sure. My "free" 15GB of storage in Gdrive is actually 0GB (ie zero, nada, nothing) because I have almost 15GB of email in Gmail.
The same amount of email in Outlook still leaves 5GB free in OneDrive, for new users. (I have 25GB because Microsoft grandfathered my earlier storage.)
And now you have.
Just had a look at my Windows 10 Pro with suggestions turned off and there aren't any ads like that. Or maybe it's because I've never downloaded a game.
However, if I had found one, it doesn't seem like it would be worth too much hysteria.... though I confess that the Chrome adverts on Google's search page actually do annoy me. Slightly.
Of course, I use Google Search much much more often than the Windows 10 start menu ;-)
I expect ads when I visit someone's store. I don't expect ads in my home, even if I'm just renting it from someone else. That's the difference that I see.
Also, Microsoft is not currently monetizing users, except via Bing. Microsoft does almost no ad selling (it farmed ad sales out to AOL), and it's the opposite of Google. There's roughly a 95/5 split, but with Microsoft, it's more like 5% ad revenues.
Unlike Google, Microsoft doesn't read any of your content (eg emails) for advertising purposes.
I do not care if the ads in my file manager are free or paid for today. What reason do you have to believe the in-OS ad-delivery infrastructure that is currently operational will not be monetized? It's a reasonable extrapolation, especially given the following caption from the article "How can you tell this is an ad? The dollar sign is one clue."
The difference is that I don't have a freeing of privacy on a cloud (and especially here it's an automated computer program that's doing the reading, it's not that engineers are reading my emails).
I should note that though I switched away from Windows back in 2001, I think they're definitely on the right track under Satya Nadella. I'm a big fan. It would have been very, very easy for Ballmer's successor to nail the lid shut on the coffin into which they were climbing. He's turning that around and winning fans along the way.
I can't stand the trend toward flat design. It was stupid with Windows 8, and I held out on Windows 7, hoping that 10 would bring some sense back to the interface. Instead, they doubled-down on the poor design, and I'm finding just how little I need to use Windows on a day-to-day basis, when Linux is becoming more and more user-friendly.
Unfortunately, it does mean that I only have until 2020 to finish up my backlog of Windows-only video games, before the long-term support of Windows 7 runs out.
The UI in Windows 10 is inconsistent and ever changing. Do you have to do something in the flat design portion or in the older Win7 style? It's akin to having to attempt to plug a USB2.0 cable into your computer three times.
I'm so sick of the inconsistency of the GUI that I just pop open PowerShell and gwmi things I want to manipulate.
One example is networking. I have a Windows 8 based tablet that I upgraded to 10. The networking is very iffy when rebooting and I often have to disable it and then re-enable the device in "Network and Sharing Center-->Change Adapter Settings". Trying to do this in the flat design way never works. Now what if I want to manage the list of WiFi networks or prioritize them? There use to be a link in the Network and Sharing Center in the bottom left. Once upon a time you could also click on the icon on your current active network which would then give you an option to manage.) That doesn't work for me anymore. I now have to do that in the flat design "Settings".
I also had to go into the registry to get a full pop-up keyboard. The option to enable it was just greyed out. And upgrading to the Anniversary edition on this 32GB tablet required a full reinstall and very carefully timed insertions/removals of a USB hub. Upgrading to Win10 from Win8 actually shortened the OS support lifetime for many of the 32GB tablets. Continued Win10 support requires updating of Win10...
Combine that with the Metro apps that I've paid money for just disappearing for good from my library, and I wonder why anyone puts up with this?
It was actually easier to do the 32 bit Linux UEFI workaround than reinstalling the Win10 Anniversary update.
I used Linux on the desktop from 2004 to 2008; I cannot stand it today.
You're not gonna like 2017 Linux then. The superflat, super-trendy themes have the most users and are pretty much the only ones that see regular updates. Which are required because tl;dr GTK3.
Vertex and -- honest to God! -- a Win 3.x lookalike are virtually the only decent alternatives that work for more than six months.
Someone built a "smaller" version a while ago, but it hasn't been updated, so it no longer works on recent GTK versions.
Welcome to data-driven software development. Good luck turning back that tide....
Obviously Microsoft itself realises this, because Windows 10 Enterprise is essentially a different product. In the spirit of sharing good luck, I wish you luck in finding any large corporate IT department that will adopt an OS as their standard platform without the ability to control exactly what gets updated and when.
The trick Microsoft seems to be trying to pull with Windows 10 is getting everyone else to be the beta testers for its enterprise customers. Commercially, I imagine that makes a lot of sense if you can do it, since surely those enterprise customers are far more valuable to you.
Other customers, who can choose from ever more alternatives for activities that used to use a Windows PC by default, might not be so keen. Casual home users rely more on alternative devices like phones, tablets, and consoles these days. "Prosumers" and small businesses can work with Apple gear or Linux, either on their own merits or simply because if a lot of the services you use are available online then it doesn't much matter what OS you're running locally anyway. With Windows 10 Pro being such an odd beast, I wonder how much longevity Microsoft's apparent strategy actually has.
Welcome to the modern world.
> Windows 10 Enterprise is essentially a different product.
Windows 10 Enterprise is essentially the same product. The timing is slightly different.
> I wish you luck in finding any large corporate IT department that will adopt an OS as their standard platform without the ability to control exactly what gets updated and when.
Try the US Defense Department, Accenture, and Bank of America.
Adaptiva Names Surge in Windows 10 Adoption Among Major Enterprise IT Industry Predictions for 2017 http://www.adaptiva.com/blog/2016/adaptiva-names-surge-windo...
100% Windows 10 Adoption Rate by 2019; 50% by 2017, Say Gartner and Citrix http://1reddrop.com/2017/01/05/100-percent-windows-10-adopti...
That doesn't make it a good thing, though. Getting to our usual dashboard now takes about half a minute on Google Analytics instead of about two seconds, thanks to their latest UI update. Facebook have lost a small fortune in advertising revenue from my businesses because of all the times that they've changed their management pages so they simply didn't work when we were going to run ads.
So are a lot of other programs, including browsers.
And with my professional web development hat on, "evergreen" browsers that update every six weeks are among the worst things that have ever happened to the industry. It's the same culture that also brings us a new JS framework every five minutes and a new half-baked, non-standardised CSS feature every ten. None of this is good unless it actually helps people to do more online, and all too often the reverse is true.
Welcome to the modern world.
Thanks, but I'll keep my old school systems where things like stability and reliability matter more than this week's shiny new UI chrome. That's why we still run Win7, we run Linux servers, our web sites and apps only rely on standardised, well-established features, and so on.
Try the US Defense Department, Accenture, and Bank of America.
Are you seriously claiming that the US DOD and major financial institutions let Microsoft install arbitrary updates and reboot their systems whenever they feel like it? I find that impossible to believe.
As I said, Windows 10 Enterprise is essentially a different product.
They are among the organizations moving to Windows 10. In fact, most organizations are moving to Windows 10.
DoD-Wide Windows 10 Rapid Deployment to Boost Cybersecurity https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/688721/dod-wide...
Clearly, it is...
> and whether giving up control over the update process is acceptable to everyone
Clearly, it's not. But the adoption rates for Windows 10 show that it's acceptable to the vast majority of people.
> by having a very different upgrade regime for Windows 10 Enterprise
Really? How is it "very different".
It isn't clear at all that bundling security and UI updates is the way things are going. That may be true if you look at very narrow parts of the market, but for example all of our servers and pretty much every piece of software we run on them get separate, individually installable security updates that very deliberately don't change any other functionality (and with extremely high reliability, don't break anything in the process either).
But the adoption rates for Windows 10 show that it's acceptable to the vast majority of people.
That's still a stretch. Nearly two years after release, even with very aggressive promotion including literally giving it away to home users for one of those years, it looks like Windows 10 still has far less market share than Windows 7. I don't know see you can get to "vast majority of people" from there.
As for businesses, large enterprises may be moving towards 10, though I note that the citations you gave earlier were invariably future predictions by analysts rather than actual adoption numbers. However, as I keep saying, large enterprises are getting a version that is very different, because it doesn't suffer from problems like having mandatory updates (or telemetry etc.) that have been widely criticised in other editions.
In contrast, and in complete opposition to your earlier claim that most organisations are moving to Windows 10, I mostly work with smaller tech businesses, where approximately none are currently moving to Windows 10 as their standard platform and several are actively looking into alternatives. If that experience is even remotely representative of the wider customer base, the nerfing of the Pro edition is going to hurt Microsoft if they don't fix it before the 2020 deadline. These companies don't have "IT departments" and they don't want "enterprise licensing deals". They want to buy new PCs that they can use to do their work, and for the less technical businesses, they usually want those PCs to be something Bob from Customer Support can set up because he knows a bit about how the office network works and has a list of which software they usually install for new starters. Getting away from all the other hassle is a big part of why cloud-based services are so popular.
On Statcounter numbers, Windows 10 has more usage than Windows 7 in the USA and the UK. That's unheard of for a new Microsoft OS, where most people don't update until they buy a new PC.
> I note that the citations you gave earlier were invariably future predictions by analysts rather than actual adoption numbers.
Some are already doing roll-outs and pilots are at an all-time high. It normally takes corporates much longer to get to this stage.
> by having a very different upgrade regime for Windows 10 Enterprise
Really? How is it "very different".
Here are a few more sources for you to consider:
StatCounter global[1]: Win7 47%, Win10 34% (of Windows desktops)
Wikimedia[2]: Win7 22%, Win10 9% (of all platforms)
USA government analytics[3]: Win7 25%, Win10 17% (of all platforms)
The only serious source I know that has consistently shown Win10 coming out ahead for a while is Steam, which is obviously looking specifically at the gaming market:
Steam survey[4]: Win10 49%, Win7 37% (of all platforms)
That's unheard of for a new Microsoft OS, where most people don't update until they buy a new PC.
It's also unheard of for a new Microsoft OS to be not just given away to home users for a year but promoted through a campaign that was widely accused of trying to trick people into upgrading even if they didn't want to.
Some are already doing roll-outs and pilots are at an all-time high.
There seem to be a lot more pilots than roll-outs, though, even in enterprise land. That in itself is quite telling.
Really? How is it "very different".
Enterprise users have full control over which updates to install and when. Home/prosumer/small business users do not.
[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/de...
[2] https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit...
...which is precisely what a large portion of the userbase who chose Microsoft did not want.
In fact the upgrade is still free through the "assistive technologies" loophole, which while MS has officially said they would close "very soon"...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4vmz19/regarding...
...that was 7 months ago and yet the page is still up and AFAICS lets you download the upgrade installer.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/windows10upgra...
(I have not tried actually running the installer, because I have no intention to deliberately use Windows 10.)
Also, MS has posted the full ISOs for free download on their site, so if you're really desperate and know how, you could just download them and crack it yourself. That would be unheard of a few years ago. The general message seems to be louder than before, although it has been the same for many years: if you really don't want to pay for it, we still want you to use Windows 10.
Hasn't that always been Microsoft's modus operandi? They could have cracked down on pirated versions of their software (Windows, Office), but they didn't because they knew that piracy helped in making their software the de-facto standard.
Do you have any evidence that it's a large proportion of the user base? Windows 10 already makes up the majority of PC usage share in the USA and the UK (on Statcounter), and Microsoft says corporate adoption is at unprecedented levels for a new version of Windows. (Mostly pilots at this stage, obviously.)
More people use Window 10 than have used all versions of Mac OS going back to 1984, and in its first month, it had more users than Linux got after 20-odd years.
There are always hold-outs: I gather some people still cling to OS/2 and maybe even Amigas. There used to be a cult that said you'd have to prize XP out of their cold dead hands.
However, the fact is that Windows 10 absolutely has to work for the US Defense Department (which is already switching to Windows 10), Bank of America and practically all the S&P500, so you can be confident that it will.
I judge companies on how they behave when they're "at the top" - MS in the late 90s-early 00's or Google (Android and search) in the late 00's - now.
The reason is that companies at the bottom have to behave nicely (Cyanogen learned that the hard way), community-cred is literally all they have. You judge companies behavior once they get to the top and can do whatever they want.
Now, back to the topic, MS was losing developer cred lately(and don't want to become IBM), so what do they do? They Open Source some developer tools and part of their language (less than Java, BTW). Oh, they also realize that developers were switching to Apple and Linux, so they added WSL.
It's not they became ethical, it's not that they're stopping vendor lockin, it's not that they're going to finally fully document the Win32 API (their online documentation is quite often inaccurate), it's not that they're going to allow you to stop their spying (unless you're a huge business who had enough purchasing power to actually leave - try telling the CIA that if they're using Windows, everything they type is seen at MS). They're at the top there and don't need to do any favors to anyone.
MS is simply business as usual.
Google is at the top in Mobile. Yet Android is 90% Open Source. It's not that even that.
If I want to install an APK, I can do it. No need to be a Enterprise or pay $100 for a developer license, anyone can install FDroid. And they let people write competitive software (Firefox, etc.) and set them as default. Actually, as a user, I don't have to see anything be Google if I don't want to.
And don't forget open sourcing TensorFlow.
compared to the openness of Edge/IE, Google are saints with Chrome
Chromium was based on Webkit which actually came from Apple (and who forked it from KHTML from the KDE project). It's not Chromium that's the "basis" of competitors, it's Webkit that was the base.
It's open source in name only. All development is done behind closed doors and essentially dumped out in the open when Google determines it's ready for a release. No one else has say in the development process and you can't contribute changes either.
All the other things you mentioned, can also be done on Windows. I am not sure how that's different than what Windows does/is doing.
For a long time even the GNU project had a similar cathedral-style approach of secretive development processes and no outside contributions.
You might have a point when there is a CyanogenMod/LineageOS equivalent for Windows.
2. MS took apple's approach that everything (on their new platform) must go through the store.
Even if right now they give exceptions, it's as I said above an example of them trying to build market share. Will they have an "Unknown Sources" button when they get 80% of the market?
It's not a binary option (nice vs. not nice) but a range from nice to not nice. Companies fall at different points on that spectrum. As examples; Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle all fall on very different points on this not-nice spectrum when they are/were at the top. The relative positions are subjective depending on who you relate to each (developer, competitor, user, recipient of legal threat or bystander), but in my circles there is a general consensus on the relative positions.
We need to prevent companies from controlling the market, and keep the powerful ones honest and accountable. Hating IBM, Microsoft and AT&T is all about fighting tyranny.
Apple was not Tone Deaf under Jobs, but weren't really ethical.
If Google would block Amazon on search, there'd be such a scream.
Now maybe people will also start looking at the current "gate is a fantastic person" trend from the PR perspective as well.
I mean, it is unsourced, but it's not an unheard of idea, and should be quite Google-able. Microsoft has engaged in astroturfing many times (last in 2014 AFAIK) so it's entirely possible.
NeoGaf discussion with a list of news reports on MS astroturfing:
http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=579641
(I'm not associated with NeoGaf, I found it on Google, I vaguely recall it having some GamerGate-related stigma attached to it so I added this disclaimer)
They win whatever happen. It's a bit depressing.
Companies are not people. Companies can't have nor lack a moral compass that tells them right from wrong.
Companies are run by people. These people are the ones making the business decisions and doing the work that enables the company as a whole to do ethical or not-so-unethical things.
The people running these companies can and do get replaced. And when enough of them get replaced, the past actions of a company will no longer be representative of its potential tendencies from that point onwards. This is very simply because a new set of people will be the ones making business decisions and doing the work, and these new people will become the real moral compass behind the company's decision making.
And let's not forget the fact that even people can change. So what's stopping them from changing while running a company, which would thereby be reflected in the actions of the company itself?
All of this change tends to happen slowly and gradually, but change itself, for better or worse, is inevitable as long as a company remains solvent.
Of course, I'm certainly not suggesting that I know for a fact that Microsoft itself has turned an entirely new leaf. In fact, I find all of their recent actions toward limiting user freedom and privacy as disgusting, exploitative and unethical as most others in this thread.
My point is, however, we should try to judge each individual action of a company on their own merit or lack thereof, rather than always viewing them through a lense tinted by some extrapolation of their actions from 20 years ago into some fundamental measurement of the company's intrisic goodness or evil. At the very least, we should try to make an effort to calibrate our lenses to weigh new information more favorably than old, because otherwise, even when the company itself may have long moved on, our opinions of them will forever be stuck in the past.
I think whether a company can change is the right question, because it stands to reason that if a company can change, then given enough time, it will change. How much time is "enough" for any given company is anybody's guess, and as stated in my original post, I'm certainly not claiming that in this case Microsoft has in fact changed for the better. But to rule out that possibility completely because of what they've done in the past strikes me as irrational.
That's only true to a certain extent. Don't forget companies are mainly run by profits. That's what really ends up deciding how the company is run.
Do you think a "good guy CEO" would stop Microsoft from extracting billions of dollars worth of royalties for bogus patents from Android and Linux vendors? Of course not. If there was such a CEO, he'd be quickly shut down by the board. And if the board were "sweetheart angels" that would ask for that, too, they would be replaced by investors.
So companies are really more like a machine, and the people are more like cogs in it. The machine's main goal is to produce profits. If one of the cogs says "no, that's not what we primarily want!", it will very likely get replaced. It takes a tremendous amount of will power to fight against the machine's desires, and it's usually only strong founders that can do it (Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk).
But those are the exception, not the rule. And even then, it's more about delaying profit gratification, rather than foregoing some profits altogether. It's about them knowing that if they do it their way, the company would be even more successful and profitable in the long term, while the machine's forces demand the profits right away.
In fact, ethical behavior is just another knob in the machine that people running a company can turn either way in their quest to maximize profit.
Erring on the side of too much ethical behavior can certainly impact profit in the form of lost efficiency and market opportunities, but we have to recognize that companies' customers are people too, and people generally have a distaste for unethical companies, and a fondness for ethical ones, that may influence their decision do business with them.
So turning the knob too far to either side can have direct and indirect implications for profit, and it's up to the people running the company to calibrate that knob in either direction.
Oftentimes the courses of actions a company can take on any given issue will not be a simple sorted array of choices with an obvious straightforward relationship in the form of less ethics -> more profit, but rather a complex decision matrix of causes and effects for which the outcome of any single option will be impossible to fully predict, and investors can generally see that too. So the people running the company will usually have some degree of freedom to experiment with which direction to turn the knob on ethics, and how far.
> The only way ethical behavior affects profit is when it causes projecting the appearance of being an ethical company to become less expensive. To whatever extent that "people" prefer doing business with companies that they see as ethical, what they see is a company's image and branding, not their actual behavior. The balance is between ethical behavior and PR costs, not ethical behavior and unethical behavior; and that's even a gross simplification, because unethical behavior doesn't immunize you from good PR.
Maybe the effects of good PR can be less easily measured and felt than the obvious and immediate repercussions of bad PR, but the effects are certainly real and build up with time, so reasonable people can disagree as to what degree a company should pursue building up goodwill through ethical (likable) acts. Ethical decisions and behavior is the foundation upon which good PR is built. Even the most obviously opportunistic PR stunt must have some backing in an action the company has taken that can be construed by their audience as doing good.
Companies take on the behavior of the personalities of the people at the top. Nadella, like Gates and Ballmer before him, was selected based on shrewdness, and everything flows from there. It's simple. The company will continue to bear the culture born of Gates because of their board (at the top), and their HR department (everywhere else).
They in fact back fill the role with someone they think should be in charge of the future of the position (which is very often in a radically different direction), or more often than not eliminate the role altogether.
By your estimation, when Steve Balmer retired, the board would have hired another Steve. No, that's not the case. They hired Nadella who is different.
Microsoft still sells (almost) no hardware, PC sales are dropping like a stone, corporate sales are lagging (my Fortune 150 switched to Windows 8 a YEAR after 10 was released), and Microsoft has to monetize seats of Windows somehow. What's left? Collecting and selling user data and advertising. This sort of thing has to have been approved by Nadella. Is this the move of a "kinder, gentler" CEO who just loves open source and freedom? No, it's a move by a shrewd person who is desperately trying to keep his company relevant in the face of phones, tablets, clouds, and social media.
However, shrewdness is just one trait, and I think it's disingenuous to insist that we can reasonably ignore all other consequences of having a different human being running the company because their shrewdness makes them as interchangeable as planks on a wooden boat.
Personalities and management philosophies can't be reduced into some simple measure on a shrewdness scale, and the other differences between these real human beings that you don't seem to be taking into account can and do bring real change in how the company behaves and operates. Maybe not a lot of the change is concentrated on the axis that you've cherry-picked, but that doesn't mean we can dismiss all the other change that may have resulted from this change in management as "next to nothing".
Microsoft is changing, and how far they are changing is to be seen.
Calling them villains unable to change or calling them as innocent as new lambs is strawmanning.
The point people are making is that the only thing that has changed so far with Microsoft is their methods. And that their new methods still align with their old tactics and goals.
Would you call a gang member that now uses guns instead of knives a "changed man"?
Does this analogy really fit? Microsoft put an advert in their file explorer and now we're comparing them to violent criminals?
The IRA stopped using bombs and guns, and took up pens and microphones. Their political goals never changed, but their methods did.
I'd say they're changed men. Using arguments instead of violence is ultimately a good thing.
Gang members often don't have a goal of "I wanna rob people". They want money. If they put on suits and ties and become software engineers because the pay is better---they're changed men.
So what does Microsoft want?
The most trite statement would be that they want market dominance and money for their shareholders. A "good" Microsoft would be one who due to government regulation or social approval cannot do bad things to achieve dominance.
This is the balancing act that we play with all companies---they want money, and society forces them to only gain money in socially approved ways thus we all benefit.
Look at how they're behaving with Windows 10 (and 8 before it). That should be enough to tell you that they have no desire at all to change.
That's not just HN. It's the state of discourse in general in 2017, particularly among internet strangers. You're either on my side 100% or you're wrong.
A classic example is Apple under Jobs. They weren't ethical (locked down iPhone) but they weren't obtuse.
WSL is a classic "shut up and take my money" - it's not open source, it doesn't let me write cross platform GUI, it just let's me keep windows as a desktop when me server is Linux.
The only thing is that MS (under Ballmer) was obtuse and didn't realize they lost the server, and now they do.
VSCode isn't cannibalizing their existing VS installations, its cannibalizing Sublime and Atom. So the most they spend on it is a team of programmers? It pays with mind share.
With .NET core also, they realized that no startup will touch .NET on the server because they don't want to spend money on a windows license. As MS isn't interested in being Oracle, they OS .Net for the server.
Note, they didn't OS .net for the desktop.
What will happen when they'll be be on top again? Will they keep Open Sourcing things (like Google is doing) or will it go back to Closed Source vendor lockin?
Okay, this is tangential to your point, and I'm no fan of Microsoft's, but I really have to defend MSDN here. MSDN is by a wide margin the best and most complete API documentation I've ever seen. Yes, it's wrong sometimes, but that's because it fucking exists. Almost every function, and certainly every function a typical developer is going to care about, is documented. Even crazy obscure shit like wmvcore COM interfaces[1]. You don't even know what that is, but look at all that fucking documentation! Oh my god. My life would be so much harder as a Wine developer if it weren't for MSDN. Every win32 API developer at Microsoft deserves a gold fucking star for actually writing documentation. They certainly don't deserve chastisement for not being perfect.
[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd7...
Maybe MS has tried to clean that up recently, but it has a track record of inaccuracy, at best.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Wine developers were the ones submitting the corrections to the MSDN, anyway.
$ cat src/wine/*/*/tests/*.c | wc -l
1085766
That's not the purpose of MSDN documentation though.
Either way, its clear vendor lockin
There's the documented, public functionality that Windows implements and wants all the applications to adhere to. This should be documented and it is.
Then there's the functionality that Microsoft had to implement behind the scenes because some important application used it in an incorrect way or it worked by accident. They didn't want that application to break with a new release of Windows. Now Microsoft doesn't want new applications to use this, so they don't document it. I think that is absolutely correct.
MSDN API documentation is meant for people that write applications the way Microsoft wants the applications written.
Wine isn't an application. They want to emulate what Windows does. The API documentation is not for that purpose and it shouldn't be.
That being said, there are APIs in Windows that are secret and undocumented. Those should not be used by applications. Windows isn't open source. Accept it.
The documentation is shallow, it does not even consistently describe all the parameters of everything. It's often wrong, it does not carry any information about bugs and lacks an easily reachable diff for older versions.
Yes, it has a page for everything. It's just that most of the pages are useless.
It used to be the best thing around, but it's not the 90's anymore. Almost all mainstream development platforms out there have better documentation than MS. (And it does not help that almost all of them also have saner APIs.)
They're intelligent ones. And no, no some shady/remote executive. One of us (maybe a little more product oriented) who then wrote in some internal memo: "Using this phrase will result in tricking users of not disabling it. It's better to conceal it and not write the truth. It's better to cheat".
And then they signed it off and went home to their families and children. YUCK.
In the late 80s / early 90s Windows was, in my personal opinion, one of the worst UIs. It wasn't even a proper OS. Nearly every other personal computer shipped a better windowing system. But IBM-compatible PCs were dominant so whichever windowing system monopolised on that was going to be dominant regardless of their quality. This made me grumpy.
But then Windows 95 came along and it was actually pretty impressive. I liked Windows 95 - for a bit. However it didn't take long for the 9x to show it's warts and instead of fixing the constant stream of kernel panics, fixing their reliance on DOS bootloaders, or even just adding desperately needed power user tools (many power users like myself ended up writing our own utilities to get around Windows 9x's short comings) Microsoft just kept bundling new features; forcing the system requirements to jump significantly with each new iteration for seemingly no real functional benefit. Windows ME was easily the worst of all Microsoft's OS (it made Vista look usable in comparison).
But thankfully there was an alternative to the Windows 9x line, and to ME specifically. Microsoft had done some serious investment into their NT line and released Windows 2000. Hooray as because they added so many much needed usability little tweaks: shortcuts to Notepad (back then people still actually used Notepad) so no more clicking File->Save for quick edits. Windows 2000 was also rock solid compared to the Windows 9x range. In fact the only times I've managed to BSOD Windows 2000 was when playing around with undocumented APIs - so pretty much my own fault.
Windows 2000 also looked doubly good because around that time Mac users were stuck on OS 9 (albeit OS X was released shortly after). Mac OS 9 was just as poor as Windows 9x in terms of the frequency one would need to reinstall. Linux was obviously around at that time but we're talking before the time when people even joked about "this year will be the year of the Linux desktop". Linux was usable but a long way from being a recommendable desktop solution for those who want something to "just work". There was another option back then though: BeOS. Sadly by the time of Windows 2000 BeOS was in it's twilight years. Struggling to gain any traction and suffering from the blow of Apple buying up Next (and Jobs). I still used BeOS 5 a fair bit around that time though but more for fun than for productivity as Windows 2000 had better software support, better development tools, etc.
This was when I started to forgive Microsoft for releasing such substandard software in the 80s and 90s. It didn't last long though. XP was twice as resource hungry, twice as ugly and -upon it's initial release- offers nothing of benefit to 2000 aside quickly booting times. XP obviously branched off significantly with each new service pack but it was too late because I held onto 2000 for a long while and then by the time XP really evolved into a new entity, desktop Linux was already good enough that I'd migrated to it as my main OS (only using Windows for specialised "pro" tools). Then with the release of Vista I ditched Microsoft entirely. To be honest I'm glad I did because with each new release of Windows it's felt like control has been inched away from the power user in favour of dumbing things down for the tech-illiterate home users.
As someone who spent their entire career OS-hopping with no real alliance it was painfully obviously how Microsoft was hurting competition. But I guess that's what you do when you're on top. If you're an underdog then you fight for market share by being better at particular things - lots of things if needed. But when you're at the top it's all about retaining market share - so you focus on keeping people on your platform. A priority which doesn't necessarily fall in line with being technically the "best". However the internet has dislodged the importance of the OS. In many ways the browser is now the kernel. Sure many people -myself included- still prefer native applications but the rise of web apps has done more to aid Linux adoption than anything any single company has contributed (Canonical included). Bill Gates could see this coming though. Hence why he tried to dominate the webspace with Internet Explorer and platform specific web controls like ActiveX and it's predecessors. He did a pretty good job too - for a while.
I actually don't hate Windows 10. I have it on a spare work laptop as an emergency in case I manage to foobar my other Linux machines (I run Arch, so it's not too difficult to break if I'm feeling careless - but usually equally easy to fix as well). WSL is a nice feature, miles better than Cygwin ever was. The cmd terminal finally has some much needed usability tweaks. Overall it reminds me of the subtle usability improvements Windows 2000 pushed that made me warm to Windows nearly 2 decades ago. But I'm happy with Linux - it functions the way I personally find the most productive and, frankly, I doubt I would ever trust Microsoft as my primary platform again anyway. However it is amusing to watch new power users go through the same highs and lows with Microsoft as I had done in the 90s. It's just another one of those cyclic trends I've observed in IT (along with technology being discovered and reinvented)
MS did not see the internet coming. I remember being at conferences in the '90s and speaking with boastful MS types about the "Microsoft Network", which required a paid subscription. "This internet stuff is just for universities, it doesn't have a future," one guy told me.
Of course, things didn't go that way, so Microsoft released IE5 and IIS and it was game on.
Let's also remember just how deeply Internet Explorer 4 integrated into Windows 95.
Microsoft were very aware of the potential of the web but that still doesn't mean they could control it.
Sure, maybe 0.01% of the market will always stop whatever Microsoft is pushing, but let's face it, most don't have time to learn all the tricks on how to stop all of Microsoft's tracking or advertising and whatnot. Plus, I bet Microsoft will change how this works in a near-future update, so this tip will become invalid. It did something similar for the tracking features that were getting stopped by people and tools early on.
There is one checkbox to switch off the ad
vs.
-- Of course I don't like the intrusion by MS either, but if people don't pay for the product (and updates!), this is what happens. Worse with Google/Facebook and now also with MS.
Google's product came as free, with the conditions upfront. When you signed up, you knew exactly what you are getting. It is also worth noting, that Google's paid product is not datamined. That comes with some slight surprises, for example, Google Now is useless. (So your off switch is right there, at $5/mo/user).
Microsoft product was paid upfront. You might have used it for years, or decades even, and only then it changed to paid and privacy invading. Bait & switch like.
So Google provided you with an additional option, that you could or could not take, you were informed with terms and conditions. Microsoft got you used to their product and then switched terms and conditions, they took the option away from you.
Not same in my book.
Google also changed. IIRC in the beginning they didn't collect 'everything' and had borders. At some point they merged all services. You are right with $5/mo/user, but I was not talking about GoogleApps, I meant 'the net' called Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AdSense etc. which 'hunts' you down all over incl. Android.
I don't much care personally if they track me, but I don't think they should be allowed to do this. And I think it's significantly worse than what MS did here. It's also much more hidden.
The fact that they continue to roll out this sort of user-hostile "features" shows that it was just an empty marketing gesture.
Time to start some bounties on making Linux usable for desktop, I guess.
Maybe I am a linux hermit, but you guys really abide this shit? I can't fathom a tech savvy person giving this kind of software a pass anymore. I know, lock in, standards, etc. But damn.
Our shit-abiding tolerance is higher than you might think.
It's been about 10 years or so since I did any web development. And yesterday we had a thread here about CSS minifying, and one of the CSS files were ~250KB. What the hell kind of abominations are people making that need 250KB of CSS?
Without being judicious, it's easy enough to see happen.
Not to mention a few resource embeds to shave load time (fonts, svg, images, etc).
Reactive native I'm more open minded about, but I'll reserve judgment until I see how well the obey things like themeing.
But I can see how they wouldn't be the preference.
It's a very stable economic arrangement /s.
What would be the point for those people to change to Linux if they can't do there what they've bought the product for?
Didn't Ubuntu do something like this with search in the past? These companies love to cream off whatever extra income they can get. Turning operating systems into services, with their increasing reliance on expensive cloud data centers is only going to make the problem worse.
Edit: corrected the company name!
Ubuntu is a linux distribution; Canonical is the company that maintains, serves, ships, and provides support for Ubuntu. I feel like you didn't make that distinction clear in your comment.
For what it's worth, it's easier to switch between Linux distributions than it is to switch from Windows to something else. Ubuntu is only one of literally thousands of desktop Linux's - many of which are forks / reskins of Debian or Ubuntu to begin with, so it was pretty trivial for users to dump Ubuntu in favour of an ad-free Linux. So Canonical didn't really have much choice other than to listen to the complaints.
That's understating it a bit. You just sudo apt install one package, log out, and select the different DE. It's a 30 second job.
The only thing missing is solid cross os encryption - but for those that can live with some metadata being exposed, it looks like encryption is coming [ed: to open zfs].
I suppose one might even share home filsystems with OS X - but running OS X requires Apple hardware (and/or breaking the license and some hacks).
[Ed: and sharing home filsystems across unix-like os' actually works: thanks to things like the Bourne shell and other software being available and using the same storage for preferences etc (typically text files) - Bsd even comes with an emulation layer to run Linux executables.]
See, this is why competition is so nice. With Linux, it's fairly easy to jump ship and move to a competing distro at any time. I can do it in under an hour. (It helps keeping your user data on a separate partition from the rest of the OS.) It's really easy when you stay within the same "camp" of distros, so there's little learning curve: the Debian/dpkg distros are somewhat different from the Redhat/Fedora/RPM distros, but within those camps they're extremely similar. Even switching between those camps isn't that hard. One distro pisses you off? No problem, just go download one of its sister distros and install. Try that with Windows. And if you'd rather stick with your distro but make a change, this is comparatively easy since the system is open-source and put together in a transparent way. Like the Amazon search lens above: it wasn't baked deeply into the system in an opaque way, it was a separate dpkg package. It's easy to look at package contents for system components like this, see any dependencies, and uninstall them if you don't like them. You can even take out large parts of the system (like the UI) and replace them with something entirely different, which is exactly what Linux Mint does, using Ubuntu's base packages, omitting Ubuntu's "Unity" DE, and sticking your choice of 4 different desktop environments on top.
In the enterprise space you used to buy "Software assurance" to make sure you were always licenced to have the latest version.
NOW, with Win10, Software assurance is the reverse. you have to PAY EXTRA to make sure that your win10 version DOESNT get new feature updates. To keep it at certain level. (ie prior to when they started pumping it full of adverts).
To me thats a stand-over tactic... "Nice OS you got there... it'd be a shame if something was to 'Appen to it..."
Ubuntu might be the most popular linux distro, but there's so many other options out there. Take a look at https://distrowatch.com/ there's basically a distribution for any type of usecase you might imagine. Hell if you can't find a distribution to suit your needs nothings stopping you from starting your own.
If I start selling beer with piss in it, does suddenly all beer taste like piss or just the one I'm selling?
Using 'dogs' and 'poodles' interchangeably subconsciously implies that all/most dogs are poodles.
I think the big difference here is the relative mindshare of Windows in the Windows ecosystem (100%) vs the share of Ubuntu in the Linux ecosystem (popular and dominiant, but not 100%).
A very small portion of the Linux community made the decision to put the launcher ads in, a large chunk of the community made a very loud fuss, and the feature was removed.
Why not? Ubuntu (along with Red Hat & others) is a commercial distribution of Linux, but it's not the only Linux. Users who care about their freedom & privacy don't use Ubuntu, because it includes proprietary drivers & does things like phone home.
Users of distros such as Debian, OTOH, do care about those things, and I think it's very fair for us to note that we find the behaviour of Microsoft recently to be quite remarkably sad.
Debian's momentum is due to the fact that it's a really stable, really well-thought-out, sysadmin-friendly, production-quality, freedom-respecting, privacy-respecting Linux distro; I don't think that has changed, and I don't think that anything beats them by those metrics.
Ubuntu's momentum is due to the fact that it supports proprietary hardware, is easy to use, and is pretty. You may be right that other distros are better than it there.
Debian & Ubuntu are very different.
I think what it boils down to is that he's abdicated his technical thinking to Microsoft because he can't keep up with it any more. When Microsoft was at it's 90's peak, he concluded that he could snuggle into their product-bosom, and ride out the rest of his career on his knowledge of Visual Basic. He wasn't necessarily wrong, but it's a decision that he doesn't have the bandwidth to reevaluate now, as his career is centered around managing. So he just ignores all of these kinds of articles. I guess that's one approach.
People at much higher levels in large companies are in much the same boat. They make purchasing decisions based on Microsoft doing no wrong, and give them the capital to ignore feedback from the public sector. And that's why we are where we are.
At least, that's the way I think it works.
I can see a philosophical opposition to this stuff, but practically it doesn't affect me at all.
The ideal OS, much like the ideal ISP, stays the hell out of the way and does an excellent, efficient job, doing only what you need it to do.
Unfortunately, modern companies seem to forget that it used to be cool to simply make some profit, even if it was modest and trickling in at a slow pace. It was more important to have continuous and stable profits, than it was to have ridiculous profits. Now we seem to have this squeeze-out-of-a-stone approach that ruins experiences. They push and they push, then act surprised when all the users bail.
Private companies want to make money too; this is just how an evergreen OS where users don't pay for updates feeds into MS's desire need for recurring revenue, which isn't a desire unique to publicly-traded firms.
I often find myself asking: Is this product designed to help the consumer achieve what they want to achieve, or is it designed to steer the user into what the designer wants to achieve? Sometimes this perspective is really illuminating, e.g. for some websites and how they make information available/discoverable.
Of course, there's also another aspect you're getting at, feature creep: If you're designing a product you really care about, it's hard to keep perspective and know when to stop versus a "more is better" mentality. I can understand/relate to that a bit better. But anyway, one thing I like about Linux is that I very rarely feel any of these criticisms apply.
I find other things much more annoying:
- I really like the random lockscreen pictures. But sometimes, I get ads for Xbox Games or movies from the Windows Store. It seems inappropriate at work, and people think I'm a fan of game XY although I've never heard about it before.
- On one PC, I get the infamous "Try edge, it is 20% faster than Firefox" every time I start Firefox. I assume (strongly hope) that this is a glitch...
- A OneDrive ad that really annoys me is a popup window, telling me to login to OneDrive (and possibly purchase something, IDK). It opens at startup, and at random times when using office. I think when an application tries to open a file that doesn't exist on a network drive triggers it also (!?). I can deactivate it, but it comes back after some time.
I have no need for OneDrive (as I already use Dropbox and Nextcloud). It's fine that you offer it to me once, but please let me opt out and never be bothered again.
----
On the positive side, maybe this means that there will be finally a proper common integration of sync providers? Every service places their icons in different places. Dropbox, Nextcloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, CERNBox (proprietary service at work). It would be really funny, because then this would mean the linked tip is another one of those frequently repeated tips that actually make you experience worse (as you can't see when a future Dropbox is trying to tell you there was a sync failure...).
The numbers don't seem to be so positive so far, though, and the effects of reputational damage particularly among techies and other influencers could take years to fully manifest.
Windows 10 has also improved dramatically over the past 18 months. Under the previous system, you'd have been using worse code for 3-5 years, then been faced with an expensive and possibly traumatic "big bang" upgrade.
Yes, but the balance of where the money is coming from seems to have been shifting, at least going by the public briefings. As I read them, it's not that Windows 10 has been successful: only 400 million people is quite a poor performance given everything 10 should have had going for it, and market share seems to have flattened dramatically since the end of the giveaway period. It's just that other parts of Microsoft are currently doing well enough to make up for it.
Windows 10 has also improved dramatically over the past 18 months.
When you start with as many problems as Windows 10 had, it would be hard not to!
Still, I'm not convinced the things that originally put off the people who haven't upgraded already have really changed much at all. Potential deal-breakers like forced updates/reboots, privacy/telemetry concerns, driver/hardware problems, and ads all still seem to be there. Edge and Cortana are still mostly gimmicks. It still doesn't have as much support for playing media as previous versions.
> It still doesn't have as much support for playing media as previous versions.
Download a media player that plays DVDs. It's not hard.
Fair enough, the opinion that 400 million is not particularly impressive under the circumstances is subjective. However, the relative flattening of Windows 10 market share and the shift in the distribution of where Microsoft is making its money seem to be widely corroborated including by Microsoft's own public statements.
Download a media player that plays DVDs. It's not hard.
I think you may have picked up on the tiniest possible detail to dispute there, while missing the multiple elephants in the room that I had mentioned just before...
That was the only simple way to be helpful, if you actually needed it.
The rest is just your opinion.
Really? There's been some nice tweaks and a minority of us can now use WSL, but it's essentially no different than it was 18 months ago.
I think for the average consumer, the system is fine but for power users or developers, it just sucks having that control taken away.
From what I understand, there have been a lot of cases where prompts are easy to overlook and time out, restarting a users computer for updates while in the middle of working.
That said, it looks like the upcoming creators update will allow you to choose the time of restarts but not what updates you receive. If you could choose your updates, this file explorer thing wouldn't probably be as big of an issue since you could just opt not to install whichever update adds it.
Of course, future updates might/probably would require it and eventually you might have to but it just feels shittier than paying for the OS outright and having control to accept or deny whatever you like.
This was true back when companies distinguished between bug-fixes and new features. The current fad of forcing a mixture of fixes and random changes (e.g. ads in the file browser) down users' throats is repugnant. It's like a flu shot bundled with a new nose ring.
No, it isn't. It's normally in everyone's best interests to have any relevant security vulnerabilities patched, but that's an entirely different thing, as anyone who suffered the GWX fiasco can testify.
In the past, Windows has been pretty dodgy sometimes with how it springs updates and reboots on you
How so? There is plenty to criticise about the way Microsoft has screwed up Windows Update for Windows 7, and plenty of suspicion about possible ulterior motives they might have for doing so years before the end of the promised support period and not fixing it already. Maintaining a properly security-patched Windows 7 system is now next to impossible if you don't have enterprise-level admin tools, and subjectively I seem to be hearing about increasing numbers of people who are just giving up and turning off Windows Update altogether. However, at least you can do that, and in any case our Windows 7 machines never install any updates we don't want them to, nor reboot out of the blue when left unattended.
The difference is that sticking needles in people requires their explicit consent.
I've seen/had it happen too many times that I go to use a classroom or lectern or meeting room PC which someone clicked shut-down instead of log-off and now the PC is indisposed for half an hour or more.
It's also pretty annoying when configuring Windows-guest virtual machines or rather, trying to get a class of students to do it in the allotted time.
How exactly are they "shooting themselves in the foot"?
They're making more money with these moves. Ads bring in money, and forced updates force more people to see ads, which brings in more money. How is this a bad thing for them?
And what are users going to do? Look at you: you're singing the praises of Win10. Are you going to switch to another platform because of the ads and forced updates/restarts? Of course not. Almost all their users are just like this. So tell me, exactly what incentive do they have to not subject you to these things that you complain about? It's simple: they have 2 choices: 1) not annoy the users, and make less money, maintain marketshare at present level, or 2) annoy the users, make more money, and still maintain marketshare at present level with probably a statistically-insignificant number of people abandoning Win10. Obviously, #2 is the correct choice for a profit-seeking entity.
$ git clone git.kernel.org/linux.git
***** TRY SUBVERSION ENTERPRISE FOR $49.99/MO ****Disappointed in you, Microsoft.
And I say this as someone who's been really enjoying Windows 10 and Microsoft's recent opening to the world at large.
Somehow I am reminded of this essay by PG:
"The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.)"
http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
Have you noticed how close to telemarketing the entire Windows 10 upgrade process was, especially to Windows 7 customers who were very happy with their OS?
It's sucky but definitely not just an MS thing.
> (Ad-like notifications for OneDrive do appear in File Explorer in the Anniversary Update, but people running the Creators Update are now seeing actual advertising)
Does any know an alternative version of windows 10 costing extra $$ for which is guaranteed without "telemetry" "forced updates" and other hostility? 3rd party add-ons to disable this behavior are just temporary hacks.
If there isnt a 'windows-10-guaranteed-isolated-edition' kicking around windows 7 will be the last microsoft OS I ever install on bare metal.
And I understand that disabling these amazing features in control panel (or that new nonsense) also tend to be temporary - until some update randomly turns those features back on.
You know all the telemetry was backported to 7 and 8 right? You can remove it but that would fall under "3rd party add-ons to disable this behavior" and thus would not satisfy your needs.
http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/
I've not seen anything to suggest they've fundamentally changed since then. The Microsoft that wrote the following in 2002:
"Messages that criticize OSS, Linux, & the GPL are NOT effective. Messaging that discusses possible Linux patent violations, pings the OSS development process for lacking accountability, attempts to call out the 'viral' aspect of the GPL, and the like are only marginally effective in driving unfavorable opinions around OSS, Linux, and the GPL, and in some cases backfire. On the other hand ‘positive’ OSS, Linux, and GPL messages are very effective - both across geographies and audiences."
... is still with us today, and their current strategy is merely a reflection of their assessment of their marketing.
The 'nice' Microsoft you see today is a PR exercise based on their discoveries, 15 years ago, about the (in)effectiveness of FUD tactics against open source software.
Yea, nah. Splitting settings into various interconnected places with completely different UIs is anything but easy to use. Flat design has nothing to do with ease of use either. Not being able to disable updates might make it easier to use for the average user, certainly does not make the life of power users easier.
It is the best OS deep under the hood, but that's where it ends.
Quite honestly, if you truly believe that as a power user you cannot completely disable upgrades in Windows 10, then you are not the type of power user who should be playing with such settings. It may sound cruel to the individual but opposed to the spectre of millions of Windows bot net units i consider it a net kindness to the rest of humanity.
As for the settings, in win10 you don't even need to remember where they are. You can just type into the start menu what you need for all the commonly accessed things, or right click the start menu to get all the classic stuff you're used to.
>As for the settings, in win10 you don't even need to remember where they are.
That's what you call ease of use? Having to remember what every single setting is called? Brilliant.
I think you misread what i wrote, as you are saying yes, but following it with a statement that is very different from the one I posed.
> I believe in having a choice which updates to install while not disabling the updates altogether.
Entirely possible. I am in fact doing this from time to time to pull in security updates immediately while temporarily holding back reboot one. The tools exist, but ms really does not want them used by people who might not fully understand the ramifications of their actions.
I hope you can understand that due to my agreeing with them, I'll refrain from trying to detail the how.
> Having to remember what every single setting is called?
No, typically you just type in what you want to mess with, e.g. language, region, firewall, mouse, applications, etc. and get the correct and useful thing. There are of course exceptions, but i can tell you my parents are having a much easier time with it as measured in less time spent by me having to step then through the paths into the old school settings.
I am not interested in workarounds. Especially not in a premium OS whose all previous applicable versions had that option.
>No, typically you just type in what you want to mess with, e.g. language, region, firewall, mouse, applications, etc. and get the correct and useful thing.
Right. Try typing "ads" in it. See how that turns out. Oh, and I don't care about what time are your parents having, this is completely irrelevant to intelligently designed control panel. In fact, the whole search function is. It should be supplementary, not primary.
It is not a workaround. Users get one interface which ensures they don't endanger the rest of the world (similar to how in e.g. Germany newbie drivers get limiters in their car engines). Admins get a completely different interface which allows them absolute, complete and granular control.
As someone with the know-how i don't need a workaround. I simply use the interface that was intended to fulfill my needs as a professional with the requisite knowledge and experience.
I presume that your super secret secret is KB3073930, which is about as dodgy as your argumentation and is not a part of Windows.
Nope. Also, i'm seeing it more as an adult not telling a kid where the key to opening the gun locker is. Heck, the fact that you haven't yet googled it yourself is plenty proof to me that you don't have the mindset to be given such power.
(You also messed up the reply chain.)
And no, at the time I was posting, there simply was no "reply" button, so I assumed the thread has reached maximum reply depth.
The old task manager that doesn't let you End Task?
Those are annoyances that come up many times an hour on Win7, having low-level OS functions like that work very well is where Win10 shines.
If you don't want ads, unclick the checkbox.
There are some negatives but they don't cancel the improvements.
But I am convinced this good will was a ruse, a charade, to excuse their questionable business practices at the the expense of the consumer. Advertising directly inside the O.S. is a good example.
And we, who reaped the benefits of this goodwill, are more likely to turn the other cheek when they are out of line - especially if (god forbid) our product relies on Windows.
"Oh, that's just Micro$oft being Micro$oft again."
"But what about all the good things they've done lately?"
Ad-like notifications for OneDrive do appear in File Explorer in the Anniversary Update, but people running the Creators Update are now seeing actual advertising.
This points out that there appears to be a transition from "Microsoft product ads" to "full blown ads". Quite worrying. I only use Windows in a VM, but still find it to be a very useful O/S for some things.
I know that one could make the argument that clicking the "chrome" button and seeing ads (ie. the internet) vs clicking the "files" button and seeing ads are not that different. But to me, they are worlds apart.
It'll be interesting to see if this is compatible with UK regulation of advertising, which says that any adverts must be clearly identified as ads.
Making the ancient file explorer that already has a shitty usability even worse is almost like asking us to stop using it.
They have a monopoly sized market share of desktop computers, which they are using to unfairly boost their Dropbox competitor.
This seems very similar to the very behavior that earned them an anti-trust smackdown.
Then again, I don't blame them, with the current administration you could probably murder children and not face any real push back from the DoJ.
Yeah, that's the problem. You might miss some.
Most of those guides degrade security, not enhance it.
Some gems I've read[0][1]: Disable Smartscreen, Disable Windows Defender, Disable or Delay Windows Update, Block Time Synchronisation in the Hosts file, Disable Biometric login, Disable driver updates, Disable Secure Boot/TPM Chip, and Disable UAC.
This is the Dunning–Kruger effect[2] all over. Most people who "know better" would never write such a guide; or the guide would just tell you to flip a half dozen switches in the official Settings -> Privacy UI and Cortana -> Settings UI, rather than disabling key security features. But longer more detailed looking guides are generally more popular in spite of being completely wrong/bad practice.
[0] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2971725/windows/how-to-reclai...
[1] http://bgr.com/2015/08/05/window-10-privacy-settings-how-to-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Think about it,
When you buy a product, and you’re presented with ads about other products that the company is offering.
Rather than them providing your money’s worth of value, you’ll get the feeling that they’re making money out of you rather than fulfilling their promise.
It's just shady business, Microsoft...
Here's a great writeup that I found with 5 simple steps to turn the damn File Explorer ads off on Windows 10.
I hope it might prove to be useful for you guys :)
For example, switching from Windows\System to Windows\System32 for Chicago made 100% sense, but how did we end up with 32-bit software stashed in \Windows\SysWOW64 and 64-bit software in \Windows\System32?
It's like that movie The Day After Tomorrow where they discuss how big a part of US they have to abandon, a few releases back Linux tossed out a lot of 90's assembler code, such purging has never occurred in Windows source tree.
Windows 10 has had its share of issues, usually resulting from updates breaking things.
It's also not free. That was a limited time deal for owners of previous versions of Windows. Most future users will pay for it, either as a Retail copy or as an increased price for whatever Windows-based sysytem they might buy in the future.
Sure, they gave it away for a little bit, but by that logic, drugs are free, because the guy down the street gave me some free baggies because 'he likes me'!
Set-Privacy.ps1: PowerShell script to batch-change privacy settings in Windows 10
https://github.com/hahndorf/Set-PrivacyI know I will not pay money for anything that's going to turn around and "monetize" me in this way. It's only forgivable for free products, for obvious reasons.
Couple that with a backlash against Apple over the non-pro MacBook Pro, and its failure to update most other Macs. Then stir in articles like these:
Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up http://char.gd/microsoft/why-i-left-mac-for-windows/
Why I’m Leaving Apple for Microsoft: Switching as a Photographer https://petapixel.com/2016/12/03/im-leaving-apple-microsoft-...
and famously:
Apple has lost the functional high ground https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-grou...
I don't want to overstate the case, but there's obviously been a shift over the past three or four years....
Pretty sure I'm going to stay with OS X for now.
One can only imagine the state of this mess in three years. Let's not forget that win10 is basically just one year old. And they already have it in such a ridiculous state.