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Microsoft Exec Admits They 'Went Too Far' With Aggressive Windows 10 Updates (softpedia.com)
It's no secret that Microsoft has been aggressively pushing Windows 10 to users. Over the past year and a half, we have seen users complain about Windows 10 automatically getting downloaded to their computer, and in some cases, getting installed on its own as well. The automatic download irked many users who were on limited or slow data plans, or didn't want to spend gigabytes of data on Windows 10. A company executive has admitted for the first time that they may have went overboard with Windows 10 updates. From a report on Softpedia: Chris Capossela, Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, said in the latest edition of the Windows Weekly that this was the moment when the company indeed went too far, pointing out that the two weeks between the moment when users started complaining about the unexpected behavior and the one when a patch was released were "very painful." "We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective, but finding the right balance where you're not stepping over the line of being too aggressive is something we tried and for a lot of the year I think we got it right, but there was one particular moment in particular where, you know, the red X in the dialog box which typically means you cancel didn't mean cancel," he said. "And within a couple of hours of that hitting the world, with the listening systems we have we knew that we had gone too far and then, of course, it takes some time to roll out the update that changes that behavior. And those two weeks were pretty painful and clearly a lowlight for us. We learned a lot from it obviously."
Better to ask for forgiveness than permission I guess
Translation: We want everyone to be running Windows 10 from a we-now-control-every-aspect-of-your-(our)-computer perspective. We can't actually force updates on other versions, but we'll do our level best to force the version on you that we can do that with. We regret the negative publicity that the lengths we went to to make this happen caused.
"We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective"
Correction: "We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a data collection perspective"
This guy doesn't regret pushing the updates -- what he regrets is causing a tidal wave of tech support issues.
The problem is contained in his statement: "We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective..."
To be successful a company should NEVER let 'what they want' get in the way of 'what the customer wants'. It is pretty simple but when a company gets way too powerful in their position this sort of crap happens.
The dialog was always misleading. The presence in the system tray was always annoying to users.
When the Marketing Team is louder than the engineers, mostly.
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
Fuck off you liars.
To get itself installed then maybe the software is lacking in merit.
Dear Chris,
This Christmas, would you please send me and all of us Windows 10 users the gift of NOT AUTOMATICALLY RESTARTING MY FUCKING COMPUTER WHEN YOU UPDATE BECAUSE I WALKED AWAY FROM IT FOR TWO MINUTES AFTER "WORKING HOURS"? I have lost my open browser tabs and other work so many times now that you are destroying the user experience of millions of people, including me. And no, work hours for people like myself who consult are completely random and I'm not about to change them manually every time I need to change my hours or they extend beyond a limit you assume is mine.
Best Regards,
StandardCell
The whole "we knew we'd gone too far with that specific incident" mea culpa is bullshit anyway, designed to frame things as if that was solely why people remembered being pissed off at MS- and having apologised for that alone, everyone would think "oh, it wasn't that big, they messed up once but now it's okay and aren't MS mostly great really?"
In reality, they'd been aggressively pushing Windows 10 for months on end by that point (from late 2015 until the "offer" ended in mid-2016) repeatedly trying to override users' explicit wishes against that, to the extent of using techniques that even bland, MOR IT publications were comparing to malware.
Now they're trying to minimise peoples' memories of the incident to the maliciously-designed "close button" semantics? Not even close. That was merely the peak of the obnoxiousness. They repeatedly and consistently maintained this behaviour for several months- they knew exactly what they were doing.
And they know exactly what they're doing with this self-serving, PR-approved "apology" that doesn't begin to cover what actually happened.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
How can an entire team of engineers be so foolish?
When will we stop blaming management decisions on engineers? Do you really think engineers are in charge at Microsoft?
Sure you authorized it. When you clicked on those 10 page EULAs sometime in the past, you most certainly allowed Apple to do what they did.
It's all your fault.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
No, he meant what he said by "...want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective".
But although he implied that he meant "from the end user's computer security perspective", actually he means "from a Microsoft's future financial security perspective".
Which does include data harvesting, as you point out. But also Win10 is the path to the OS on a subscription model.
Everyone is responsible for their job. Those engineers can refuse to do unethical things, but they choose not to because they value the money that management waves in front of them more than the wellbeing of their fellow man.
Easy, engineers are morons. They don't think about what PEOPLE need or want
You obviously aren't an engineer. Nor do you know many. Most engineers don't decide the features and performance requirements of the product. Either management or the customer does.
So the people writing the specs are morons. If someone gives you a recipe for a turd sandwich, you're going to make them a turd sandwich---or else you'll get fired for not doing your job.
Maybe you can ask them if they want lettuce or tomato on their turd sandwich. Maybe you can tell them that they have to choose between toasted and untoasted bread (because it's impossible to have both). But, in the end, if the spec is a turd sandwich then that's what you deliver.
I'm sure any programmer with an ounce of sense realized the implications of automatic updates and always-on telemetry. And most of them would never put that crap into the spec if they had any say in the matter. But they don't get a say. So enjoy your turd sandwich.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Oh please stop with the "source equals security" bullshit which is trivially proven false, ready? You have the source, kindly list for us the vulnerabilities in the Linux networking stack...what, you can't? How about any lousy code in the audio stacks? What you HAVE vetted the code, yes?
The "source equals security" fallacy is a fallacy of assumption, you assume because the code is there someone has done the work for you and vetted these millions of lines of code with zero actual evidence that it has actually occurred and in fact vulnerabilities like Heartbleed, Bash weaknesses that have sat there for years and the plethora of Linux targeted malware including commercial attacks give plenty of evidence that the opposite is true and the majority of code isn't looked at beyond whomever is actually working on the thing.
I think Windows 10 is a giant POS where the only thing that runs reliably is its baked in spyware (which makes it similar to Android so if Nutella is trying to copy Google? Mission accomplished.) but I also hate OS flag waving bullshit when it has no evidence to back it up, from "OSX doesn't get malware" which Macheads simply changed the definition of what malware was until that statement could still prove true and in the same vein with Linux based Android beating Windows several years in a row when it comes to malware growth and major Linux exploits coming out of the woodwork claiming source equals security is no different than claiming Santa Claus protects your OS, you have the same level of evidence for both statements.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.