They announced they'd made it a recommended update and it would auto push out to everyone with auto updates on.
I think the important question is whether they announced it to the people who actually needed to know, in a way those people would understand, so those people could choose to act on that information by declining the update it if they didn't want it.
If I tell you I'm going to punch you, remind you that I'm going to punch you, tell you exactly when I'm going to punch you, is it really my fault if you get punched?
Well... Yes. Yes, it is.
If you try to do that, you shouldn't be surprised if I defend myself and/or call the cops.
I'm sorry, but you are defending the indefensible. If Microsoft were being as reasonable and transparent as you suggest, it wouldn't be literally front page news that they've upset so many people who were surprised at what happened, didn't want it, and in particular explicitly thought they hadn't agreed to it.
The behaviour we're talking about, installing recommended updates automatically, is the default. It's what someone gets if they don't know to actively change it. If someone didn't install Windows 7 themselves but instead bought a PC with Windows pre-installed, it's unreasonable to assume that they would have any idea there was even anything to change. And for about a decade, the default policy was sensible, because it meant users who didn't know these things still received important security and stability fixes.
Suddenly making an entire new OS (let's not insult anyone's intelligence by pretending it's anything like a normal Windows 7 upgrade, please) recommended is a drastic change in the expected behaviour.
Turning back on various updates that users have explicitly and actively declined previously is a drastic change in behaviour.
Bundling nag messages about the update within otherwise unrelated security updates is a drastic change in behaviour.
You can dress it up however you want, but the end result is still the same: users are being tricked into upgrading, and many of them very clearly didn't want to be and didn't intend to make the choice you blame them for. Microsoft's reputation isn't going to do any better because of the dubious technicalities you're basing your argument on. If this winds up in a court, it's unlikely those types of argument will do them much good either.
That's cute, but for nearly 10 years the recommended default for non-technical users, both according to Microsoft themselves and according to most people who knew about IT, was to enable automatic installation of recommended Windows updates for security reasons. Microsoft don't get to dramatically alter what "recommended" means and how the system works after all this time, present the information in a way that anyone with five minutes of UI design experience could tell you would be confusing at best, betray the trust of all those users who followed their long-standing advice, and not get criticised for it. The fact that they've already back-peddled on this whole mess today, in the face of criticism that made the front page of not just the tech news sites but major general news outlets, suggests that even Microsoft are well aware that their position is untenable at this point.
It's like a notification that pops up that says "you have new email". You wouldn't expect the system to delete your email if you click on the 'x' to close the notification, would you? Of course not.
I also wouldn't expect the e-mail client I've been happily using for years to one day automatically schedule an update that reorganised its whole UI, started randomly cancelling e-mails I was in the middle of writing to reload itself every now and then, started quietly forwarding my mails to some unknown third party, and corrupted 25% of my saved mail if I tried to back the update out, and then just pop up a random notice not even asking for my active consent to go ahead but just telling me how I'm going to be screwed unless I click the tiny text hidden in the middle of the dialog instead of any of the controls I've been using for those past few years.
I agree that having a simple, robust and secure way to install, update and uninstall applications would be a huge win for any of the major desktop OSes. We should have had that decades ago, and I don't think we'd have seen the industry move in quite the same direction in recent years if Windows had provided better mechanisms to manage installed software back then.
It would be great if any moves Microsoft is making in that direction now would be for full applications and not just the kind of toy apps we see on mobile app stores, and if they would support third party installation and not require jumping through hoops with some sort of Microsoft-controlled store. I'm not sure whether those will be the case, though.
Ok, that sounds reasonable... but, doesn't MS already do this? What new action is expected?
Well, things like not pushing out updates that dramatically change other aspects of the system using the exact same mechanism as those that fix defects would be a good start. There was an IE security update recently that also included GWX crap, and IMHO that is unacceptable.
What is the "expected useful lifetime" of Windows? 5 years? 10 years? Frankly I think MS provides updates longer than most companies do and for more past versions than most companies do.
Microsoft publishes support lifetimes for most of its major products. It has made an awful lot of money from those products, in part because customers got that level of stability.
Even without that, for something like system software that is supplied with a laptop and essential to its use, clearly the expected useful lifetime must be at least as long as the laptop itself lasts. Who is legally responsible if the software gets broken is a different question, but for sure it isn't the end customer who bought a computer and just wants to get what they paid for.
IMHO the law in my country is outdated in this area, since it effectively dumps the main responsibility on the final vendor who took the customer's money. However, it's the after-sale actions of other parties such as the OS developer that are really deciding the outcome in these cases, and it's also the failures of the software developers that lead to the defects we're talking about in the first place. It's about time we had proper recognition of the actual commercial and practical relationships between the different parties in law and consumers had the right to claim against software developers who don't meet reasonable standards and cause harm as a result.
What if MS came out tomorrow and said, "Windows 10 is now free forever to Windows 7 owners, but support for Windows 7 is ending, Windows 10 is your patch for security"?
No. Windows 10 is significantly different to Windows 7 in all kinds of ways. As we've been discussing, some of them are rather important. I think Microsoft has an obligation to fix the defects in Windows 7 without imposing other changes, and if they don't want to do that because it's more expensive to maintain multiple products or whatever other excuse, I think the law should compel them to do so for a reasonable period in the interests of protecting consumers.
How far back does Apple provide support for OS X? Does MS do more?
I don't know the details for Apple, but I do know that I take exactly the same position about their equipment and the software it's supplied with. In particular, I have on several occasions chosen not to buy Apple equipment because of the lack of acceptable long-term software support compared to Windows systems, and I have seen people return iPads that were screwed up after an iOS update and claim substantial refunds from the stores that sold them (and be given those refunds). Presumably if that started to happen more often or if larger-scale action by consumer protection organisations became a factor, those final vendors who are on the hook for the repair/replacement/refund under the law would start taking up the issue more strongly with their own suppliers and ultimately with Apple.
There are millions of small family businesses, independent professionals, or even somewhat larger businesses that aren't IT-centric, that won't meet that threshold and/or won't have the time or IT staff to jump through all Microsoft's hoops, yet which still have similar requirements for security, data protection and stability. It's basically the entire (business) market for what used to be Pro.
I don't think there is any doubt there is room for them to grow, the question is... "is there room to grow and maintain their profit margins?"
It would be a different commercial strategy, for sure. That's why I think a secondary brand would be more likely than trying to push their premium Macbook products at a lower price point.
I think one very clear example is that software that communicates with the outside world but has a security vulnerability is defective. If that vulnerability isn't found before it ships, it's fair to expect the software developer to make commercially reasonable efforts to provide a fix within a reasonable timeframe for as long as the software is within a reasonably expected useful lifetime.
That's a lot of reasonables, and we have courts to figure out the details based on the specifics of a particular case. I'd expect more from a $100 mass market operating system than from a $2 mobile app with 100 total sales. I'd expect more still from a $X,000-per-seat professional software product that requires extensive contact just to buy it and then locks the customer's data into a proprietary format so the consequences of any bugs may be much worse.
Ultimately, if you're selling software that is running hundreds of millions of computers, making billions of dollars in revenues, but with the result that a security vulnerability in your product a few months after launch can cause huge amounts of damage as well, I think it's fair to expect you to provide an update that closes the hole, and to do so without imposing other unwanted changes on your customers at the same time. IMHO, with that level of profit and that level of influence comes a commensurate level of responsibility to put right your mistakes, and to do so without taking advantage of your customers in other ways.
Well, when we're talking about "getting the government involved" here, I don't think we're talking about heavy regulation or things like mandatory registration for practitioners as we often see in disciplines like medicine, engineering or law.
All I'm suggesting is that the software industry should not be magically exempt from the same general legal standards as everyone else. If you sell something and it doesn't work properly, you should be required to do something reasonable about that, and you should be required to do it without attaching strings that the customer didn't originally sign up for.
Enterprise is only available to larger businesses. Smaller businesses or independent professionals, the kind of people who would have used Pro in Windows 7 or 8.x, have nowhere to go with 10.
All of that is true today, but remember this is Apple we're talking about. If they saw an opportunity to grow dramatically in the general desktop/laptop market, perhaps with a secondary "budget" brand, they have more than enough resources to make a play for it and 2020 is a long way away in computer years.
FYI, the secondary source you cited is actually based on the primary source I cited.
The 20% figure is a share of Windows PCs. It excludes Apple laptops, Linux workstations, mobile devices, etc.
I'm afraid you're also misreading the Apple figures somewhere. Mac sales are much lower than Windows PC sales, of course, but perhaps you confused quarterly figures with annual ones somewhere along the line?
As for overall share of the current installed base, the same primary source currently puts Mac at 8.9% of visits, against 11.6% for Windows 10. That doesn't seem implausible, given that many of the new Windows PCs sold in 2015 won't be running Windows 10. In short, Macs still only represent a modest proportion of total desktop/laptop sales compared to all versions of Windows, but certainly not an insignificant one.
While that sounds reasonable, those businesses are going to use it anyway, they have no other choice. My wife is a doctor, HIPPA laws apply to her. I've seen people make the case that Windows 10 doesn't comply with those privacy laws, but frankly lots of doctors use it so either they are all breaking the rules, or no one cares, or it isn't really out of compliance. Take your pick.:)
I find that argument disturbing. I also work with sensitive data at times, though not in the US so the regulatory environment isn't exactly the same as HIPAA.
For us, it seems absolutely clear that a system that is known to phone home under a wide range of circumstances and which is known to be able to introduce arbitrary changes via automatic updates cannot possibly be in compliance with our regulatory and contractual data protection obligations and be guaranteed to remain so. Even if it were somehow in compliance today, the forced updates mean we can't possibly know whether it would remain so tomorrow.
There are plenty of alternatives, and plenty of us are using them. Any doctors who aren't should be educated and, if necessary, subject to regulatory action for non-compliance. The same goes for anyone who knowingly supplies such a system for use in an unsuitable environment, such as one handling confidential medical records. There's not even any room for ambiguity here. This one is about as clear-cut as any issue you'll ever see in IT.
Is it possible to write software of that scale 100% bug free? I doubt it. Even if we could get the implementation close to perfect, I doubt we know how to produce an equally perfect spec for what the required behaviour is under such a wide range of conditions yet.
However, is it possible to write software of that scale with significantly better reliability than much of what ships today? Of course. Just writing most software in more robust languages than C or C++ and reserving those low-level tools for the systems programming tasks where their strengths are actually needed would be a good start.
The problem is that the industry continues to use substandard tools and processes, despite ample evidence of their weaknesses and better alternatives, in large part because of non-technical issues. There is insufficient commercial incentive to research and train developers in better ways of building software when there are already millions of developers you can hire to write code in existing languages and with existing processes, so as long as customers are willing to accept the unnecessarily poor quality that results, why would you change (from a business perspective)?
Except that in the real world, there's things like HIPAA and PCIDSS that consider not installing updates unacceptable.
Cite, please? I sometimes work in security sensitive environments, and I have never heard of such a black-and-white rule. In fact, mandating that updates be automatically installed seems like an incredibly bad idea, and I'm fairly sure no sysadmin I know would consider it good practice.
In other words, avoiding Windows 10 doesn't actually solve the problem unless you take extreme measures in all of your digital life, and doing so will get harder, not easier, going forward. You can probably do it if you care enough, but don't confuse the edge of the market with the mainstream.
I don't think wanting privacy and security is nearly as rare as you're making out. Leaving aside personal preferences, numerous small businesses will be bound by contractual and/or regulatory rules that mean they have to handle various kinds of data securely. That may mean Windows 10 in its current form simply isn't an option for those businesses, as it's impossible to control or audit sensibly.
The fear over people leaving Windows when XP finally ended was there too, and it didn't happen. Instead once support finally ended, people did upgrade.
Except for all the people still running XP, you mean? Including numerous security-sensitive environments like banks and government departments?
I expect if we looked back at the stats, we'd find the majority moved on from Windows XP when Windows 7 arrived and didn't suck as hard as Vista did.
In fact, I completely disagree over your viewpoint on Windows 10 being a poor launch, I don't think MS sees it that way at all. It was far superior to Windows 8 and Vista.
I'm sure MS would like to portray Windows 10 as not being a poor launch, but it seems they've only recently achieved double-digit market share after nearly a year of literally giving it away, and to achieve even that result they've already actively alienated a significant part of their customer base in a variety of ways.
I'm not sure the Windows 10 launch being more successful than two of the biggest flops in recent IT history is a very convincing argument, BTW.
Windows 10 isn't "barely" above Windows XP in marketshare today, it is not even close. XP has finally dropped to the small single digits and it continues to lose support.
That depends on whose numbers you read, of course. Netmarketshare still has XP at over 10%, with 10 now up to around 15%. Even if you question the Netmarketshare stats (and I would agree there are reasons you might), another source I've seen cited a few times that puts XP much lower still agrees that 10 has only around one third of the market share of 7 and that 7 retains around half of the desktop/laptop market.
What would replace MS on the desktop?
Well, firstly, you're assuming that everyone needs to replace MS on the desktop. With the variety of devices available today, it's quite possible that a significant part of the market simply won't buy new PCs at all, preferring other types of device such as tablets for some applications.
The obvious answer for those who do want a more traditional PC set-up is Apple. You say they cost way too much, but plenty of businesses I work with routinely equip their staff with Apple laptops. The TCO isn't so very different, and with Windows 10 the TCO of Microsoft's platform doesn't look nearly as attractive as it used to.
Another possibility that is still niche today but could easily change by 2020 is using some variation of Linux. I don't buy the general "Linux on the desktop" hype any more than the next guy, but if you look at Android and even newer products like Valve's SteamOS you can see its strength as a foundation. With so much now running as web apps or on custom hardware anyway, it's not hard to imagine substantial parts of the market increasingly shifting to entirely non-Microsoft infrastructure.
Perhaps you're right about those cases, but the equivalent for computing would be something like if you're commissioning the devices and networking equipment for a medium-sized business, you might want to get expert help if you're not an expert yourself. What we're talking about here appears to be a small business in a non-IT field that bought a PC and wants to use what they bought for the purpose they bought it for in a way that had previously been working, which is hardly unreasonable.
Perhaps we would see those things, but what I described is much closer to possible than a lot of the big software companies would like their customers to believe, and even just in economic terms the amount of time and money lost to unnecessarily bad software is huge. Of course, you can't fix that as long as you primarily hire inexperienced (aka cheap) developers, put managers who think the word "Agile" is a silver bullet in charge of those developers, provide those developers with tools that are popular rather than good, hire consultants who tell you TDD is the pinnacle of software design and quality processes, and other such nonsense that plagues the industry today. But as long as they can get away with doing this stuff in the name of profit even if they're then supplying sub-standard products to their customers, what incentive do they have to explore better options?
I was just giving an example, and it could just as well apply to various nasty copy-protection schemes that games have shipped with over the years. As far as I can see, nothing the OP mentioned about their situation implied it was work-related, so I still think the reply by arth1 about not being able to revert was out of line.
Your point about drivers is fair for new equipment, but doesn't matter if someone already has a working system and they aren't changing their hardware. And of course, it does cut both ways, as there have been various hardware-related problems with Windows 10 that don't affect earlier versions (and in some cases, the combination of those with the automatic updates has rendered Windows 10 systems literally unusable).
I'm not disputing that 10 also has some useful advantages over earlier versions, though in my case it's not even a possibility because of the privacy and security implications, and I think the day-to-day UI is significantly worse than what I already have with 7. I'm still waiting to see anything I'd call a killer feature; certainly the high-profile additions like Cortana, Edge and DirectX 12 aren't it.
As for always being up-to-date, in practice there's no guarantee that any software you buy will have security issues fixed, so relying on a single line of defence is never a very good strategy if you can avoid it. As I was just commenting in another post, the industry is interesting in that because at least the major software developers do tend to issue updates to fix glaring problems in their products post-sale, they seem to get cut a lot of slack for supplying a poor quality product in the first place. I suspect that before too long, given the increasing customer-hostile trends in the industry in terms of built-in obsolescence and forced update cycles (literally or just practically), there may be actual laws or other government regulation mandating certain minimum standards for support in digital products unless the industry gets its act together.
As for 2020, I'm honestly not worried about that at all. Windows 7 still has about 50% of the entire global market share for desktop/laptop OSes. Windows 10 is barely above Windows XP, and by the numbers it looks like most of its take-up has been Windows 8/8.1 users, not 7. I don't expect the current senior management team at Microsoft to survive in their posts for very much longer since by business standards the launch of Windows 10 has been very poorly received, and I expect the new management team to go back to more familiar territory and try to repair the damage that has been done to Microsoft's reputation before literally half their customers run out of support on Windows 7. Otherwise, if significant numbers of customers really do start switching to Apple laptops, mobile devices, or whatever other options appear within the next four years or so, Microsoft probably is finished as a serious player in the industry.
And what else should everyone do? Pay a few hundred bucks to an accountant every few months in case they're breaking some new tax rule? Hire a lawyer to review every legal agreement they ever agree to?
The only reason there is any need to install updates on an otherwise working system is to mitigate defects in the original software. Software vendors have gotten off very lightly in recent years considering the poor quality of a lot of what they sell, and the only way that's even slightly justifiable under the usual laws about fitness for purpose and the like is because of the way updates are issued for things like security vulnerabilities.
I'll be happy to accept that it's the user's sole responsibility to maintain the system they paid for, just as soon as all the software developers involved accept the usual level of liability for defects and any consequential losses that vendors of almost any other commercial product would routinely face.
So now you think it's reasonable for a typical PC user to run not just normal data back-ups, but also a full system image, every couple of weeks? You were defending the indefensible before, but this is just silly.
Pushing out an unsolicited fundamental change to the system is 100% on Microsoft, as surely as a burglar stealing from a home the owner forgot to lock is on the burglar and raping a pretty girl who went out for the night in a short skirt is on the rapist. These things are totally unacceptable behaviour and are never the victim's fault, regardless of whether there was anything the victim could have changed that might have led to a different outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
They announced they'd made it a recommended update and it would auto push out to everyone with auto updates on.
I think the important question is whether they announced it to the people who actually needed to know, in a way those people would understand, so those people could choose to act on that information by declining the update it if they didn't want it.
If I tell you I'm going to punch you, remind you that I'm going to punch you, tell you exactly when I'm going to punch you, is it really my fault if you get punched?
Well... Yes. Yes, it is.
If you try to do that, you shouldn't be surprised if I defend myself and/or call the cops.
So do I. :-(
I'm sorry, but you are defending the indefensible. If Microsoft were being as reasonable and transparent as you suggest, it wouldn't be literally front page news that they've upset so many people who were surprised at what happened, didn't want it, and in particular explicitly thought they hadn't agreed to it.
The behaviour we're talking about, installing recommended updates automatically, is the default. It's what someone gets if they don't know to actively change it. If someone didn't install Windows 7 themselves but instead bought a PC with Windows pre-installed, it's unreasonable to assume that they would have any idea there was even anything to change. And for about a decade, the default policy was sensible, because it meant users who didn't know these things still received important security and stability fixes.
Suddenly making an entire new OS (let's not insult anyone's intelligence by pretending it's anything like a normal Windows 7 upgrade, please) recommended is a drastic change in the expected behaviour.
Turning back on various updates that users have explicitly and actively declined previously is a drastic change in behaviour.
Bundling nag messages about the update within otherwise unrelated security updates is a drastic change in behaviour.
You can dress it up however you want, but the end result is still the same: users are being tricked into upgrading, and many of them very clearly didn't want to be and didn't intend to make the choice you blame them for. Microsoft's reputation isn't going to do any better because of the dubious technicalities you're basing your argument on. If this winds up in a court, it's unlikely those types of argument will do them much good either.
That's cute, but for nearly 10 years the recommended default for non-technical users, both according to Microsoft themselves and according to most people who knew about IT, was to enable automatic installation of recommended Windows updates for security reasons. Microsoft don't get to dramatically alter what "recommended" means and how the system works after all this time, present the information in a way that anyone with five minutes of UI design experience could tell you would be confusing at best, betray the trust of all those users who followed their long-standing advice, and not get criticised for it. The fact that they've already back-peddled on this whole mess today, in the face of criticism that made the front page of not just the tech news sites but major general news outlets, suggests that even Microsoft are well aware that their position is untenable at this point.
It's like a notification that pops up that says "you have new email". You wouldn't expect the system to delete your email if you click on the 'x' to close the notification, would you? Of course not.
I also wouldn't expect the e-mail client I've been happily using for years to one day automatically schedule an update that reorganised its whole UI, started randomly cancelling e-mails I was in the middle of writing to reload itself every now and then, started quietly forwarding my mails to some unknown third party, and corrupted 25% of my saved mail if I tried to back the update out, and then just pop up a random notice not even asking for my active consent to go ahead but just telling me how I'm going to be screwed unless I click the tiny text hidden in the middle of the dialog instead of any of the controls I've been using for those past few years.
I agree that having a simple, robust and secure way to install, update and uninstall applications would be a huge win for any of the major desktop OSes. We should have had that decades ago, and I don't think we'd have seen the industry move in quite the same direction in recent years if Windows had provided better mechanisms to manage installed software back then.
It would be great if any moves Microsoft is making in that direction now would be for full applications and not just the kind of toy apps we see on mobile app stores, and if they would support third party installation and not require jumping through hoops with some sort of Microsoft-controlled store. I'm not sure whether those will be the case, though.
Ok, that sounds reasonable... but, doesn't MS already do this? What new action is expected?
Well, things like not pushing out updates that dramatically change other aspects of the system using the exact same mechanism as those that fix defects would be a good start. There was an IE security update recently that also included GWX crap, and IMHO that is unacceptable.
What is the "expected useful lifetime" of Windows? 5 years? 10 years? Frankly I think MS provides updates longer than most companies do and for more past versions than most companies do.
Microsoft publishes support lifetimes for most of its major products. It has made an awful lot of money from those products, in part because customers got that level of stability.
Even without that, for something like system software that is supplied with a laptop and essential to its use, clearly the expected useful lifetime must be at least as long as the laptop itself lasts. Who is legally responsible if the software gets broken is a different question, but for sure it isn't the end customer who bought a computer and just wants to get what they paid for.
IMHO the law in my country is outdated in this area, since it effectively dumps the main responsibility on the final vendor who took the customer's money. However, it's the after-sale actions of other parties such as the OS developer that are really deciding the outcome in these cases, and it's also the failures of the software developers that lead to the defects we're talking about in the first place. It's about time we had proper recognition of the actual commercial and practical relationships between the different parties in law and consumers had the right to claim against software developers who don't meet reasonable standards and cause harm as a result.
What if MS came out tomorrow and said, "Windows 10 is now free forever to Windows 7 owners, but support for Windows 7 is ending, Windows 10 is your patch for security"?
No. Windows 10 is significantly different to Windows 7 in all kinds of ways. As we've been discussing, some of them are rather important. I think Microsoft has an obligation to fix the defects in Windows 7 without imposing other changes, and if they don't want to do that because it's more expensive to maintain multiple products or whatever other excuse, I think the law should compel them to do so for a reasonable period in the interests of protecting consumers.
How far back does Apple provide support for OS X? Does MS do more?
I don't know the details for Apple, but I do know that I take exactly the same position about their equipment and the software it's supplied with. In particular, I have on several occasions chosen not to buy Apple equipment because of the lack of acceptable long-term software support compared to Windows systems, and I have seen people return iPads that were screwed up after an iOS update and claim substantial refunds from the stores that sold them (and be given those refunds). Presumably if that started to happen more often or if larger-scale action by consumer protection organisations became a factor, those final vendors who are on the hook for the repair/replacement/refund under the law would start taking up the issue more strongly with their own suppliers and ultimately with Apple.
There are millions of small family businesses, independent professionals, or even somewhat larger businesses that aren't IT-centric, that won't meet that threshold and/or won't have the time or IT staff to jump through all Microsoft's hoops, yet which still have similar requirements for security, data protection and stability. It's basically the entire (business) market for what used to be Pro.
I don't think there is any doubt there is room for them to grow, the question is... "is there room to grow and maintain their profit margins?"
It would be a different commercial strategy, for sure. That's why I think a secondary brand would be more likely than trying to push their premium Macbook products at a lower price point.
I think one very clear example is that software that communicates with the outside world but has a security vulnerability is defective. If that vulnerability isn't found before it ships, it's fair to expect the software developer to make commercially reasonable efforts to provide a fix within a reasonable timeframe for as long as the software is within a reasonably expected useful lifetime.
That's a lot of reasonables, and we have courts to figure out the details based on the specifics of a particular case. I'd expect more from a $100 mass market operating system than from a $2 mobile app with 100 total sales. I'd expect more still from a $X,000-per-seat professional software product that requires extensive contact just to buy it and then locks the customer's data into a proprietary format so the consequences of any bugs may be much worse.
Ultimately, if you're selling software that is running hundreds of millions of computers, making billions of dollars in revenues, but with the result that a security vulnerability in your product a few months after launch can cause huge amounts of damage as well, I think it's fair to expect you to provide an update that closes the hole, and to do so without imposing other unwanted changes on your customers at the same time. IMHO, with that level of profit and that level of influence comes a commensurate level of responsibility to put right your mistakes, and to do so without taking advantage of your customers in other ways.
Well, when we're talking about "getting the government involved" here, I don't think we're talking about heavy regulation or things like mandatory registration for practitioners as we often see in disciplines like medicine, engineering or law.
All I'm suggesting is that the software industry should not be magically exempt from the same general legal standards as everyone else. If you sell something and it doesn't work properly, you should be required to do something reasonable about that, and you should be required to do it without attaching strings that the customer didn't originally sign up for.
Enterprise is only available to larger businesses. Smaller businesses or independent professionals, the kind of people who would have used Pro in Windows 7 or 8.x, have nowhere to go with 10.
All of that is true today, but remember this is Apple we're talking about. If they saw an opportunity to grow dramatically in the general desktop/laptop market, perhaps with a secondary "budget" brand, they have more than enough resources to make a play for it and 2020 is a long way away in computer years.
FYI, the secondary source you cited is actually based on the primary source I cited.
The 20% figure is a share of Windows PCs. It excludes Apple laptops, Linux workstations, mobile devices, etc.
I'm afraid you're also misreading the Apple figures somewhere. Mac sales are much lower than Windows PC sales, of course, but perhaps you confused quarterly figures with annual ones somewhere along the line?
As for overall share of the current installed base, the same primary source currently puts Mac at 8.9% of visits, against 11.6% for Windows 10. That doesn't seem implausible, given that many of the new Windows PCs sold in 2015 won't be running Windows 10. In short, Macs still only represent a modest proportion of total desktop/laptop sales compared to all versions of Windows, but certainly not an insignificant one.
While that sounds reasonable, those businesses are going to use it anyway, they have no other choice. My wife is a doctor, HIPPA laws apply to her. I've seen people make the case that Windows 10 doesn't comply with those privacy laws, but frankly lots of doctors use it so either they are all breaking the rules, or no one cares, or it isn't really out of compliance. Take your pick. :)
I find that argument disturbing. I also work with sensitive data at times, though not in the US so the regulatory environment isn't exactly the same as HIPAA.
For us, it seems absolutely clear that a system that is known to phone home under a wide range of circumstances and which is known to be able to introduce arbitrary changes via automatic updates cannot possibly be in compliance with our regulatory and contractual data protection obligations and be guaranteed to remain so. Even if it were somehow in compliance today, the forced updates mean we can't possibly know whether it would remain so tomorrow.
There are plenty of alternatives, and plenty of us are using them. Any doctors who aren't should be educated and, if necessary, subject to regulatory action for non-compliance. The same goes for anyone who knowingly supplies such a system for use in an unsuitable environment, such as one handling confidential medical records. There's not even any room for ambiguity here. This one is about as clear-cut as any issue you'll ever see in IT.
Is it possible to write software of that scale 100% bug free? I doubt it. Even if we could get the implementation close to perfect, I doubt we know how to produce an equally perfect spec for what the required behaviour is under such a wide range of conditions yet.
However, is it possible to write software of that scale with significantly better reliability than much of what ships today? Of course. Just writing most software in more robust languages than C or C++ and reserving those low-level tools for the systems programming tasks where their strengths are actually needed would be a good start.
The problem is that the industry continues to use substandard tools and processes, despite ample evidence of their weaknesses and better alternatives, in large part because of non-technical issues. There is insufficient commercial incentive to research and train developers in better ways of building software when there are already millions of developers you can hire to write code in existing languages and with existing processes, so as long as customers are willing to accept the unnecessarily poor quality that results, why would you change (from a business perspective)?
Not necessarily. Microsoft's business is now focusing largely on cloud computing.
How's that working out for them?
(In case it's not clear, that was a rhetorical question.)
Except that in the real world, there's things like HIPAA and PCIDSS that consider not installing updates unacceptable.
Cite, please? I sometimes work in security sensitive environments, and I have never heard of such a black-and-white rule. In fact, mandating that updates be automatically installed seems like an incredibly bad idea, and I'm fairly sure no sysadmin I know would consider it good practice.
In other words, avoiding Windows 10 doesn't actually solve the problem unless you take extreme measures in all of your digital life, and doing so will get harder, not easier, going forward. You can probably do it if you care enough, but don't confuse the edge of the market with the mainstream.
I don't think wanting privacy and security is nearly as rare as you're making out. Leaving aside personal preferences, numerous small businesses will be bound by contractual and/or regulatory rules that mean they have to handle various kinds of data securely. That may mean Windows 10 in its current form simply isn't an option for those businesses, as it's impossible to control or audit sensibly.
The fear over people leaving Windows when XP finally ended was there too, and it didn't happen. Instead once support finally ended, people did upgrade.
Except for all the people still running XP, you mean? Including numerous security-sensitive environments like banks and government departments?
I expect if we looked back at the stats, we'd find the majority moved on from Windows XP when Windows 7 arrived and didn't suck as hard as Vista did.
In fact, I completely disagree over your viewpoint on Windows 10 being a poor launch, I don't think MS sees it that way at all. It was far superior to Windows 8 and Vista.
I'm sure MS would like to portray Windows 10 as not being a poor launch, but it seems they've only recently achieved double-digit market share after nearly a year of literally giving it away, and to achieve even that result they've already actively alienated a significant part of their customer base in a variety of ways.
I'm not sure the Windows 10 launch being more successful than two of the biggest flops in recent IT history is a very convincing argument, BTW.
Windows 10 isn't "barely" above Windows XP in marketshare today, it is not even close. XP has finally dropped to the small single digits and it continues to lose support.
That depends on whose numbers you read, of course. Netmarketshare still has XP at over 10%, with 10 now up to around 15%. Even if you question the Netmarketshare stats (and I would agree there are reasons you might), another source I've seen cited a few times that puts XP much lower still agrees that 10 has only around one third of the market share of 7 and that 7 retains around half of the desktop/laptop market.
What would replace MS on the desktop?
Well, firstly, you're assuming that everyone needs to replace MS on the desktop. With the variety of devices available today, it's quite possible that a significant part of the market simply won't buy new PCs at all, preferring other types of device such as tablets for some applications.
The obvious answer for those who do want a more traditional PC set-up is Apple. You say they cost way too much, but plenty of businesses I work with routinely equip their staff with Apple laptops. The TCO isn't so very different, and with Windows 10 the TCO of Microsoft's platform doesn't look nearly as attractive as it used to.
Another possibility that is still niche today but could easily change by 2020 is using some variation of Linux. I don't buy the general "Linux on the desktop" hype any more than the next guy, but if you look at Android and even newer products like Valve's SteamOS you can see its strength as a foundation. With so much now running as web apps or on custom hardware anyway, it's not hard to imagine substantial parts of the market increasingly shifting to entirely non-Microsoft infrastructure.
Perhaps you're right about those cases, but the equivalent for computing would be something like if you're commissioning the devices and networking equipment for a medium-sized business, you might want to get expert help if you're not an expert yourself. What we're talking about here appears to be a small business in a non-IT field that bought a PC and wants to use what they bought for the purpose they bought it for in a way that had previously been working, which is hardly unreasonable.
Perhaps we would see those things, but what I described is much closer to possible than a lot of the big software companies would like their customers to believe, and even just in economic terms the amount of time and money lost to unnecessarily bad software is huge. Of course, you can't fix that as long as you primarily hire inexperienced (aka cheap) developers, put managers who think the word "Agile" is a silver bullet in charge of those developers, provide those developers with tools that are popular rather than good, hire consultants who tell you TDD is the pinnacle of software design and quality processes, and other such nonsense that plagues the industry today. But as long as they can get away with doing this stuff in the name of profit even if they're then supplying sub-standard products to their customers, what incentive do they have to explore better options?
I was just giving an example, and it could just as well apply to various nasty copy-protection schemes that games have shipped with over the years. As far as I can see, nothing the OP mentioned about their situation implied it was work-related, so I still think the reply by arth1 about not being able to revert was out of line.
Your point about drivers is fair for new equipment, but doesn't matter if someone already has a working system and they aren't changing their hardware. And of course, it does cut both ways, as there have been various hardware-related problems with Windows 10 that don't affect earlier versions (and in some cases, the combination of those with the automatic updates has rendered Windows 10 systems literally unusable).
I'm not disputing that 10 also has some useful advantages over earlier versions, though in my case it's not even a possibility because of the privacy and security implications, and I think the day-to-day UI is significantly worse than what I already have with 7. I'm still waiting to see anything I'd call a killer feature; certainly the high-profile additions like Cortana, Edge and DirectX 12 aren't it.
As for always being up-to-date, in practice there's no guarantee that any software you buy will have security issues fixed, so relying on a single line of defence is never a very good strategy if you can avoid it. As I was just commenting in another post, the industry is interesting in that because at least the major software developers do tend to issue updates to fix glaring problems in their products post-sale, they seem to get cut a lot of slack for supplying a poor quality product in the first place. I suspect that before too long, given the increasing customer-hostile trends in the industry in terms of built-in obsolescence and forced update cycles (literally or just practically), there may be actual laws or other government regulation mandating certain minimum standards for support in digital products unless the industry gets its act together.
As for 2020, I'm honestly not worried about that at all. Windows 7 still has about 50% of the entire global market share for desktop/laptop OSes. Windows 10 is barely above Windows XP, and by the numbers it looks like most of its take-up has been Windows 8/8.1 users, not 7. I don't expect the current senior management team at Microsoft to survive in their posts for very much longer since by business standards the launch of Windows 10 has been very poorly received, and I expect the new management team to go back to more familiar territory and try to repair the damage that has been done to Microsoft's reputation before literally half their customers run out of support on Windows 7. Otherwise, if significant numbers of customers really do start switching to Apple laptops, mobile devices, or whatever other options appear within the next four years or so, Microsoft probably is finished as a serious player in the industry.
And what else should everyone do? Pay a few hundred bucks to an accountant every few months in case they're breaking some new tax rule? Hire a lawyer to review every legal agreement they ever agree to?
The only reason there is any need to install updates on an otherwise working system is to mitigate defects in the original software. Software vendors have gotten off very lightly in recent years considering the poor quality of a lot of what they sell, and the only way that's even slightly justifiable under the usual laws about fitness for purpose and the like is because of the way updates are issued for things like security vulnerabilities.
I'll be happy to accept that it's the user's sole responsibility to maintain the system they paid for, just as soon as all the software developers involved accept the usual level of liability for defects and any consequential losses that vendors of almost any other commercial product would routinely face.
So now you think it's reasonable for a typical PC user to run not just normal data back-ups, but also a full system image, every couple of weeks? You were defending the indefensible before, but this is just silly.
Pushing out an unsolicited fundamental change to the system is 100% on Microsoft, as surely as a burglar stealing from a home the owner forgot to lock is on the burglar and raping a pretty girl who went out for the night in a short skirt is on the rapist. These things are totally unacceptable behaviour and are never the victim's fault, regardless of whether there was anything the victim could have changed that might have led to a different outcome.