I take it from your comment that they're still up to their old tricks... I'll continue my boycott of EA and Ubi
Edit: To clarify the "hit a nerve" bit, when I wrote this my post and agildehaus's were both down voted.
I believe I read somewhere that this will be MS's last release #. It will be a rolling release from here on out. I have not seen details on how they monetize that unless they switch to Apple's HW model.
I think they are just wanting as many people as possible to switch to Windows 10 as fast as possible. They are doing this by giving it away for free.
After the year Windows will be monotonized the same way. As someone that always builds his own comoputers I jumped on the $29.99 Windows 7 deal which they offered the first 6 months and $39.99 for Windows 8 which was good for the first three months (Off the top of my head not needed to be accurate for arguement sake)
It's free for a year to upgrade and than back to business as usual.
They sell computers and mobile phones of their own design tailored for their own OS. The only difference is that they allow third party hardware and Apple doesn't.
> I think they are just wanting as many people as possible to switch to Windows 10 as fast as possible. They are doing this by giving it away for free.
I agree.
> After the year Windows will be monotonized the same way.
This doesn't seem to be consistent with their stated goals and the direction they've been moving in. The idea is that Windows 10 is the last numbered version of Windows, after that it will be evergreen. What upgrades are there to sell?
Microsoft are trying to change how people think of their web browser. Edge is very important yet they are launching it without one of the biggest features needed in a modern browser, extension support.
But do you believe that more than 1% of web browser users install and use one or more browser extensions?
In 2013, this article[1] gave numbers of anywhere from 9% to 22% of users blocking ads, which requires an extension AFAIK. So, "yes". Even if those numbers are exaggerated due to skewed measurements, I'm pretty sure it's going to be more than 1%.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/21/use-of-ad...
Not sure if it has Silverlight, but since we aren't streaming the 2008 Olympics and Netflix doesn't need it anymore I'm not terribly worried.
Right now, there is very little incentive for a user to move on from Windows 7 on an existing machine, particularly if it is not touch enabled. Now imagine if they hear that Windows 10 is riddled with bugs and doesn't work.
The carrot they're dangling is a free upgrade, so think I might take this gamble. I'm not a penny pincher, but even so I cringe at the thought of paying for operating system upgrades.
This opportunity won't last forever, so I'll start with laptops and work my way up.
But I strongly suspect after a year Microsoft will extend the upgrade indefinitely. The whole year limit only exists to accelerate Windows 10 upgrades (to add urgency to it).
It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to end the free upgrade program after that point. They've already sacrificed most of the private licence revenue by the majority of the people buying them already upgrading, so the remaining trickle after the year won't be significant.
But I might be wrong. They did end the Windows 8 $25 upgrade after a year for real. So we'll have to wait and see.
To a power user you get lots of nice things. Hyper-V is fantastic from Windows 8. Explorer is also faster and locks a lot less files and folders (the "you can't delete a folder that contained pictures" bug in windows 7).
But to a common user, there is nothing better in windows 10, other than the fact that they need to relearn how to use windows. From a UI point of view, the only additions are multiple desktops, which is at best a featurette, and moving the search bar from within the start menu to the task bar, which isn't exactly a revolution. If you don't have touch enabled on your machine, which would be the common case for windows 7, upgrading to windows 10 is only going to be a hassle.
EDIT: I don't have many/any ongoing issues with bugs, and I even use Visual Studio CTP/RC on a day to day basis, without any major issues.
Microsoft do software _really_ well. The crap they have to get right on an ongoing basis is nothing compared to Google and Facebook, we should give them some credit.
From a developer perspective, this sounds like a support nightmare given the number of potential configurations that could end up out there with no clear way of identifying them.
I genuinely don't understand this move by Microsoft. Of all the things you want to be stable and reliable over time, your basic OS and platform software has to be at the top of the list.
While dumping any responsibility to support software older than the latest release has obvious appeal for developers, evergreen software has mostly proven to be mediocre-to-disastrous from the user's point of view so far. For business users, it's also painful from an internal support point of view, for much the same reasons. And as you mentioned, for an OS or other platform software, anyone developing other software that runs on top of it also faces problems.
About the only thing this kind of constantly updating deployment model has been good for is getting security and stability patches out faster. This is beneficial, but that benefit is tempered by the "just ship junk and patch it later" philosophy that has become widespread at the same time. Many of those patches simply shouldn't ever have been necessary in the first place, but new releases are now routinely of such poor quality that many people just don't bother, and advice to wait until SP1 or the equivalent is common.
If I were Microsoft, I think I'd want my new flagship OS to be the stable, reliable, trustworthy antidote to Apple's broken-within-a-week operating systems[1], not something with the same reputation for constantly tweaking things as Chrome/Firefox, on-line SaaS apps, and the like.
[1] For legal reasons, I would like to point out that not all Apple operating systems break within a week. In fact, the fastest I have seen a mainstream Apple device break in practice was approximately an hour after purchase, when iOS updated on a mobile device almost immediately, leaving the device so much worse than what the purchaser had previously tried out and thought they were buying that they took it straight back to the shop and demanded a full refund.
A business will typically test and verify updates before pushing then out to their employees.
Businesses which allow its users to perform updates directly from Microsoft already face the issues you describe. (Many updates can and have caused issues. Especially the occasional broken patch that gets rolled back shortly after release).
I can certainly see this being an issue for support companies. On the other hand, they will likely still have some form of versioning to base their support on. "Sir, please do XXX. You should see something saying Windows 10 Service Pack and then a number. Can you please tell me what that number is?"
Sure, but someone still has to test each update as it applies to each critical system or widely used standard PC configuration before giving the OK to roll it out across the organisation. If MS moved to releasing non-essential updates in an ad-hoc fashion, it seems inevitable that the result would be either a scheduling and resource management headache for corporate IT departments or (perhaps more likely) a general policy of not deploying non-essential updates at all by default in large organisations because the hassle of keeping up isn't justified. Corporate IT have enough to worry about already without someone potentially moving the goalposts on a daily basis.
The same goes for companies supporting Windows 7 today... they're using their own base, with cherry picked updates. It seems to me, that this would be easier to manage, than keeping up with rolling from xp/7/8/8.x etc.
Gotta love the double standards...
The original iPhone was feature complete, in that the features it shipped with were complete.
Whether it had all the features it could have done is another question. However that misses the point - the goal was to set the bar for a fully touch-screen interface, not compete on feature lists.
And it was earth shattering. That one product launch was the catalyst for a huge amount of change – our entire computing landscape has been shaken up, previous incumbents are dead or dying, new industries have been created and billions of dollars of value has been created and destroyed.
OTOH, coming from Win8, where it's so much worse, Win10 is an improvement. After running I for months, a friend asked what was new. "Well they undid the Metro app fiasco, more or less. And console windows are now resizable. Font rendering is blurry in half the OS. And most settings are messed up and unusable until you manage to get into the "legacy" settings dialog. And uh... That's it?" Yeah they added a weak attempt at some new window management, but nothing super usable.
Anything is better than Win8, but Win7 users are not going to enjoy it. They'll probably prefer the old shell, with the new kernel extensions.
Users are gonna be hard pressed to list the advantages of 20 over 7. Console windows suck less. Start menu is back. Task manager is better. Lots of under-the-hood stuff, sure. But day to day? I've been using Win10 for months and can't think of anything. (Virtual desktops, maybe... Their implementation seems clunky compared to others I've used.)
Unless you're into metro apps and like the junk ridden store, what's the killer app? What's the huge win in upgrading?
The only version of Windows in my mind that worked really good out of the box was Windows 2000 (not ME), and even that had a conflict with some piece of software (cd burning program iirc)... Also, they removed the in-memory database between the final RC and release, which irked me to no end.
I didn't really start using Windows 8 until 8.1, I touched a few machines (that didn't have touchscreens) with windows 8 early on and it sucked, server 2008 over RDP was worse... 8.1 with classicshell isn't bad.
9 out of 10 computers run Windows. Let's try to make it a version that's from 2015.
Too bad they could not include free xp upgrades as well
Though the market share of XP has been dropping. The only real users left are those who don't know what an OS is and only uses it to check AOL in ie6 and businesses who are too stupid to upgrade their horribly dated software.
Instead of simply just spelling out with a very straight forward table what will be eligible they kept releasing vague and confusing press releases.
I've read articles which have claimed (amongst other things):
- Windows XP+ will be eligible (untrue).
- Pirated copies of Windows will be eligible (untrue?).
- Everyone can upgrade but there is a subscription fee (untrue).
- Windows 8 and 8.1 gets the free upgrade only (untrue).
And many others. Microsoft could trivially have let people know exactly what to expect a year ago when they announced this program. It is a good program, I mean free stuff, but the messaging on it was just awful.
PS - I still, to this day, don't feel like I have a complete overview of what is and is not included.
We've probably long passed the point of "sufficient for the average user" in terms of OS features, as things like Chromebooks have shown, but even for not-so-average users like me who do mostly embedded work with some desktop application stuff, it does what I need without getting in the way.
I'd sooner switch completely to Linux, which I've been working with on my servers, than "upgrade"...
What has changed, has not all been for the better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win...
(There's no article I can find for Windows 10 yet.)
I do local IT. Word of mouth side job stuff. Its nice to remind myself why Windows is shit down in the trenches sometimes, and its a lot easier to manually uninstall a half dozen viruses and edit out registry rootkits for an hour after a week of coding.
I normally bill pretty standard in home support freelancer rates, $60 an hour with a minimum $80 to come. If I ever find a computer running Windows XP, I always offer and implore the owner (assuming they are not dependent on some software that has no Linux surrogate) to let me throw Lubuntu 14.04 on the thing. I do it for free, and offer up to three hours of tutoring also for free, because Windows XP is literally cancer. Its a tumor you don't know is there until it goes malignant and kills you by having some unpublished never to be patched exploit used to wreck your PC and steal all your personal information or lock you out. Its more unsafe than unprotected sex in a sleazy strip club.
Feature wise, Lubuntu matches pretty much perfectly, and even people still using XP often have Android phones, so the Lubuntu software center makes a lot more sense to people than have Play Store experience. Its not like anyone using these computers needs performance out of them - if they were trying to run a business or do anything intensive enough to require proprietary Windows only software they would have certainly updated the machine once in the last decade. They almost always are exclusively doing word processing and email, often not even web browsing because these are systems stuck with IE8 at best. And Lubutu does both of those things much better than XP ever did with auto-updating Firefox / Libreoffice and one click system upgrades every two years for LTS releases.
So yeah, switch to Linux, please. Your OS is hugely insecure and nobody is ever going to fix it.
That and mechanical hard drives saw a lot of longevity revolutions in the early 2000s. Last generation IDE and any SATA disk in my experience seem to handle many, many more power on cycles than older models. This was even before SMART, so I can't even test some of these disks for how error prone they are.
I'd say 95% of XP machines I've touched are SP3, and I've dealt with over a hundred of em. Even a few small businesses I've pressured to switch off XP were at least running SP3. IE6 is a much more prevalent issue on those older machines, where end users would ignore the popups and prompts from home pages and websites about how their browser is literally satan.
I agree about performance.. a fast machine around when the Core-2's came out is still pretty decent today with sufficient ram, which a lot of them even had.
XP is only "insecure" if you're the kind of person who would download and run random executables without any real thought, or use IE on default settings.
The "treat the user like an idiot" "security" of newer Windows is precisely why I'm still using XP. I don't need a nanny of an OS. I rarely need to install new software anyway.
In fact I'd say that malware is increasingly going to target features found only in newer OSs... when the WMF exploit (remember that?) was going around, I was still using 98SE, which was completely unaffected by the exploit code since it used NT-specific features and attackers were targeting those OSs at the time. A lot of the rootkit-y stuff won't even run on 9x because of that.
Other than that, I hope that one day Microsoft will do something to allow Unix folks to be more comfortable on Windows because I honestly don't like anything about OS X and I'm looking forward to a time when Unix lovers will flock to some other brand of hardware and OS. Anything but Apple.
If someone had told me 2 years ago that I wouldn't give a damn about MSFT software and would care about MSFT H/W i would have wondered what they were smoking.
Works pretty well, if you need more, have a virtual or real linux machine running in the background and ssh to it for shell related bits. Or go farther into the rabbit hole with cygwin, but I don't find that I need that much myself, I have in the past though.
The "AeroGlass" theme was beautiful and my hardware is fast enough - sure some low end mobile hardware can't handle it.
Will Win10 RTM still requires a Microsoft Outlook/Live/Passport/Hotmail-Account? The non-obvious small almost hidden "offline" profile option during Windows install wizard is not okay. It should be an equal option.
And for OneDrive and Cortana there should be an option to disable them and remove them from the interface in all Win10 editions, not just an option in the Enterprise edition.
It seems to me that Microsoft still doesn't care about a larger sizeable margin of the user base at all. Well I don't care that much about Win10, my beloved Win7 is supported til 2022.
It almost certainly will not. Even in Windows 8.1, I have had to disconnect from the Internet before creating the first user so Microsoft wouldn't fuss about it.
As to the Live Account thing, as another poster said there is a hidden button to bypass it, but they intentionally make it hard to find to try and force people into using a Live Account (and things like OneDrive and the Store integrate with a Live Account also, so without one functionality will break).
Microsoft is, in my opinion, squandering an opportunity to be the major industry player to disintermediate today's "cloud" and give control back to individuals, families, and friends. Because they think of managing local accounts from a 15-year old point of view clouded by overly-complicated Windows Domains, they are unwilling to conceive an interface for managing your family's accounts yourself in a secure manner. But it would be possible, and Microsoft should be the one major player saying: "We're going to provide you the tools to manage your information securely for yourself. Unlike Google and Apple, we don't want your information. It's yours and we value your privacy!"
It's #5 from my 2013 rant on Microsoft: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft
I don't think it's insurmountable, but they definitely have their work cut out for them.
Parent is suggesting that what you think is "recent code" isn't recent at all (if you mean the tech previews). The leaked internal builds are more recent, but only relatively so.Therefore you can't extrapolate the number of current bugs remaining from tech previews.
It's also possible that this whole thing is a psyops campaign and Microsoft has been sending out purposely buggy releases while sitting on a build that works amazingly so that they can appear to have released an excellent product under a major time crunch. Unlikely, but fun to think about.
I disagree on that part - I do not think that is reasonable. If I read correctly, your assumption is that pipeline for everything is: Develop > Test internally > polish > public testing > fix.
It's also reasonable to assume that not everything needs to be tested by the public, and only those deemed to require public testing were included in public previews.
There a lot of reasons to release 'old' code, especially on a large codebase. It's not that they intentionally send out "buggy releases while sitting on a build that works", but gating is complicated business.
I've not had any BSODs, but the UI in general is poor and glitchy.
Only weird thing is the browser - I haven't seen a version that could be considered even beta-ready. No way they are going to release something better than IE in just two months.
Of course its far from being all consistent...
Unable to set static IP. Appeared to Work in GUI but not actually set.
Touchpad being available every other reboot. Device simply not detected.