Maintain your equipment, install updates on your schedule, and know what you're doing, or don't bitch about it doing it some other way.
Why should anyone have to do that? I guarantee there are aspects of your own life where you're not an expert and someone hostile who knows the system better than you could take advantage of that, because no-one is an expert at everything. That's part of the reason we have laws prohibiting things like unauthorised access to computers. It's also why we have laws that say if you hide some generic consent deep within your terms, you might find it's considered unfair and therefore unenforceable.
No, I work in an environment where security actually matters. The grown-ups do their homework and take measures that actually work, instead of trusting a third party that has been shown not to be reliable.
You would think everyone would already be upgraded with all the forcing that has been going on.
Indeed. To me, one of the most interesting things about Windows 10 is how unsuccessful Microsoft appears to have been at getting people to migrate, despite literally giving it away and actively trying to get users to switch. I've been told so often lately about how normal people don't mind the changes in UI or don't care about their privacy or should be installing all the forced updates anyway or whatever it is this week that only concerns geeks. If that's really the case, an awful lot of people seem to be actively avoiding the proposed update for no obvious reason.
Disk image back-ups still won't help if you actually have to replace the machine, which was the situation we were in. They're also totally impractical for frequently updated off-site storage in most cases, so file-based and database snapshot back-ups are still better for some things.
In some cases, I would agree that disk image back-ups are useful, but I'm betting that approximately 100% of people being caught out by a non-compulsory but heavily suggested Windows update wouldn't even know what one was or where to find software to perform one. I therefore think having a dig at someone who doesn't know those things and then finds their Windows 7 laptop suddenly changed to Windows 10 against their wishes, as some of your are doing, is unjustified.
We don't install any updates on older Windows versions by default any more. The risk of business being disrupted or security/stability being compromised because of Microsoft now appears to outweigh the risk of those things happening because someone got through all our other precautions and successfully attacked the system.
Obviously we do still install some security updates, but only selectively once we've identified what they are really for, we've read up on them to make sure there's nothing sneaky being included as well, and we've confirmed that we would actually benefit from each specific update.
I have several pieces of expensive professional software that required activation installed on my work Windows 7 box. As we discovered after a sudden drive failure on the previous machine, all the back-ups in the world won't help you in that situation, and presumably it would be the same if you suddenly lost access due to the unexpected Windows 10 update and imaginary password issue described here.
This is, of course, a very good argument against accepting that sort of software activation in the first place. Sadly, in some professional markets, you literally won't have a choice if you want/need to use any of the top level software products.
I believe they just want all previous versions of Windows to disappear as quickly as possible and erase the past.
Well, they can hope, but given that the big announcements recently have been things like Windows 10 passing Windows XP in market share or Windows 7 dropping just below 50%, I don't think those previous versions are going anywhere any time soon.
Also, it's worth pointing out, since the summary failed to do so, that all they've really done here appears to be classifying Windows 10 as a recommended update. That will mean anyone whose system is set to auto-install recommended updates will indeed get it. However, you can still cancel (or reschedule, if you prefer) when you get the prompt, and in any case if you don't have Windows Update set to auto-install things then this doesn't seem to make any difference to you.
In other words, the people who are going to get stung by this are the ones who have auto-updates on anyway. Since that's one of the major reasons not to move to Windows 10 if you're not happy to accept whatever Microsoft decides you should have, the people who feel that way probably won't have auto-install turned on for earlier Windows versions anyway and should be OK here.
Not only do I care about privacy and security personally, but from a business point of view, some of us literally can't install Windows 10 at work. Since we're dealing with other people's sensitive information, having a system that phones home in unknown ways and can update itself however it wants without knowledge or consent is just a complete deal-breaker.
We looked at that option, but concluded that we didn't have enough confidence in hardware compatibility or being able to get a completely clean 7 install to trust it. You mentioned Secure Boot, which was one of the issues we had reservations about.
No doubt we could figure it out with enough homework, but this is a small business with no dedicated IT staff, so every hour spent on this is an hour spent not doing chargeable work, and it was already taking a lot of hours just to identify potential problem areas we'd need to investigate.
The other problem is that we don't really want Windows 7 at this point, because Windows 7 lacks support for various modern hardware. What we'd like in an ideal world is Windows 7 plus the improved security features and hardware support from later versions and no other changes. If Microsoft released that today, we'd be buying a small business full of new PCs tomorrow. Unfortunately, as long as the current executive team are still there, I can't see their vision being compatible with that.
It's a pain if you want to install 7 on a modern machine with only USB3 ports and no optical drive, though, which isn't completely out of this world for a new high-end PC today. Since 7 won't recognise the USB3 ports out of the box, how do you get the drivers onto such a system? There are tricks you can do, like booting Linux from USB and then using that to copy the necessary driver files to local storage on the machine, but it's a hassle one way or another. And while that works for USB3, you can't work around some of the other hardware support issues (scaling for high-res monitors comes to mind) as easily.
For the consumer market, it's true that some people don't know, some people don't care, and some people don't think they have any choice, all of which may lead to accepting telemetry.
For business customers, where the real money is, it's an entirely different situation.
[3] Vendors seem to think tablets are like phones and customers are going to upgrade them every couple of years. They aren't.
The vendors somehow haven't noticed that tablets don't benefit from the concealed pricing and natural update timetable that almost all mobile phone plans conveniently create for phones. Support for tablets more than a couple of years old is often abandoned, sometimes to the point that modern OS updates or new/updated apps won't run properly on even quite recent hardware. A lot of users have now been stung by that at least once and are shy of buying another short-lived device as a result.
You can't chalk all of it up to Microsoft fear/hate, certainly, but that might be one factor.
One of my own small businesses is a clear example. We would have bought a handful of new laptops and desktop workstations for various people at least 2-3 years ago, but the usual complaints about Windows 8 put us off and we were waiting for 10 to fix the problems. Since 10 is a complete non-starter for that business because of the privacy and robustness concerns (dealing with potentially sensitive information = instant compliance violations if we can't fully control our equipment) we're still making do with 5+ year old machines.
That's increasingly painful, because we're talking about laptops that now have sub-2 hour battery life if they're not plugged in, several machines that have small, spinning disk storage, and so on. We would drop thousands on new PC hardware in a heartbeat, if someone would just give us anything close to what we actually need, which is basically modern hardware + Windows 7 + a couple of the updates that newer Windows versions do offer to support that modern hardware (USB3, hi-res screens, etc.).
Now we're all wondering whether you forgot that Microsoft was the final company on the list or their omission was an oblique reference to their relevance in the mobile market and/or how they handle demands from authorities.
Insulting me won't make your argument any more convincing.
Microsoft have had the dominant desktop OS for decades. They also have a significant presence in the server and back office space. With their long term support and ubiquitous presence, they were the adult player in an industry full of impetuous children, the business that business could count on.
And now they've thrown away that reputation in barely more than months, because cloud and subscriptions and devices and stuff.
Perhaps, but there are about a million options on the scale between "depending on proprietary protocols and software that Microsoft can discontinue supporting at any time" and "setting up your own mail server". For example, there are numerous services that will host mail for you on their established mail systems, accessible with whatever client software you want over standard protocols like POP3 and IMAP and/or via webmail, and allowing you to use your own domain so you have complete portability and no lock-in. The price for a year of this sort of service is probably less than many people spend on their phones in a month.
They used to, at least much better than this. That's the saddest thing about the Microsoft strategy in recent years: not only are they not delivering the kinds of benefits they should be to justify the lock-in they're asking their customers to accept, they're actually going backwards in several important ways that those customers will notice. They're so busy trying to beat Google and Apple at their own game (and failing) that they've forgotten how to be Microsoft.
Or just just use services and mail clients based on established, independent standards, and spend your time on more important things than Microsoft's upgrade treadmill.
Register yourself a domain name of your own so you can control which service(s) will receive your mail in the future while you're at it.
I think quite a few of us now solve this problem by not installing any Windows 7 updates by default, and then selectively applying security updates if there's an identified need for them.
Microsoft's reputation and credibility has been all but permanently damaged, imo.
I agree, except for the "all but".
We've been actively reducing our dependence on anything from Microsoft ever since Nadella took over, and I doubt our policy will change until the senior management team has changed again and the corporate strategy has changed with it.
Personally, I expect that to happen before Windows 7 support runs out. I don't think they can afford not to have a credible successor available by then, and clearly for many people and businesses that successor is not Windows 10.
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Maintain your equipment, install updates on your schedule, and know what you're doing, or don't bitch about it doing it some other way.
Why should anyone have to do that? I guarantee there are aspects of your own life where you're not an expert and someone hostile who knows the system better than you could take advantage of that, because no-one is an expert at everything. That's part of the reason we have laws prohibiting things like unauthorised access to computers. It's also why we have laws that say if you hide some generic consent deep within your terms, you might find it's considered unfair and therefore unenforceable.
No, I work in an environment where security actually matters. The grown-ups do their homework and take measures that actually work, instead of trusting a third party that has been shown not to be reliable.
You would think everyone would already be upgraded with all the forcing that has been going on.
Indeed. To me, one of the most interesting things about Windows 10 is how unsuccessful Microsoft appears to have been at getting people to migrate, despite literally giving it away and actively trying to get users to switch. I've been told so often lately about how normal people don't mind the changes in UI or don't care about their privacy or should be installing all the forced updates anyway or whatever it is this week that only concerns geeks. If that's really the case, an awful lot of people seem to be actively avoiding the proposed update for no obvious reason.
Disk image back-ups still won't help if you actually have to replace the machine, which was the situation we were in. They're also totally impractical for frequently updated off-site storage in most cases, so file-based and database snapshot back-ups are still better for some things.
In some cases, I would agree that disk image back-ups are useful, but I'm betting that approximately 100% of people being caught out by a non-compulsory but heavily suggested Windows update wouldn't even know what one was or where to find software to perform one. I therefore think having a dig at someone who doesn't know those things and then finds their Windows 7 laptop suddenly changed to Windows 10 against their wishes, as some of your are doing, is unjustified.
We don't install any updates on older Windows versions by default any more. The risk of business being disrupted or security/stability being compromised because of Microsoft now appears to outweigh the risk of those things happening because someone got through all our other precautions and successfully attacked the system.
Obviously we do still install some security updates, but only selectively once we've identified what they are really for, we've read up on them to make sure there's nothing sneaky being included as well, and we've confirmed that we would actually benefit from each specific update.
I have several pieces of expensive professional software that required activation installed on my work Windows 7 box. As we discovered after a sudden drive failure on the previous machine, all the back-ups in the world won't help you in that situation, and presumably it would be the same if you suddenly lost access due to the unexpected Windows 10 update and imaginary password issue described here.
This is, of course, a very good argument against accepting that sort of software activation in the first place. Sadly, in some professional markets, you literally won't have a choice if you want/need to use any of the top level software products.
I believe they just want all previous versions of Windows to disappear as quickly as possible and erase the past.
Well, they can hope, but given that the big announcements recently have been things like Windows 10 passing Windows XP in market share or Windows 7 dropping just below 50%, I don't think those previous versions are going anywhere any time soon.
Also, it's worth pointing out, since the summary failed to do so, that all they've really done here appears to be classifying Windows 10 as a recommended update. That will mean anyone whose system is set to auto-install recommended updates will indeed get it. However, you can still cancel (or reschedule, if you prefer) when you get the prompt, and in any case if you don't have Windows Update set to auto-install things then this doesn't seem to make any difference to you.
In other words, the people who are going to get stung by this are the ones who have auto-updates on anyway. Since that's one of the major reasons not to move to Windows 10 if you're not happy to accept whatever Microsoft decides you should have, the people who feel that way probably won't have auto-install turned on for earlier Windows versions anyway and should be OK here.
That windows 10 home was replacing 7 pro...
It might as well be, in some respects. Windows 10 Pro is not like Windows 7 Pro.
Not only do I care about privacy and security personally, but from a business point of view, some of us literally can't install Windows 10 at work. Since we're dealing with other people's sensitive information, having a system that phones home in unknown ways and can update itself however it wants without knowledge or consent is just a complete deal-breaker.
We looked at that option, but concluded that we didn't have enough confidence in hardware compatibility or being able to get a completely clean 7 install to trust it. You mentioned Secure Boot, which was one of the issues we had reservations about.
No doubt we could figure it out with enough homework, but this is a small business with no dedicated IT staff, so every hour spent on this is an hour spent not doing chargeable work, and it was already taking a lot of hours just to identify potential problem areas we'd need to investigate.
The other problem is that we don't really want Windows 7 at this point, because Windows 7 lacks support for various modern hardware. What we'd like in an ideal world is Windows 7 plus the improved security features and hardware support from later versions and no other changes. If Microsoft released that today, we'd be buying a small business full of new PCs tomorrow. Unfortunately, as long as the current executive team are still there, I can't see their vision being compatible with that.
At this rate, that is the sort of thing we're going to wind up doing.
It would be a huge waste of our time, though, and we'd much rather just buy a modern PC with a sensible OS... if anyone made one.
It's a pain if you want to install 7 on a modern machine with only USB3 ports and no optical drive, though, which isn't completely out of this world for a new high-end PC today. Since 7 won't recognise the USB3 ports out of the box, how do you get the drivers onto such a system? There are tricks you can do, like booting Linux from USB and then using that to copy the necessary driver files to local storage on the machine, but it's a hassle one way or another. And while that works for USB3, you can't work around some of the other hardware support issues (scaling for high-res monitors comes to mind) as easily.
For the consumer market, it's true that some people don't know, some people don't care, and some people don't think they have any choice, all of which may lead to accepting telemetry.
For business customers, where the real money is, it's an entirely different situation.
[3] Vendors seem to think tablets are like phones and customers are going to upgrade them every couple of years. They aren't.
The vendors somehow haven't noticed that tablets don't benefit from the concealed pricing and natural update timetable that almost all mobile phone plans conveniently create for phones. Support for tablets more than a couple of years old is often abandoned, sometimes to the point that modern OS updates or new/updated apps won't run properly on even quite recent hardware. A lot of users have now been stung by that at least once and are shy of buying another short-lived device as a result.
You can't chalk all of it up to Microsoft fear/hate, certainly, but that might be one factor.
One of my own small businesses is a clear example. We would have bought a handful of new laptops and desktop workstations for various people at least 2-3 years ago, but the usual complaints about Windows 8 put us off and we were waiting for 10 to fix the problems. Since 10 is a complete non-starter for that business because of the privacy and robustness concerns (dealing with potentially sensitive information = instant compliance violations if we can't fully control our equipment) we're still making do with 5+ year old machines.
That's increasingly painful, because we're talking about laptops that now have sub-2 hour battery life if they're not plugged in, several machines that have small, spinning disk storage, and so on. We would drop thousands on new PC hardware in a heartbeat, if someone would just give us anything close to what we actually need, which is basically modern hardware + Windows 7 + a couple of the updates that newer Windows versions do offer to support that modern hardware (USB3, hi-res screens, etc.).
I'm certainly not assuming that, though it doesn't seem the most likely explanation to me.
You're assuming this isn't an evidence-gathering exercise prior to going after the carriers for exactly that reason?
Now we're all wondering whether you forgot that Microsoft was the final company on the list or their omission was an oblique reference to their relevance in the mobile market and/or how they handle demands from authorities.
Insulting me won't make your argument any more convincing.
Microsoft have had the dominant desktop OS for decades. They also have a significant presence in the server and back office space. With their long term support and ubiquitous presence, they were the adult player in an industry full of impetuous children, the business that business could count on.
And now they've thrown away that reputation in barely more than months, because cloud and subscriptions and devices and stuff.
Perhaps, but there are about a million options on the scale between "depending on proprietary protocols and software that Microsoft can discontinue supporting at any time" and "setting up your own mail server". For example, there are numerous services that will host mail for you on their established mail systems, accessible with whatever client software you want over standard protocols like POP3 and IMAP and/or via webmail, and allowing you to use your own domain so you have complete portability and no lock-in. The price for a year of this sort of service is probably less than many people spend on their phones in a month.
They used to, at least much better than this. That's the saddest thing about the Microsoft strategy in recent years: not only are they not delivering the kinds of benefits they should be to justify the lock-in they're asking their customers to accept, they're actually going backwards in several important ways that those customers will notice. They're so busy trying to beat Google and Apple at their own game (and failing) that they've forgotten how to be Microsoft.
Evolve or die!
Or just just use services and mail clients based on established, independent standards, and spend your time on more important things than Microsoft's upgrade treadmill.
Register yourself a domain name of your own so you can control which service(s) will receive your mail in the future while you're at it.
I think quite a few of us now solve this problem by not installing any Windows 7 updates by default, and then selectively applying security updates if there's an identified need for them.
Microsoft's reputation and credibility has been all but permanently damaged, imo.
I agree, except for the "all but".
We've been actively reducing our dependence on anything from Microsoft ever since Nadella took over, and I doubt our policy will change until the senior management team has changed again and the corporate strategy has changed with it.
Personally, I expect that to happen before Windows 7 support runs out. I don't think they can afford not to have a credible successor available by then, and clearly for many people and businesses that successor is not Windows 10.