They're just trying to keep up with Google. More than once, I've given a sales person a locally installed demonstrator for some web app that was working when they left the office, and then the demo was undermined when they connected their laptop to the Internet while out of the office and Chrome self-updated and broke something.
I'm sure there are always going to be people who can rip someone off so they will, but I suspect that won't change much either way. I also suspect you're right about these people not caring that much about the quality anyway.
However, for those who pirate because they want to watch a movie and simply haven't been given an attractive legal option for doing so, this new idea sounds like it could be worthwhile.
I sympathise with your problems with sound quality. My hearing is still, thankfully, pretty good, but it drives me crazy that particularly the big movie studios keep releasing movies on disc that have an audio mix designed for a full theatre. Play that same mix through a private system that isn't a full home cinema with 7.1 surround sound speakers and all that jazz, and often you'll get a movie where the action scenes are deafening yet the dialog is barely audible. It's an amazingly obvious problem once you've become aware of it, and some discs do provide alternatives that are more suitable for a typical twin-speaker or 2.1 home setup, but far from all of them.
I just realized they they are trying to make up revenue from the loss of at least 3 movie tickets (i.e. 2 adults and a child).
My wife and I often enjoy different types of movie, so when we do go to a cinema, it is often with friends who enjoy the same types of movie that each of us does. But mostly we don't go to the cinema at all, because the experience at many of them is so much worse than home viewing (and don't even start on any showing involving kids). That revenue for "at least 3 movie tickets" was never there.
I could imagine that early access at a reasonable price might cut piracy significantly for big name movies, and I could see myself watching several movies a year that way if the deal was sensible. However, the equivalent of $50 for a one-time home viewing is off-the-charts crazy for me. I've always somehow managed to contain my excitement and wait a year or so to watch blockbusters on disc or streaming service or TV before. I'm pretty sure I can do the same in the future if any new early access offer comes with the traditional screwing-you-out-of-your-money feeling of going to a cinema.
That may be true, but we have not yet discovered how to make a system that is truly, 100%, absolutely guaranteed secure. That means real world security is all about risk management: what risks can we identify, and what can we do to mitigate them?
Unless you are capable of building literally everything you need, from the most basic hardware components or the first line of code on up, at some point you will come to a decision between trusting some partner organisation and its staff to do what they say and looking elsewhere. And if you really need something big and you can't build it yourself, there are probably only so many potential partners to work with before you run out of options.
So, maybe no amount of assurances from Microsoft would reassure you, but if you're in charge of a hypothetical multi-year, multi-billion dollar R&D programme and you need a desktop OS to run your software on, who would you allow to reassure you? Apple? The Debian security team? A few hundred specialist developers you just hired to build you something from scratch on top of FreeBSD?
The real world doesn't work like that. Having independently audited the source code from a big provider, there isn't much difference between having your own background-checked people building it and having actionable assurances from senior executives at your supplier that their technicians with the same relevant background checks and security clearances have built it properly. At some point, there is always a level of trust in the individuals involved and a level of oversight in how the product is made and deployed, regardless of whose name appears on the payslip of those people.
I'd guess they'd get told telemetry was optional but would be necessary for certain support functions/p>
I'm fairly sure that if you'd told them that, all of the banks I'm thinking of would have required either the ability to permanently disable all such telemetry code before going into service or, in some cases, a custom build of any relevant software with all such telemetry code removed.
or turn some automated functions (like software updates) into manual, downtime-required functions.
No-one in the environments I was dealing with would have been installing any sort of automated updates anyway. We're talking about the kind of place where taking anything out of service, other than special emergency procedures in some cases, typically requires a sign-off process that could last for weeks. Usually that would include significant amounts of lab evaluation before being put into production for literally any hardware or software change. It was also normal to require sufficient assurances to satisfy them that for large-scale deployments, what was later delivered in volume would be absolutely identical to what they had evaluated under lab conditions.
Obviously this is at the opposite end of the spectrum to "Just install it, I don't care". I'm just pointing out that in organisations with serious security or reliability concerns, this kind of thing does happen. I've encountered a similar abundance of caution in plenty of back office environments as well, say places like communications providers or the infrastructure used by big online retailers, but banks seemed like a good example here because they do also have large numbers of regular PCs accessible from front-office locations and running regular desktop OSes.
I think we're talking about different things here.
I'm talking about buying a new PC from a major vendor that comes with Windows 10 pre-installed but lets the customer replace that (legally) with Windows 7 or 8.1 post-sale. This is still allowed if the vendor offers it, but they aren't allowed to supply new machines with 7 or 8.1 preinstalled any more, only 10. I can't immediately find a reference, but I've seen reports that similar moves by Microsoft will prevent even selling new machines with those downgrade rights in a year or so.
I suspect you're talking about more general provisions under enterprise licensing agreements or some sort of developer programme. There are other schemes that Microsoft runs that let people do all kinds of things, but they aren't necessarily available to someone who just went to dell.com and bought a new XPS laptop.
OK, that might be possible in some cases. But given the huge amount of potentially relevant information about compatibility and dependencies for an update to a system deployed as widely as Windows, that could be a mighty big database you're talking about downloading there.
Yep, for now there are still options to buy new PCs and run older versions of Windows (legally), though only if you're willing to jump through a few hoops at this point. There will be more serious questions when that possibility is also removed, which isn't far away now in business planning terms.
In the serious editions of Win10 used by larger organisations, telemetry mostly is a non-issue. They don't have the same compulsory phone-home behaviour as the Pro/Home editions used by small businesses and home users do.
Well, if you want Microsoft to automatically determine which update(s) are relevant for your system, obviously you're going to have to share some level of information about what you have installed already. If that counts as telemetry, then yes, of course the update tools won't be able to work properly if you disable it. I'm not sure how relevant this is for Enterprise users, though, since the odds of individual users managing the updates on their own systems in an environment running Enterprise must be pretty low to start with.
However, that kind of telemetry is a far cry from functions like search boxes or Cortana automatically and silently sending details of what you're doing back to the mothership even though everything else involved is local to your system. This is the kind of privacy problem that most people objecting to the increased telemetry in recent Windows versions are concerned about.
For example, I've been involved with sales to the IT groups at certain banks, and they have strict checklists where anything connected to or running on their systems must meet 100% of the hundreds of conditions or it's game over. Nothing with any sort of telemetry built in would be getting anywhere near those systems.
For Joe's Retail Business, if the systems involved aren't handling anything regulated/audited like credit card details, it might be a completely different story. I suspect a lot of businesses will also potentially be in violation of data protection/privacy laws or of commercial agreements like NDAs as a result of the telemetry, which is also somewhat worrying. However, in practice, those probably won't result in any substantial penalties unless either a major breach comes to light or Microsoft starts abusing its access to data it collects coincidentally, so as usual businesses will probably ignore potential leaks unless they think they'll get caught and suffer for having them.
In any case, it's more relevant that during 2017 we'll probably be looking at some larger organisations that will be running the Enterprise or Education versions starting to migrate to Win10, and those don't have the same problems with things like telemetry and forced updates as the Home and Pro editions.
Just to follow up on a couple of the points you mentioned:
Downloading some things from our library for use off-line is actually one of our most frequently asked questions, and again it's something where we generally take a pretty liberal approach and always have. We want people to enjoy the material. That's why we make it!
What I'm talking about is people who don't just download a few bits and pieces, but blatantly try to download everything right before the end of their subscription. These aren't people who are going on a trip and want something to listen to on the train. These are the people who would sign up to Spotify and then try to run scrapers on a mass of cloud-hosted machines to download literally every song on Spotify for their permanent use. Somehow, I would be rather surprised if the facility you mentioned for downloading content for offline use extended to providing a 100% DRM-free copy of Spotify's entire library, or if their ToS said that was OK, or if they would take no action if they caught someone doing it.
As for what is reasonable, I'm not sure I understand your position here. We're not offering (or in any way pretending to offer) a permanent copy of our works for someone to keep. We work on a subscription basis, and we offer subscriptions at a price that makes sense for that arrangement. I don't see how it's any different to saying you used to go rent a movie from the video hire store, but you paid a much lower price than buying your own copy and you had to return it. Offering the movie for rental didn't give customers any automatic right to buy a copy, at the same or any other price, nor did renting it out give customers the right to make their own copy to keep forever or share with their friends.
In the same way, I don't see how it is reasonable to expect us to provide access at a fraction of the per-user cost it would take just to produce the material, let people sign up for the minimum period, and then let them download as much as they can before it runs out even though it's clearly not being used on the terms we offered. Sure, you can just download the web pages or audio files or whatever from our site, and up to a point we'll be understanding about why you might want to even though that's not really part of the deal, but you basically seem to be implying the same as DRM guy: if we don't want people to abuse our openness, we should actively stop them, which brings us back to limitations and DRM of one kind or another.
Or maybe I've misunderstood and you were just saying you only like payment models where you get permanent ownership of your copy of the content? If so, that is fine and your choice, but it's not the deal we're offering and so joining our library wouldn't be a good option for you. Apparently it's also not a deal that would be economically viable in our case (we know, we did plenty of research to find out), which means if we were required to offer such terms if we were offering our material at all, then we simply wouldn't be producing and sharing that material, and again everyone who does currently enjoy it and find our current pricing plan acceptable would lose out.
Right, but most people aren't students, and $10/month for access to a library the size of Netflix is still vastly cheaper than buying everything a typical subscriber might watch there the way you had to before the streaming library services were around.
I might also wonder what anyone who is watching enough stuff to need $60+/month of subscriptions to that many different services at once is actually doing with their lives, but that's a different question.
If we were talking about updates to the Enterprise version of 7 or 8.1, which organisations might already have deployed widely, presumably it would be tougher for those organisations to justify the switch. Maybe only those who were concerned about serious legal/regulatory issues would do so. But then in that situation, the sysadmins could just block the other updates they didn't want, so concerns about updates introducing ads or removing features or whatever don't really apply.
The thing with Windows 10 is that it's a big upgrade anyway. Enterprise-scale IT departments are already going to need plans for a full migration if they want to go to Win 10 Enterprise. They're already going to have to check compatibility with all the software they rely on, maybe upgrade some of their hardware, and so on. So the cost of accepting Windows 10 if Microsoft were also to push stuff like telemetry and automatic updates in the Enterprise edition would just be that much higher.
What large corporate IT department has their executives running any version of Windows Pro on their laptops, rather than Enterprise connected to their centralised update servers etc?
What corporate IT department has allowed any machines under their control, even running Windows 7/8/8.1 Pro if it's a smaller organisation, to deploy the telemetry updates?
I don't disagree with you on the being run by humans and having inertia aspects. I just think you're underestimating how damaging trying to force known data leaks and uncontrolled software into a large organisation would be.
The data leak aspect is a concern for the lawyers, as well as the obvious underlying security implications. I'm only involved with smaller businesses, which previously used Pro versions of Windows, but even we don't seem to be able to move to Windows 10 without risking violating various data protection laws, NDAs, and so on. What happens to larger businesses, particularly those who work in regulated industries and who really do get audited from time to time, if Windows 10 Enterprise imposes the same vulnerability?
The forced upgrades also have obvious stability and reliability implications. Microsoft has long provided tools for corporate system administrators to manage large numbers of Windows desktops and deploy updates (or not) according to their own schedules and testing requirements. I have never encountered a large organisation using Windows whose administrators do not use these tools, and the answer to many problems with Windows updates for these organisations has essentially been "If it took out the 10 dummy PCs in the test lab, don't deploy it to the rest of the organisation". Again, if Windows 10 Enterprise took away that flexibility and allowed (or required) users to start upgrading their own systems, I can't imagine corporate IT tolerating that at all.
In short, it doesn't necessarily take an incredible amount of silly things to tip the balance. Even one or two things will still do it, if those things are silly enough.
No I just think you are being unrealistic about the "care factor" of those execs you think will send in the lawyers with guns blazing.
If Microsoft introduced mandatory telemetry, spyware, upgrades, ads etc. in Windows 10 Enterprise, in the same way that they have in Home and Pro, I imagine a fair number of those lawyers would be the ones demanding that their business didn't move to Windows 10 Enterprise, right next to the senior IT staff.
It has happened more than once already.
In rather different circumstances, and relatively rarely even then. Now compare how often it's happened with how often there has been a credible threat of it happening until someone from a big software company offered someone from a big customer a much, much better deal to prevent it.
It's simple economics. There's a significant cost to any technology migration in an organisation of that scale, and there's also typically a significant cost to relying on systems for longer than they're well suited for the job. As you imply yourself, this is true whether you're talking about updating to a newer product from the same supplier or you're talking about switching to a different supplier. There is rarely such a thing as being truly locked in for large enterprises, there is only when the cost of switching becomes lower than the costs of upgrading and of keeping the current system.
One of the biggest strategic problems Microsoft has to deal with is the reality that even in huge organisations, the trend in recent years has been back towards more centralised systems, with thin client applications or web interfaces for access. Windows-only software is certainly still a factor, but it's becoming less of a limiting one as time goes by. That means the cost of switching is already lowering, relative to the cost of a full-scale OS upgrade across the organisation. If Microsoft started doing silly things with Windows 10 that made that full-scale upgrade a problem, it would swing the needle further, and at some point it would tip the balance.
You say that, but annual fees for the services we subscribe to in my household work out far less than the cost of buying all those shows and movies on DVD would have been a few years earlier. The gap is even wider once you take into account the not-sure things that you could try because they were on a streaming service and it wouldn't cost you any more if you gave up ten minutes in.
I still buy a load of stuff on DVD/Blu-ray, but those are the things I want to keep, because I don't trust the likes of Netflix not to renegotiate some licensing deal and remove a show I'm enjoying in the middle of a season. In terms of financial cost, for the kinds of shows and movies I'll probably only ever watch once anyway, the streaming services are still way cheaper for frequent viewers even if they have to sign up for a few different ones.
until you made clear that they're downloading it from you, presumably the authorized distributor.
No, we are the people who create the content in question, and who run the library site providing access to it. No-one else is involved here or taking a cut as a distributor.
So...they downloaded exactly as much as they're allowed to, and then once allowed again, started again? Didn't hack your system, didn't go off to torrent it instead? And they're doing...what wrong again? How do you know how they're using it and if such use is "normally"?
It's a subscription model for online browsing of the library. (Think Netflix, Spotify, and so on.) Downloading for permanent storage and offline viewing is not allowed. This is all clearly and explicitly stated in our terms, and I suppose that real-time element is our version of an "all you can eat" restaurant bringing you your eighth course on request, but politely refusing you a doggy back to take leftovers home with you.
A small number of people join the library, and then right before the end of their first billing period, they start going down the index and grabbing everything they can, in order, until they're blocked, at a rate many times faster than any normal user navigates. The outlier here is very, very obvious -- we're talking orders of magnitude. And -- here's the kicker -- at that rate, they would have to be consuming the audio/video content at several times its normal speed just to keep up. And they're doing this for extended periods, and trying again after each time they get blocked, for say the last week in the quarter. Now, if you still think those people are accessing the content of the library online, I know a Nigerian price with a great deal to offer you.
As for why we allow people to do that, well, the alternatives to the limits we do impose would mostly use some sort of heuristic to identify suspicious behaviour more aggressively and throttle it earlier and/or supply the content via some sort of DRM scheme. Obviously either of those might screw genuine users if something went wrong, and put simply, we don't want to risk doing that.
Why on Earth does your system let people do that, if you don't want them to do that?... (Whoever made the statement to you about DRM is a moron, it's not effective anyway and would drive away your users.)
The person who made the statement about DRM to us may have been a moron, as you put it, and DRM may or may not be effective, but this is the reality that a small content provider faces on the web today. So if someone like the original AC I replied to here wants to come along and claim that they'll start respecting copyrights when the quid pro quo is honoured, I'd like to know what they think about a situation like ours or how they think what we do justifies what other people try to do to us. Or, y'know, it could just be that some people say that because they want to claim anyone with a business model involving copyright deserves to be abused, as apparently a small but noticeable number of people who join our library do.
When it comes down to it, you can't know why anyone downloaded such and such thing.
See, that's the thing. In cases like this, the rip-off behaviour is so obvious that we really can.
As a final point, please consider that the position you've taken and the incorrect assumptions you've made in your post here and in particular casually dismissive comments like "just be glad you're being paid" are exactly why larger content providers routinely use obnoxious DRM schemes and file aggressive legal actions and lobby for punitive copyright laws.
I think it's fair to say that we're about as reasonable and transparent as you could possibly be for a site that provides content and charges for it. We do a lot of work because it's something we care about. The money coming in basically covers the operating expenses and it's a fraction
If this is a large Fortune 500 business we're talking about, it's probably a household name with many thousands of staff. If Microsoft try to screw them, a few executives from that business are going to have some pleasant conversations over golf with people who also happen to work at a senior level for alternative suppliers like Apple and Red Hat.
First, they're going to cut a nice deal for enterprise-scale everything, because any business that size is worth serious money. Score a win for both the business (big cost savings) and the suppliers (big new customer).
Next, those alternative suppliers like Apple and Red Hat are going to make nice press releases touting their new Fortune 500 customer. Those press releases are going to feature quotes from C-level executives at the Fortune 500 saying how happy they are and what a great supplier they've got. There will be white papers with case studies showing off how much better the big organisation is doing now they've switched to the new supplier.
If this happens once, it's already bad for Microsoft. If it becomes more of a pattern than an isolated incident, the big consultancies and industry commentators are going to start paying attention and using the same sorts of quotes in their own analysis, and that in turn is going to influence other senior executives at other big organisations who are also unhappy with being given the finger by a supplier and interested in what their other options might be.
If you think I'm kidding about all of this, I invite you to research the order-of-magnitude reductions in licence fees that certain big name software companies offer to their enterprise customers in this kind of situation to keep them on side. That is how much these giant customers are worth to them, and the same customers are worth just as much to other potential suppliers who have the scale to operate at that level too. Or you could just notice that Windows 10 Enterprise is basically a totally different product to Windows 10 Home, which doesn't require the telemetry, updates, and so on that have been so controversial, and ask yourself why Microsoft did that.
I have some sympathy with this argument when it's applied to Big Media who chase grannies with no Internet connection for settlements or who supply their content with system-destroying broken DRM systems or activation measures that don't work and stop someone enjoying what they paid for.
On the other hand, I'm part of a team running a small library of original online content, which is produced with considerable work and at considerable cost by enthusiasts who don't make any seriously money from the membership fees. I think a lot of the anti-copyright people around these parts might be amazed at the excuses and rationalisations that people will give you for blatantly trying to rip off your whole library, even if you just send them a friendly message to make it clear that you know what they're doing and remind them politely that it's not allowed.
I've seen someone literally sit at their computer for several hours a day for several days in a row, downloading large numbers of files they couldn't possible be using normally, only stopping each time our rate limiter kicked in and blocked further downloads for a while. I've had someone tell me that if we don't want people to download and share our stuff, we should supply it using DRM, and if we don't then it's our fault and they don't see anything wrong with what they were doing.
Fortunately, most people are quite honest, at least with a little site like ours. We in turn have never liked the idea of using technologies that might accidentally spoil a legitimate customer's enjoyment of the library, and we still don't. Up to a point, we can just ignore the attempts at ripping us off the same way you might ignore anyone else you don't approve of or like very much.
But the kind of person who not only thinks it's OK to come along and just blatantly rip off original content that a few people spent a lot of time and money creating, but who is also then totally unrepentant or even aggressive when called out on it, is enough to make blood boil. I will truly have no sympathy the first time we get frustrated enough to throw the legal book at one of those people, and they're crazy if they don't think we would have an open-and-shut case against them. Under the kind of punitive copyright laws that exist in a lot of countries now, we'd probably make a lot of money from the damages in some of these cases, too.
In that context, some sort of official "No, really, you should understand that this would be illegal and if you're doing it there might be consequences" mechanism might actually be better even for the offending parties than leaving the rightsholders no middle ground so they jump straight into call-the-lawyer territory. The problem comes when such a system isn't just a friendly(ish) warning but has more serious consequences like causing ISPs to reduce service to repeat "offenders" even though the notifications are only based on suspected or alleged infringement.
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They're just trying to keep up with Google. More than once, I've given a sales person a locally installed demonstrator for some web app that was working when they left the office, and then the demo was undermined when they connected their laptop to the Internet while out of the office and Chrome self-updated and broke something.
I'm sure there are always going to be people who can rip someone off so they will, but I suspect that won't change much either way. I also suspect you're right about these people not caring that much about the quality anyway.
However, for those who pirate because they want to watch a movie and simply haven't been given an attractive legal option for doing so, this new idea sounds like it could be worthwhile.
I sympathise with your problems with sound quality. My hearing is still, thankfully, pretty good, but it drives me crazy that particularly the big movie studios keep releasing movies on disc that have an audio mix designed for a full theatre. Play that same mix through a private system that isn't a full home cinema with 7.1 surround sound speakers and all that jazz, and often you'll get a movie where the action scenes are deafening yet the dialog is barely audible. It's an amazingly obvious problem once you've become aware of it, and some discs do provide alternatives that are more suitable for a typical twin-speaker or 2.1 home setup, but far from all of them.
I just realized they they are trying to make up revenue from the loss of at least 3 movie tickets (i.e. 2 adults and a child).
My wife and I often enjoy different types of movie, so when we do go to a cinema, it is often with friends who enjoy the same types of movie that each of us does. But mostly we don't go to the cinema at all, because the experience at many of them is so much worse than home viewing (and don't even start on any showing involving kids). That revenue for "at least 3 movie tickets" was never there.
I could imagine that early access at a reasonable price might cut piracy significantly for big name movies, and I could see myself watching several movies a year that way if the deal was sensible. However, the equivalent of $50 for a one-time home viewing is off-the-charts crazy for me. I've always somehow managed to contain my excitement and wait a year or so to watch blockbusters on disc or streaming service or TV before. I'm pretty sure I can do the same in the future if any new early access offer comes with the traditional screwing-you-out-of-your-money feeling of going to a cinema.
That may be true, but we have not yet discovered how to make a system that is truly, 100%, absolutely guaranteed secure. That means real world security is all about risk management: what risks can we identify, and what can we do to mitigate them?
Unless you are capable of building literally everything you need, from the most basic hardware components or the first line of code on up, at some point you will come to a decision between trusting some partner organisation and its staff to do what they say and looking elsewhere. And if you really need something big and you can't build it yourself, there are probably only so many potential partners to work with before you run out of options.
So, maybe no amount of assurances from Microsoft would reassure you, but if you're in charge of a hypothetical multi-year, multi-billion dollar R&D programme and you need a desktop OS to run your software on, who would you allow to reassure you? Apple? The Debian security team? A few hundred specialist developers you just hired to build you something from scratch on top of FreeBSD?
The real world doesn't work like that. Having independently audited the source code from a big provider, there isn't much difference between having your own background-checked people building it and having actionable assurances from senior executives at your supplier that their technicians with the same relevant background checks and security clearances have built it properly. At some point, there is always a level of trust in the individuals involved and a level of oversight in how the product is made and deployed, regardless of whose name appears on the payslip of those people.
I'd guess they'd get told telemetry was optional but would be necessary for certain support functions/p>
I'm fairly sure that if you'd told them that, all of the banks I'm thinking of would have required either the ability to permanently disable all such telemetry code before going into service or, in some cases, a custom build of any relevant software with all such telemetry code removed.
or turn some automated functions (like software updates) into manual, downtime-required functions.
No-one in the environments I was dealing with would have been installing any sort of automated updates anyway. We're talking about the kind of place where taking anything out of service, other than special emergency procedures in some cases, typically requires a sign-off process that could last for weeks. Usually that would include significant amounts of lab evaluation before being put into production for literally any hardware or software change. It was also normal to require sufficient assurances to satisfy them that for large-scale deployments, what was later delivered in volume would be absolutely identical to what they had evaluated under lab conditions.
Obviously this is at the opposite end of the spectrum to "Just install it, I don't care". I'm just pointing out that in organisations with serious security or reliability concerns, this kind of thing does happen. I've encountered a similar abundance of caution in plenty of back office environments as well, say places like communications providers or the infrastructure used by big online retailers, but banks seemed like a good example here because they do also have large numbers of regular PCs accessible from front-office locations and running regular desktop OSes.
I think we're talking about different things here.
I'm talking about buying a new PC from a major vendor that comes with Windows 10 pre-installed but lets the customer replace that (legally) with Windows 7 or 8.1 post-sale. This is still allowed if the vendor offers it, but they aren't allowed to supply new machines with 7 or 8.1 preinstalled any more, only 10. I can't immediately find a reference, but I've seen reports that similar moves by Microsoft will prevent even selling new machines with those downgrade rights in a year or so.
I suspect you're talking about more general provisions under enterprise licensing agreements or some sort of developer programme. There are other schemes that Microsoft runs that let people do all kinds of things, but they aren't necessarily available to someone who just went to dell.com and bought a new XPS laptop.
OK, that might be possible in some cases. But given the huge amount of potentially relevant information about compatibility and dependencies for an update to a system deployed as widely as Windows, that could be a mighty big database you're talking about downloading there.
Yep, for now there are still options to buy new PCs and run older versions of Windows (legally), though only if you're willing to jump through a few hoops at this point. There will be more serious questions when that possibility is also removed, which isn't far away now in business planning terms.
In the serious editions of Win10 used by larger organisations, telemetry mostly is a non-issue. They don't have the same compulsory phone-home behaviour as the Pro/Home editions used by small businesses and home users do.
Well, if you want Microsoft to automatically determine which update(s) are relevant for your system, obviously you're going to have to share some level of information about what you have installed already. If that counts as telemetry, then yes, of course the update tools won't be able to work properly if you disable it. I'm not sure how relevant this is for Enterprise users, though, since the odds of individual users managing the updates on their own systems in an environment running Enterprise must be pretty low to start with.
However, that kind of telemetry is a far cry from functions like search boxes or Cortana automatically and silently sending details of what you're doing back to the mothership even though everything else involved is local to your system. This is the kind of privacy problem that most people objecting to the increased telemetry in recent Windows versions are concerned about.
If you're big and important enough, your suppliers will pretty much always let you audit their source code under some sort of heavy NDA.
It depends very much on context.
For example, I've been involved with sales to the IT groups at certain banks, and they have strict checklists where anything connected to or running on their systems must meet 100% of the hundreds of conditions or it's game over. Nothing with any sort of telemetry built in would be getting anywhere near those systems.
For Joe's Retail Business, if the systems involved aren't handling anything regulated/audited like credit card details, it might be a completely different story. I suspect a lot of businesses will also potentially be in violation of data protection/privacy laws or of commercial agreements like NDAs as a result of the telemetry, which is also somewhat worrying. However, in practice, those probably won't result in any substantial penalties unless either a major breach comes to light or Microsoft starts abusing its access to data it collects coincidentally, so as usual businesses will probably ignore potential leaks unless they think they'll get caught and suffer for having them.
In any case, it's more relevant that during 2017 we'll probably be looking at some larger organisations that will be running the Enterprise or Education versions starting to migrate to Win10, and those don't have the same problems with things like telemetry and forced updates as the Home and Pro editions.
Just to follow up on a couple of the points you mentioned:
Downloading some things from our library for use off-line is actually one of our most frequently asked questions, and again it's something where we generally take a pretty liberal approach and always have. We want people to enjoy the material. That's why we make it!
What I'm talking about is people who don't just download a few bits and pieces, but blatantly try to download everything right before the end of their subscription. These aren't people who are going on a trip and want something to listen to on the train. These are the people who would sign up to Spotify and then try to run scrapers on a mass of cloud-hosted machines to download literally every song on Spotify for their permanent use. Somehow, I would be rather surprised if the facility you mentioned for downloading content for offline use extended to providing a 100% DRM-free copy of Spotify's entire library, or if their ToS said that was OK, or if they would take no action if they caught someone doing it.
As for what is reasonable, I'm not sure I understand your position here. We're not offering (or in any way pretending to offer) a permanent copy of our works for someone to keep. We work on a subscription basis, and we offer subscriptions at a price that makes sense for that arrangement. I don't see how it's any different to saying you used to go rent a movie from the video hire store, but you paid a much lower price than buying your own copy and you had to return it. Offering the movie for rental didn't give customers any automatic right to buy a copy, at the same or any other price, nor did renting it out give customers the right to make their own copy to keep forever or share with their friends.
In the same way, I don't see how it is reasonable to expect us to provide access at a fraction of the per-user cost it would take just to produce the material, let people sign up for the minimum period, and then let them download as much as they can before it runs out even though it's clearly not being used on the terms we offered. Sure, you can just download the web pages or audio files or whatever from our site, and up to a point we'll be understanding about why you might want to even though that's not really part of the deal, but you basically seem to be implying the same as DRM guy: if we don't want people to abuse our openness, we should actively stop them, which brings us back to limitations and DRM of one kind or another.
Or maybe I've misunderstood and you were just saying you only like payment models where you get permanent ownership of your copy of the content? If so, that is fine and your choice, but it's not the deal we're offering and so joining our library wouldn't be a good option for you. Apparently it's also not a deal that would be economically viable in our case (we know, we did plenty of research to find out), which means if we were required to offer such terms if we were offering our material at all, then we simply wouldn't be producing and sharing that material, and again everyone who does currently enjoy it and find our current pricing plan acceptable would lose out.
Right, but most people aren't students, and $10/month for access to a library the size of Netflix is still vastly cheaper than buying everything a typical subscriber might watch there the way you had to before the streaming library services were around.
I might also wonder what anyone who is watching enough stuff to need $60+/month of subscriptions to that many different services at once is actually doing with their lives, but that's a different question.
If we were talking about updates to the Enterprise version of 7 or 8.1, which organisations might already have deployed widely, presumably it would be tougher for those organisations to justify the switch. Maybe only those who were concerned about serious legal/regulatory issues would do so. But then in that situation, the sysadmins could just block the other updates they didn't want, so concerns about updates introducing ads or removing features or whatever don't really apply.
The thing with Windows 10 is that it's a big upgrade anyway. Enterprise-scale IT departments are already going to need plans for a full migration if they want to go to Win 10 Enterprise. They're already going to have to check compatibility with all the software they rely on, maybe upgrade some of their hardware, and so on. So the cost of accepting Windows 10 if Microsoft were also to push stuff like telemetry and automatic updates in the Enterprise edition would just be that much higher.
What large corporate IT department has their executives running any version of Windows Pro on their laptops, rather than Enterprise connected to their centralised update servers etc?
What corporate IT department has allowed any machines under their control, even running Windows 7/8/8.1 Pro if it's a smaller organisation, to deploy the telemetry updates?
I don't disagree with you on the being run by humans and having inertia aspects. I just think you're underestimating how damaging trying to force known data leaks and uncontrolled software into a large organisation would be.
The data leak aspect is a concern for the lawyers, as well as the obvious underlying security implications. I'm only involved with smaller businesses, which previously used Pro versions of Windows, but even we don't seem to be able to move to Windows 10 without risking violating various data protection laws, NDAs, and so on. What happens to larger businesses, particularly those who work in regulated industries and who really do get audited from time to time, if Windows 10 Enterprise imposes the same vulnerability?
The forced upgrades also have obvious stability and reliability implications. Microsoft has long provided tools for corporate system administrators to manage large numbers of Windows desktops and deploy updates (or not) according to their own schedules and testing requirements. I have never encountered a large organisation using Windows whose administrators do not use these tools, and the answer to many problems with Windows updates for these organisations has essentially been "If it took out the 10 dummy PCs in the test lab, don't deploy it to the rest of the organisation". Again, if Windows 10 Enterprise took away that flexibility and allowed (or required) users to start upgrading their own systems, I can't imagine corporate IT tolerating that at all.
In short, it doesn't necessarily take an incredible amount of silly things to tip the balance. Even one or two things will still do it, if those things are silly enough.
No I just think you are being unrealistic about the "care factor" of those execs you think will send in the lawyers with guns blazing.
If Microsoft introduced mandatory telemetry, spyware, upgrades, ads etc. in Windows 10 Enterprise, in the same way that they have in Home and Pro, I imagine a fair number of those lawyers would be the ones demanding that their business didn't move to Windows 10 Enterprise, right next to the senior IT staff.
It has happened more than once already.
In rather different circumstances, and relatively rarely even then. Now compare how often it's happened with how often there has been a credible threat of it happening until someone from a big software company offered someone from a big customer a much, much better deal to prevent it.
It's simple economics. There's a significant cost to any technology migration in an organisation of that scale, and there's also typically a significant cost to relying on systems for longer than they're well suited for the job. As you imply yourself, this is true whether you're talking about updating to a newer product from the same supplier or you're talking about switching to a different supplier. There is rarely such a thing as being truly locked in for large enterprises, there is only when the cost of switching becomes lower than the costs of upgrading and of keeping the current system.
One of the biggest strategic problems Microsoft has to deal with is the reality that even in huge organisations, the trend in recent years has been back towards more centralised systems, with thin client applications or web interfaces for access. Windows-only software is certainly still a factor, but it's becoming less of a limiting one as time goes by. That means the cost of switching is already lowering, relative to the cost of a full-scale OS upgrade across the organisation. If Microsoft started doing silly things with Windows 10 that made that full-scale upgrade a problem, it would swing the needle further, and at some point it would tip the balance.
You say that, but annual fees for the services we subscribe to in my household work out far less than the cost of buying all those shows and movies on DVD would have been a few years earlier. The gap is even wider once you take into account the not-sure things that you could try because they were on a streaming service and it wouldn't cost you any more if you gave up ten minutes in.
I still buy a load of stuff on DVD/Blu-ray, but those are the things I want to keep, because I don't trust the likes of Netflix not to renegotiate some licensing deal and remove a show I'm enjoying in the middle of a season. In terms of financial cost, for the kinds of shows and movies I'll probably only ever watch once anyway, the streaming services are still way cheaper for frequent viewers even if they have to sign up for a few different ones.
until you made clear that they're downloading it from you, presumably the authorized distributor.
No, we are the people who create the content in question, and who run the library site providing access to it. No-one else is involved here or taking a cut as a distributor.
So...they downloaded exactly as much as they're allowed to, and then once allowed again, started again? Didn't hack your system, didn't go off to torrent it instead? And they're doing...what wrong again? How do you know how they're using it and if such use is "normally"?
It's a subscription model for online browsing of the library. (Think Netflix, Spotify, and so on.) Downloading for permanent storage and offline viewing is not allowed. This is all clearly and explicitly stated in our terms, and I suppose that real-time element is our version of an "all you can eat" restaurant bringing you your eighth course on request, but politely refusing you a doggy back to take leftovers home with you.
A small number of people join the library, and then right before the end of their first billing period, they start going down the index and grabbing everything they can, in order, until they're blocked, at a rate many times faster than any normal user navigates. The outlier here is very, very obvious -- we're talking orders of magnitude. And -- here's the kicker -- at that rate, they would have to be consuming the audio/video content at several times its normal speed just to keep up. And they're doing this for extended periods, and trying again after each time they get blocked, for say the last week in the quarter. Now, if you still think those people are accessing the content of the library online, I know a Nigerian price with a great deal to offer you.
As for why we allow people to do that, well, the alternatives to the limits we do impose would mostly use some sort of heuristic to identify suspicious behaviour more aggressively and throttle it earlier and/or supply the content via some sort of DRM scheme. Obviously either of those might screw genuine users if something went wrong, and put simply, we don't want to risk doing that.
Why on Earth does your system let people do that, if you don't want them to do that? ... (Whoever made the statement to you about DRM is a moron, it's not effective anyway and would drive away your users.)
The person who made the statement about DRM to us may have been a moron, as you put it, and DRM may or may not be effective, but this is the reality that a small content provider faces on the web today. So if someone like the original AC I replied to here wants to come along and claim that they'll start respecting copyrights when the quid pro quo is honoured, I'd like to know what they think about a situation like ours or how they think what we do justifies what other people try to do to us. Or, y'know, it could just be that some people say that because they want to claim anyone with a business model involving copyright deserves to be abused, as apparently a small but noticeable number of people who join our library do.
When it comes down to it, you can't know why anyone downloaded such and such thing.
See, that's the thing. In cases like this, the rip-off behaviour is so obvious that we really can.
As a final point, please consider that the position you've taken and the incorrect assumptions you've made in your post here and in particular casually dismissive comments like "just be glad you're being paid" are exactly why larger content providers routinely use obnoxious DRM schemes and file aggressive legal actions and lobby for punitive copyright laws.
I think it's fair to say that we're about as reasonable and transparent as you could possibly be for a site that provides content and charges for it. We do a lot of work because it's something we care about. The money coming in basically covers the operating expenses and it's a fraction
You're kidding, right?
If this is a large Fortune 500 business we're talking about, it's probably a household name with many thousands of staff. If Microsoft try to screw them, a few executives from that business are going to have some pleasant conversations over golf with people who also happen to work at a senior level for alternative suppliers like Apple and Red Hat.
First, they're going to cut a nice deal for enterprise-scale everything, because any business that size is worth serious money. Score a win for both the business (big cost savings) and the suppliers (big new customer).
Next, those alternative suppliers like Apple and Red Hat are going to make nice press releases touting their new Fortune 500 customer. Those press releases are going to feature quotes from C-level executives at the Fortune 500 saying how happy they are and what a great supplier they've got. There will be white papers with case studies showing off how much better the big organisation is doing now they've switched to the new supplier.
If this happens once, it's already bad for Microsoft. If it becomes more of a pattern than an isolated incident, the big consultancies and industry commentators are going to start paying attention and using the same sorts of quotes in their own analysis, and that in turn is going to influence other senior executives at other big organisations who are also unhappy with being given the finger by a supplier and interested in what their other options might be.
If you think I'm kidding about all of this, I invite you to research the order-of-magnitude reductions in licence fees that certain big name software companies offer to their enterprise customers in this kind of situation to keep them on side. That is how much these giant customers are worth to them, and the same customers are worth just as much to other potential suppliers who have the scale to operate at that level too. Or you could just notice that Windows 10 Enterprise is basically a totally different product to Windows 10 Home, which doesn't require the telemetry, updates, and so on that have been so controversial, and ask yourself why Microsoft did that.
I have some sympathy with this argument when it's applied to Big Media who chase grannies with no Internet connection for settlements or who supply their content with system-destroying broken DRM systems or activation measures that don't work and stop someone enjoying what they paid for.
On the other hand, I'm part of a team running a small library of original online content, which is produced with considerable work and at considerable cost by enthusiasts who don't make any seriously money from the membership fees. I think a lot of the anti-copyright people around these parts might be amazed at the excuses and rationalisations that people will give you for blatantly trying to rip off your whole library, even if you just send them a friendly message to make it clear that you know what they're doing and remind them politely that it's not allowed.
I've seen someone literally sit at their computer for several hours a day for several days in a row, downloading large numbers of files they couldn't possible be using normally, only stopping each time our rate limiter kicked in and blocked further downloads for a while. I've had someone tell me that if we don't want people to download and share our stuff, we should supply it using DRM, and if we don't then it's our fault and they don't see anything wrong with what they were doing.
Fortunately, most people are quite honest, at least with a little site like ours. We in turn have never liked the idea of using technologies that might accidentally spoil a legitimate customer's enjoyment of the library, and we still don't. Up to a point, we can just ignore the attempts at ripping us off the same way you might ignore anyone else you don't approve of or like very much.
But the kind of person who not only thinks it's OK to come along and just blatantly rip off original content that a few people spent a lot of time and money creating, but who is also then totally unrepentant or even aggressive when called out on it, is enough to make blood boil. I will truly have no sympathy the first time we get frustrated enough to throw the legal book at one of those people, and they're crazy if they don't think we would have an open-and-shut case against them. Under the kind of punitive copyright laws that exist in a lot of countries now, we'd probably make a lot of money from the damages in some of these cases, too.
In that context, some sort of official "No, really, you should understand that this would be illegal and if you're doing it there might be consequences" mechanism might actually be better even for the offending parties than leaving the rightsholders no middle ground so they jump straight into call-the-lawyer territory. The problem comes when such a system isn't just a friendly(ish) warning but has more serious consequences like causing ISPs to reduce service to repeat "offenders" even though the notifications are only based on suspected or alleged infringement.