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Windows 10 Buggy Updates? Our Patching is Simple, Regular, and Consistent, Says Microsoft (zdnet.com)
Microsoft has declined to comment on an expert's many complaints about the quality of its recent patches and cadence of Windows 10 feature updates. Earlier, Susan Bradley, a Microsoft MVP who for the past 18 years has volunteered her time helping Windows users, took a survey of over 1,800 respondents regarding the Windows 10 Update experience. She then sent an open letter to Microsoft executives summarizing the results of this survey and providing thoroughly researched material regarding the poor update experience Windows 10 users have been experiencing. In return, Microsoft argued in a blog that it gives admins all the tools they need to test and provide feedback before it releases Patch Tuesday updates. From a report: Microsoft's John Wilcox, who helps promote why organizations should move to Windows 10's Windows-as-a-service model has, at the behest of Windows pros, offered an explanation of its monthly Windows 10 quality update servicing cadence and terminology.
As noted by ZDNet's Ed Bott recently, IT admins who'd spent years learning about Windows Update needed to "prepare to do some unlearning" due to the many changes introduced by Microsoft's shift to a Windows 10-as-a-service model. "With Windows 10, Microsoft has completely rewritten the Windows Update rulebook. For expert users and IT pros accustomed to having fine-grained control over the update process, these changes might seem wrenching and even draconian," he noted. [...]
Wilcox outlines that Microsoft's guiding principles to its monthly Windows service updates are built around being "simple and predictable", "agile", and "transparent." Wilcox doesn't directly address patching expert Bradley's major complaints about Microsoft's patches of late, but said Microsoft's predictability meant IT managers should be able to handle its "simple, regular and consistent patching cadence."
As noted by ZDNet's Ed Bott recently, IT admins who'd spent years learning about Windows Update needed to "prepare to do some unlearning" due to the many changes introduced by Microsoft's shift to a Windows 10-as-a-service model. "With Windows 10, Microsoft has completely rewritten the Windows Update rulebook. For expert users and IT pros accustomed to having fine-grained control over the update process, these changes might seem wrenching and even draconian," he noted. [...]
Wilcox outlines that Microsoft's guiding principles to its monthly Windows service updates are built around being "simple and predictable", "agile", and "transparent." Wilcox doesn't directly address patching expert Bradley's major complaints about Microsoft's patches of late, but said Microsoft's predictability meant IT managers should be able to handle its "simple, regular and consistent patching cadence."
And then it is already to late.
I notice "Reliable" is not in there. Please add that one in, too, Microsoft.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
...."all your IT belong to us."
Seriously, that is just the type of new-speak jargon for "we don't care about you, only your sweet, sweet dollars now that we've gotten you locked in, heh, heh, heh...".
ANYONE still using Windows 10 is getting exactly what they deserve.
Microsoft should separate out the operating system, the applications, libraries and the user data a lot more and then with proper security measures and filesystem snapshots the operating system could be a lot better, easier to manage and easier to rollback.
If something goes wrong on Linux or BSD I do an apt-get or pkg install with a specific version. With a ZFS boot volume, I snapshot before and after any major updates, something goes wrong it literally takes seconds to repair. On Windows, you can't roll much of anything back without destroying the OS.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Microsoft is so full of shit that the Couric scale measuring it broke in half. Windows 10 with no updates can be quite "simple and predictable" but updates carry a massive risk of installation failure with irreparable OS damage compared to my experiences with Windows 7. I neuter the Windows 10 update system on all my Win10 machines because the updates are guaranteed to mess up the system at some point; it's not "if," it's "when." It also doesn't help that every feature update rearranges the control panels and loses control panel functionality, and when Microsoft says "send us feedback so we know" and feedback is sent, it is FUCKING IGNORED.
They're fucking lying. Microsoft the company has no regard for the needs of the users. I'm sure several engineers there really do care, but they can't fix the problems caused by the weenies that think they're too smart and users need to be dragged kicking into their new paradigm. To hell with user interfaces that have slowly evolved over decades and proven to stand the test of time! To hell with the most fundamental usability concepts! To hell with everything that works! We're AGILE! But somehow also SIMPLE AND PREDICTABLE! Because that makes sense when Satya's ya boy!
Fuck you, Microsoft. Give me back my fucking Default Programs where I can unilaterally assign one program to all possible defaults with one click, otherwise go fuck yourselves.
1803 (April 2018 patch) has been very problematic for me as well. BOTH my dev machines still can't update to that version, as it hangs or errs on installation. After failing to install multiple times over the course of several months, they both seem to have given up, leaving me at 1709. I'm sort of wondering how long 1709 will still get support. What happens if a Windows 10 machine gets "left behind" simply due to technical issues with patching? Answer: probably something I won't like.
I've had more issues with patches in the last few years than I ever remember having in the previous decade or so. So, yeah, count me as being pretty unhappy about the lack of quality control in the patching process. Before a couple of years ago, that wouldn't have even made my top ten complaints.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
How proprietors use their power over the user power varies and perhaps increasingly obtuse, but is completely explainable in terms corporate media mostly doesn't dare to explain even as it documents a proprietors' excesses: the power is firmly rooted in denying users software freedom—the freedom to run, inspect, modify, and share published computer software. Proprietary software users get as much control as the proprietors let them have. Microsoft has shown its users a taste of their power before such as when Windows 10 ignored user's privacy settings (including sending identifiable information to Microsoft, even if a user turns off its Bing search and Cortana features, and activates the privacy-protection settings) or when Microsoft forcibly and immediately imposed "upgrades" to Windows 10.
DRM, jailing, tyrannical control, surveillance, interference with ordinary activities, and sabotage are all there. When and if Microsoft deems it time for Windows users to take their updates without warning or opportunity for delay (including enterprise users), Microsoft will do so. This isn't unique to Microsoft either, this is part of an ongoing pattern of which Microsoft is but one proprietor wielding this control. Proprietors get to make these decisions stick based on your willingness to submit to their authority; you determine the limit of their control over your system by how long you'll let proprietary software (such as most of Microsoft's software) be installed on your computer. You can choose to favor software freedom instead, even if it means giving up some conveniences and learning new things. In doing so you take a step in the direction of controlling your computer and getting back the power you deserve over your computer.
Digital Citizen
In the future Windows will evolve into a Useless Machine. When you turn it on, it's only purpose will be to get an update and turn itself back off.
It simply isn't.
Windows 10 updates are out of control. They claim they intend to schedule them at proper or convenient times but they don't. The computer will just up and reboot at the most inconvenient time.
They are NOT stable, they DO break, and files DO go missing. One computer I support did the 1803 update and all the files were gone. The profile was still there, the files were gone. I found them - they were IN THE TRASH.
WHY? WHY MICROSOFT? Why did you see fit to upgrade this PC and throw away the user's files? Are you sending a message? Is it personal?
You can say the solution is Linux. For many geeks and power users that is true.
I have another solution, 4 simple letters.
LTSB
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
I'm curious how administrators managing certified/validated systems are handling this. Generally speaking the user of such systems is not supposed to install changes that they have not tested and do not control. If Microsoft is removing the ability for system administrators to understand or manage updates how are they maintaining certification status?
I've never once had rolling back to a restore point help. It seems like a great idea, but the implementation is lacking.
Microsoft made a very smart decision, which was exactly the right thing to do at the time. Then the world changed and what had been a good decision became a huge problem. Not because Microsoft was dumb, but because of a fundamental change in computing.
> It's also had proper security measures for ages (UAC is basically Sudo)
Yes, it is basically sudo, which was considered proper security ... in the 1970s. Windows has had it for ten years, so only 30 years behind. That model is called discretionary access control, or DAC.
In the 1970s and 1980s, very secure systems had a much more secure model, called mandatory access control. That's more security than needed for a personal home computer which runs from a local disk, as opposed to a mainframe exposed on a network. A personal home computer only needed to be worried about virsuses on disks, because they used Disk Operating System, not a network operating system such as Unix.
Then the world wide web happened. What had been your personal home computer was suddenly exposed to hackers around the world. The level of security needed, the way one thinks about security, had to change radically. That's why Linux got Mandatory Access Control in the 1990s, first as an optional module, then as a built-in part of the kernel, called SELinux. Since the late 1990s, MAC has been "proper security". Windows may get it in about ten more years - they recently got the *nix userland.
I said Microsoft ended up in this situation by doing something smart. In the 1970s, computers cost as much as a house (particularly with important accessories like hard drives). Microsoft wanted a system people could run at home, on affordable hardware. That meant a few kilobytes of memory, and a 360KB drive. A drive that can store 360KB isn't much. To make that work, Microsoft would have to delete 80% of the OS compared to mainframes. It made perfect sense to delete stuff home users wouldn't have any need for. Before the web, they had no need for any of that security stuff, so Microsoft didn't include any in their OS.
Microsoft spent 190-1994 (and a billion dollars) developing a new future of computing. The key underlying technology was called COM. Their vision of the future was finally ready for beta testing when it got it's name, Windows 95. But something crazy happened. In 1995, the world wide web became a phenomenon. There was a whole new future of computing completely different from what Microsoft had spent years developing. At first they tried to stop the web, then tried to turn it into a bunch of COM programs (by renaming COM to ActiveX) which would run only in Internet Explorer. That didn't work, of course. HTML was too good of an idea to be stopped.
Microsoft starting fighting. Trying to save their vision of computing. Mobile showed up and Microsoft tried, but missed. Tried again and missed. They fought against Linux, they fought against the open internet, and they fought against the government potentially breaking the company into pieces. They fought for 20 years and in all this fighting they didn't accept the reality, the new needs, and build a solid, secure operating system - they improved some things, but didn't catch up on security. Remember they started off about 30 years behind on security, which was actually the smart thing to do at the time.
A few years ago Microsoft leadership really accepted they had lost the fight. They have started embracing Linux and open source. They now know they and their systems are just one more player in a huge global network - one full of dangers. It takes a few years to reverse the culture all through a behemoth the size of Microsoft, so pockets of old-school Gates and Balmer-style thinking remain. They are improving on many fronts.
Of course their new thing is Windows as a service, paid for in part through the Facebook model of giving up all your privacy and control. We'll see how that works out. Facebook is an enormously successful company, so maybe the same model will work for Microsoft.
Windows has what they call Mandatory Integrity Control, which is very different from MAC.
The concept behind MIC is useful for systems with tens of thousands of people. Well, it would be useful, except Microsoft forgot to implement half of it. It's not very useful on a personal computer, and hence rarely used. The idea, borrowed from DoD, is that people and files are assigned security levels. Low security, medium, high, top secret. Low security people can't read high security files. That's cool - of you have tens of thousands of people who need different security LEVELS to maybe access millions of files.
The second half of that system, uses by DoD and others serious about security, is that high-level people can't write low security files. If you have top-secret information, anything you save could contain top secret information, so by default it I treated as top secret until it's cleared. Windows doesn't do that. On Windows, the admin's Keepass keyring may be a low-security file, and therefore readable by JavaScript.
Even if they had implemented MIC, both halves, that in no way replaces MAC. The two are orthogonal. It's like the CIA saying "we don't need locks on the doors because we stamped the document 'top secret'".
Reading their responses, in which they don't even respond to what's actually being brought up, I somehow get the feeling that their corporate communications policy literally doesn't allow them to admit mistakes, so instead they just try to pivot and go on about something only tangentially related rather than admit that patches have been an absolute mess for the last few years. Only problem is that their move to turn Windows into a Software-as-a-Service type deal is only going to make the buggy patch problem worse when admins get less control over what patches are installed.
Then again I do understand why they don't want to address and admit fault with their shoddy testing and QA practices. Windows 8 and now 10 have after all been the way better advertisements for Linux, Mac OS and other alternatives than anything their creators could conjure up and they're obviously noticing how IT admins are once again looking at alternatives (the last time being when Windows 10 came out).
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."