There's no need to duck, because that's exactly when it started. The catch is that it wasn't me choosing to use Chrome, it was some of our clients.
The so-called evergreen web browsers are, in my professional opinion as a web developer, one of the worst ideas our industry has come up with in a long time, and comparable to the Windows 10 issues in terms of how much damage they cause and time they waste.
We've never allowed fully automated updates on any of the systems I'm talking about. The change in policy for us is that when patch day came around, we used to basically just go down the list and tick anything recommended unless we'd heard there was a problem. Now we go down the list, untick everything first, and then re-tick any security issues that appear to be relevant to us and not bundling anything we don't want after we've looked them up outside Windows Update.
As you apparently know, Windows 7 has support until the early 2020. That is a long time before we need to make any big decisions, and we expect the Windows 10 fiasco to be ancient history by then one way or another.
In some cases we couldn't use the free Windows 10 update even if we did want to, because we'd have immediate compliance issues as soon as we didn't have full control of systems that handle sensitive data, which no version of Windows 10 available via the free update offers.
Yes and no. It's annoying that someone has to spend an hour or two each month looking up the new security updates to make sure they're not doing questionable things before installing. It's a lot less expensive than having our systems compromised, whether by updating to Windows 10, installing telemetry that potentially raises regulatory or contractual compliance issues, etc.
2. if you can't trust your supplier not to try to trick you why are you using that supplier?
When we bought these systems, we did trust Microsoft. Now we don't, because their behaviour is no longer trustworthy. We aren't currently buying any new Windows-based systems. We are currently experimenting with other platforms. There's nothing inconsistent here, just a supplier that unfortunately changed for the worse over time.
Sorry, I can't give a useful answer to that one. As far as I know, none of the organisations I'm talking about would be installing updates without approval anyway.
Is this some weird thing that phone companies can turn on or something? That article is several months old, but I have never seen anything like that behaviour on the test iPad I have here.
So how do you go from installing recommended updates AND critical updates, to not installing any updates at all? Is it just an issue of mistrust?
In a word, yes. We're talking about small businesses here. Some of them are generally technically clued up but too small to have dedicated IT staff, so anything to do with maintaining the IT systems is time out of someone else's day and minimizing overheads is important.
It used to be the case that installing security updates and other things that were described as improving stability and the like generally worked, and following Microsoft's recommendations seemed to give acceptable results while keeping the systems as safe and reliable as possible.
Since following Microsoft's advice no longer has that result, and since anything to be manually reviewed and installed takes time, a lot of the businesses I work with are now defaulting to install-nothing, and then doing the minimum sensible amount on top of that to keep things security patched as necessary.
As for the rest of the enterprise, can you see IT departments migrating their entire user base to something other than Windows?
I already have, but then I mostly work with smaller businesses rather than big "enterprise" clients. In the smaller organisations, IME, there's generally much less tolerance for the kind of shenanigans Microsoft has been pulling lately, and often more willingness to make significant changes if the alternatives look better. I've seen things like dumping MS Office entirely (in favour of cloud-hosted equivalents) and dumping Windows almost entirely (in favour of Apple laptops) with generally positive responses.
I suspect you're right about trending back towards thin clients, at least for the short to medium term. In a sense we have already been doing that for a few years with mobile apps as front ends to remote services, but it seems that for many businesses, web apps and cloud hosting generally have also won for now, despite the various downsides. I'm not as sure as you are that the thin client model will stick: I think those downsides will become too significant to ignore after a while and business users will look to regain control. The irony is that the one business that could potentially have led the industry on a short-cut to that end result was Microsoft, and it would probably have been huge for them, but once again they tried to follow another trend five years too late instead and now they've blown it.
You must be looking at different Steam stats to the ones you linked to. Those show Windows 10 at around 40% market penetration, almost exactly the same as Windows 7, with 8.1 at around 12% and everything else lost in the noise.
I'm curious to know which very large companies are already rolling out Windows 10, if you're free to name them. So far I haven't encountered any in my own work, but most of the clients I deal with are at the smaller end of the scale.
I have a few friends who also run their own businesses or are senior enough in someone else's to make IT purchasing decisions. That kind of thing happens when you've been working for a decade or two. Still, as long as all of us are only pretending to have power and our businesses are all mythical, Microsoft has nothing to worry about, right?
It's pretty pathetic when you have to keep a computer off the network in order to keep it functioning.
Indeed. I've done the same thing with the "special laptops" when demonstrating a new web app to someone, just in case Chrome decided to update and break it on the morning of the presentation. You can probably imagine how that habit started.
Hello. I'm a guy who makes purchasing decisions for a business. We're not moving to Windows 10. We are looking at alternatives and about to spend real money on some of them.
I suppose it depends on how desperate they get as the deadline nears, particularly if they don't see a huge surge in conversions at the last minute. Even when the Get Windows 10 prompts started, I wouldn't have expected Microsoft to turn an update that installs them back on after a user actively chose to hide it. Even after they'd done that, I wouldn't have expected them to bundle promotional material into an unrelated security update. Today I don't honestly know what lines they wouldn't cross any more or if there even are any.
I think it will take time given the situation today and the need for a change in senior management, but if Microsoft doesn't come out with a better alternative before Windows 7 support runs out at the start of 2020, it is surely gifting a huge commercial opportunity to anyone who wants to make a play for their OS markets. I don't know who that would be or what form it would take, but I can immediately think of several vaguely plausible variations, and nearly four years is a long time in IT.
Where are all these people finding iPads that nag them to update every day? We use them for testing, and I've never seen more than a message when a new version of iOS is available and then the little marker like all the other apps with available updates on the relevant screen.
Apple certainly do some shady things in terms of trying to drive updates. They stop apps that don't favour newer iOS versions being available in the App Store. They provide no mechanism to back out of an update if it doesn't work. They should be, and sometimes actually are, criticised for these things. But I've never seen anything to suggest they harass users the way Microsoft have been recently or automatically install anything unless the user actively opts out.
Win 10 will dominate the Windows market, the world will move on, and Microsoft will consider defending and possibly losing a massive class action suit as merely a cost of business.
Presumably that is their strategy. I'm not sure it's looking so good for them so far, though. We're already most of the way through the one year period for an update to Windows 10, they have been literally giving it away and actively trying to trick people into migrating, and Windows 7 still has a much larger market share. Meanwhile, Microsoft's reputation and credibility are in tatters, probably more so with the geek and professional community than anyone else.
That's about how we feel as well. We've never allowed updates to install fully automatically, but our default policy used to be that we'd normally install recommended updates unless we had a good reason not to. Not long after the Windows 10 mess started, that policy changed to install-nothing by default, and we just have someone review the security updates each patch day and make a list of any that it seems (a) we might actually need and (b) don't come bundled with anything else we don't want.
The thing that makes me nervous, even though it's quite rational as a business decision, is that until we've had time to vet, we now don't install anything. Our assumption is that the risk of some new security vulnerability that isn't patched for a day or two and also gets past all our other precautions is lower than the risk of Microsoft shafting us with an update we really don't want.
All I'm saying is the fiasco could have also been avoided if people read the messages.
I'm sure that's also true, at least up to a point. However, I'd expect a company with as much UI experience as Microsoft to know very well that most users won't read that kind of message, so I'm unwilling to give them the benefit of the doubt about their intentions in this particular case.
For the record, at no point in this discussion have I repeated any of the claims you listed after that statement.
My objection here is to the premise -- which you have supported repeatedly throughout this thread -- that users have knowingly chosen to allow this update and so deserve what they get. Clearly very many people who have been updated did not think they had done so, because that's why this is an issue at all. And clearly the tactics Microsoft have used in their UIs have been actively designed to encourage users to upgrade even when they don't actually want to.
The notification is not "do you want to upgrade to Windows 10?"
No, but it should have been. If Microsoft had offered a simple yes/no confirmation before updating the whole OS in a completely different way to how automatic updates had ever worked before, they wouldn't be in the mess they are stuck in now.
The next several parts of your post keep referring to things the user has opted or chosen to do, but as I pointed out before, the automatic installation of recommended updates was the default behaviour. It's entirely possible that most Windows 7 users, who received the OS pre-installed on a new computer they bought, didn't even know this setting existed, never mind what its implications were.
As for the warnings Microsoft has given since, even if a user turned off the automatic installation and actively chose not to install certain recommended Windows updates related to GWX, Microsoft have been turning those updates back on later. You can't credibly argue that this is in any way respecting users' choices or not actively trying to trick them into doing something when they have clearly chosen that they don't want to do it.
I'm sorry, but the fact that people knee-jerk click 'x' on notifications without reading them isn't a basis for a lawsuit. It just isn't.
This is perhaps the most telling part of the entire thread. These deceptive UI practices, where you train users to work one way and then pull a fast one by reversing a convention, or you set something up as the default behaviour and make it difficult or confusing for users to achieve another outcome, are very well understood. There's even a term that's been adopted for such shady behaviour in UIs recently: dark patterns.
They have been so effective and so damaging that we're not talking about lawsuits now but actual statute laws being implemented right across Europe recently to totally prohibit some of these practices under a wide range of circumstances. Those particular rules were aimed more at upselling during a new sale rather than updates of pre-installed products as we're discussing here, but it's very clear which way the thinking was going, and I wouldn't expect courts to have much sympathy with the argument you made.
After the Windows 10 debacle, as well as some questionable practices about software updates from other big tech firms like Apple in recent years, it wouldn't surprise me to see another round of consumer protection legislation that explicitly extended the principle of active consent and opted-out-by-default to software updates some time in the future.
You seem to have some non-standard definitions for words.
I didn't mention anything about deleting e-mails, hyperbolic or otherwise, so I'm not sure which of my points you intended to refer to there. If it was the one about corruption, then there most certainly have been cases where backing out the Windows 10 update hasn't restored everything properly; numerous stories are yours for the price for a Google search.
What App Stores automatically update apps without the user's consent? None of the ones I use do.
As for active consent, your argument is like saying someone consented to give up their first born child because somewhere on page 74 of some minor software EULA it said so, in completely different words that mean the same thing if you squint just right and hire the more expensive legal team. In particular, I fail to see how "reserve" means anything like "in a few months, go ahead and replace my current OS with the new one without any further consent". Apparently quite a few other people don't see that either, judging by the number of complaints by people who seem very clear that they didn't want and don't think they gave permission for the update to be installed.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no need to duck, because that's exactly when it started. The catch is that it wasn't me choosing to use Chrome, it was some of our clients.
The so-called evergreen web browsers are, in my professional opinion as a web developer, one of the worst ideas our industry has come up with in a long time, and comparable to the Windows 10 issues in terms of how much damage they cause and time they waste.
We've never allowed fully automated updates on any of the systems I'm talking about. The change in policy for us is that when patch day came around, we used to basically just go down the list and tick anything recommended unless we'd heard there was a problem. Now we go down the list, untick everything first, and then re-tick any security issues that appear to be relevant to us and not bundling anything we don't want after we've looked them up outside Windows Update.
As you apparently know, Windows 7 has support until the early 2020. That is a long time before we need to make any big decisions, and we expect the Windows 10 fiasco to be ancient history by then one way or another.
In some cases we couldn't use the free Windows 10 update even if we did want to, because we'd have immediate compliance issues as soon as we didn't have full control of systems that handle sensitive data, which no version of Windows 10 available via the free update offers.
1. Isn't that kind of expensive?
Yes and no. It's annoying that someone has to spend an hour or two each month looking up the new security updates to make sure they're not doing questionable things before installing. It's a lot less expensive than having our systems compromised, whether by updating to Windows 10, installing telemetry that potentially raises regulatory or contractual compliance issues, etc.
2. if you can't trust your supplier not to try to trick you why are you using that supplier?
When we bought these systems, we did trust Microsoft. Now we don't, because their behaviour is no longer trustworthy. We aren't currently buying any new Windows-based systems. We are currently experimenting with other platforms. There's nothing inconsistent here, just a supplier that unfortunately changed for the worse over time.
Sorry, I can't give a useful answer to that one. As far as I know, none of the organisations I'm talking about would be installing updates without approval anyway.
Is this some weird thing that phone companies can turn on or something? That article is several months old, but I have never seen anything like that behaviour on the test iPad I have here.
So how do you go from installing recommended updates AND critical updates, to not installing any updates at all? Is it just an issue of mistrust?
In a word, yes. We're talking about small businesses here. Some of them are generally technically clued up but too small to have dedicated IT staff, so anything to do with maintaining the IT systems is time out of someone else's day and minimizing overheads is important.
It used to be the case that installing security updates and other things that were described as improving stability and the like generally worked, and following Microsoft's recommendations seemed to give acceptable results while keeping the systems as safe and reliable as possible.
Since following Microsoft's advice no longer has that result, and since anything to be manually reviewed and installed takes time, a lot of the businesses I work with are now defaulting to install-nothing, and then doing the minimum sensible amount on top of that to keep things security patched as necessary.
As for the rest of the enterprise, can you see IT departments migrating their entire user base to something other than Windows?
I already have, but then I mostly work with smaller businesses rather than big "enterprise" clients. In the smaller organisations, IME, there's generally much less tolerance for the kind of shenanigans Microsoft has been pulling lately, and often more willingness to make significant changes if the alternatives look better. I've seen things like dumping MS Office entirely (in favour of cloud-hosted equivalents) and dumping Windows almost entirely (in favour of Apple laptops) with generally positive responses.
I suspect you're right about trending back towards thin clients, at least for the short to medium term. In a sense we have already been doing that for a few years with mobile apps as front ends to remote services, but it seems that for many businesses, web apps and cloud hosting generally have also won for now, despite the various downsides. I'm not as sure as you are that the thin client model will stick: I think those downsides will become too significant to ignore after a while and business users will look to regain control. The irony is that the one business that could potentially have led the industry on a short-cut to that end result was Microsoft, and it would probably have been huge for them, but once again they tried to follow another trend five years too late instead and now they've blown it.
You must be looking at different Steam stats to the ones you linked to. Those show Windows 10 at around 40% market penetration, almost exactly the same as Windows 7, with 8.1 at around 12% and everything else lost in the noise.
I'm curious to know which very large companies are already rolling out Windows 10, if you're free to name them. So far I haven't encountered any in my own work, but most of the clients I deal with are at the smaller end of the scale.
I mostly work with small businesses. These organisations are far more likely to be on Pro than Enterprise.
I have a few friends who also run their own businesses or are senior enough in someone else's to make IT purchasing decisions. That kind of thing happens when you've been working for a decade or two. Still, as long as all of us are only pretending to have power and our businesses are all mythical, Microsoft has nothing to worry about, right?
It's pretty pathetic when you have to keep a computer off the network in order to keep it functioning.
Indeed. I've done the same thing with the "special laptops" when demonstrating a new web app to someone, just in case Chrome decided to update and break it on the morning of the presentation. You can probably imagine how that habit started.
Hello. I'm a guy who makes purchasing decisions for a business. We're not moving to Windows 10. We are looking at alternatives and about to spend real money on some of them.
You have no evidence for your claims.
He does now.
(For whoever missed the reference and thought I was trolling: here you go.)
But what's the point now?
I suppose it depends on how desperate they get as the deadline nears, particularly if they don't see a huge surge in conversions at the last minute. Even when the Get Windows 10 prompts started, I wouldn't have expected Microsoft to turn an update that installs them back on after a user actively chose to hide it. Even after they'd done that, I wouldn't have expected them to bundle promotional material into an unrelated security update. Today I don't honestly know what lines they wouldn't cross any more or if there even are any.
I think it will take time given the situation today and the need for a change in senior management, but if Microsoft doesn't come out with a better alternative before Windows 7 support runs out at the start of 2020, it is surely gifting a huge commercial opportunity to anyone who wants to make a play for their OS markets. I don't know who that would be or what form it would take, but I can immediately think of several vaguely plausible variations, and nearly four years is a long time in IT.
Where are all these people finding iPads that nag them to update every day? We use them for testing, and I've never seen more than a message when a new version of iOS is available and then the little marker like all the other apps with available updates on the relevant screen.
Apple certainly do some shady things in terms of trying to drive updates. They stop apps that don't favour newer iOS versions being available in the App Store. They provide no mechanism to back out of an update if it doesn't work. They should be, and sometimes actually are, criticised for these things. But I've never seen anything to suggest they harass users the way Microsoft have been recently or automatically install anything unless the user actively opts out.
Win 10 will dominate the Windows market, the world will move on, and Microsoft will consider defending and possibly losing a massive class action suit as merely a cost of business.
Presumably that is their strategy. I'm not sure it's looking so good for them so far, though. We're already most of the way through the one year period for an update to Windows 10, they have been literally giving it away and actively trying to trick people into migrating, and Windows 7 still has a much larger market share. Meanwhile, Microsoft's reputation and credibility are in tatters, probably more so with the geek and professional community than anyone else.
"If."
That's about how we feel as well. We've never allowed updates to install fully automatically, but our default policy used to be that we'd normally install recommended updates unless we had a good reason not to. Not long after the Windows 10 mess started, that policy changed to install-nothing by default, and we just have someone review the security updates each patch day and make a list of any that it seems (a) we might actually need and (b) don't come bundled with anything else we don't want.
The thing that makes me nervous, even though it's quite rational as a business decision, is that until we've had time to vet, we now don't install anything. Our assumption is that the risk of some new security vulnerability that isn't patched for a day or two and also gets past all our other precautions is lower than the risk of Microsoft shafting us with an update we really don't want.
"The Treadstone Project has actually already been terminated..."
All I'm saying is the fiasco could have also been avoided if people read the messages.
I'm sure that's also true, at least up to a point. However, I'd expect a company with as much UI experience as Microsoft to know very well that most users won't read that kind of message, so I'm unwilling to give them the benefit of the doubt about their intentions in this particular case.
Making it a recommend thing in the first place is dodgy as fuck but they did what they could to let people know.
Really? Because it seems to me that this entire fiasco could have been completely avoided with the following words:
Microsoft recommends that you update your system to Windows 10. Do you want to do this?
Yes, update to Windows 10
No, keep Windows [7/8/8.1]
I'm sorry, but you're making things up.
For the record, at no point in this discussion have I repeated any of the claims you listed after that statement.
My objection here is to the premise -- which you have supported repeatedly throughout this thread -- that users have knowingly chosen to allow this update and so deserve what they get. Clearly very many people who have been updated did not think they had done so, because that's why this is an issue at all. And clearly the tactics Microsoft have used in their UIs have been actively designed to encourage users to upgrade even when they don't actually want to.
The notification is not "do you want to upgrade to Windows 10?"
No, but it should have been. If Microsoft had offered a simple yes/no confirmation before updating the whole OS in a completely different way to how automatic updates had ever worked before, they wouldn't be in the mess they are stuck in now.
The next several parts of your post keep referring to things the user has opted or chosen to do, but as I pointed out before, the automatic installation of recommended updates was the default behaviour. It's entirely possible that most Windows 7 users, who received the OS pre-installed on a new computer they bought, didn't even know this setting existed, never mind what its implications were.
As for the warnings Microsoft has given since, even if a user turned off the automatic installation and actively chose not to install certain recommended Windows updates related to GWX, Microsoft have been turning those updates back on later. You can't credibly argue that this is in any way respecting users' choices or not actively trying to trick them into doing something when they have clearly chosen that they don't want to do it.
I'm sorry, but the fact that people knee-jerk click 'x' on notifications without reading them isn't a basis for a lawsuit. It just isn't.
This is perhaps the most telling part of the entire thread. These deceptive UI practices, where you train users to work one way and then pull a fast one by reversing a convention, or you set something up as the default behaviour and make it difficult or confusing for users to achieve another outcome, are very well understood. There's even a term that's been adopted for such shady behaviour in UIs recently: dark patterns.
They have been so effective and so damaging that we're not talking about lawsuits now but actual statute laws being implemented right across Europe recently to totally prohibit some of these practices under a wide range of circumstances. Those particular rules were aimed more at upselling during a new sale rather than updates of pre-installed products as we're discussing here, but it's very clear which way the thinking was going, and I wouldn't expect courts to have much sympathy with the argument you made.
After the Windows 10 debacle, as well as some questionable practices about software updates from other big tech firms like Apple in recent years, it wouldn't surprise me to see another round of consumer protection legislation that explicitly extended the principle of active consent and opted-out-by-default to software updates some time in the future.
You seem to have some non-standard definitions for words.
I didn't mention anything about deleting e-mails, hyperbolic or otherwise, so I'm not sure which of my points you intended to refer to there. If it was the one about corruption, then there most certainly have been cases where backing out the Windows 10 update hasn't restored everything properly; numerous stories are yours for the price for a Google search.
What App Stores automatically update apps without the user's consent? None of the ones I use do.
As for active consent, your argument is like saying someone consented to give up their first born child because somewhere on page 74 of some minor software EULA it said so, in completely different words that mean the same thing if you squint just right and hire the more expensive legal team. In particular, I fail to see how "reserve" means anything like "in a few months, go ahead and replace my current OS with the new one without any further consent". Apparently quite a few other people don't see that either, judging by the number of complaints by people who seem very clear that they didn't want and don't think they gave permission for the update to be installed.