As a Microsoft employee, this W10 force upgrade things is the single thing that pisses me off the most by far...
It goes against everything that we are trying to promote/change.
Sometimes I'm really wondering if we work for the same company (I'm not in the Windows division).
I feel like all the effort we put in investing in open source, being more open, and just generally a more empathic company is totally destroyed by this w10 fiasco.
I feel like all the effort we put in investing in open source, being more open, and just generally a more empathic company is totally destroyed by this w10 fiasco.
I'd like to sympathise, but I'm afraid this is looking like a general trend for modern Microsoft, and if your group isn't doing similar shady things then it's the exception.
Some other examples:
I was going to try a bit of C++ programming on Windows for the first time on a new PC a little while back, so I looked into what is now called Visual Studio Community. Whereas Microsoft used to make the basic Express tools to develop on its platform free and readily available, I now have to sign in with a Microsoft account to use Community. I don't know exactly what that does, but after probably half an hour of reading on Microsoft's site, I do know that it seems to involve uploading data to Microsoft, multiple very long privacy policies, and no guarantee that I could find that potentially sensitive things like the actual code I'm working on wouldn't be included.
We were looking at getting some office software for that PC as well. I thought MS Office still came as a standalone desktop application as well as the online service-y thing, but I couldn't find anything in more than 20 minutes of looking around Microsoft's site that even mentioned the former any more. Again, it's all online-this and subscription-service-that now, and I have no interest in renting important software or sharing whatever I do with it with Microsoft.
Obviously the new PC itself, which we specifically ordered with Windows 7 because we didn't want any of the more recent versions, also needed lots of updates immediately uninstalling just to clean out all the spyware, adware, and so on.
There have been related concerns with other MS products, such as the gaming and console line, in the more recent generations as well.
For many years, I have generally been positive about Microsoft, and considered Windows, Office and Visual Studio the gold standards for useful software. I'm sorry to say that none of that is true any more, and I'm now actively hostile toward and distrustful of anything associated with Microsoft. It's a great pity.
I've been in this business a long time, and sadly the whole episode is entirely in line with the general level of competence and empathy that I've come to expect from the Windows division. SQL Server is really good, hugely impressed by .NET Core, but I can say nothing good about Windows today, and haven't been able to for an age.
Disclosure: I was one of the people that signed the petition to ask the EFF to get involved. The stories from people whose computers were taken out by upgrades that they were tricked into just got too much. If you think that this kind of thing is totally surprising, though, I'll refer you to the disaster that was the Windows 8 UI changes, and the swamp that has been the Windows Update experience lo these many years.
Windows updates have been so bad about bricking randomly your machines that I've been using slipstreamed installs and completely disabling updates at all.
That'd be in line with Conway's law ("organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations").
As an anecdotal reply from a totally random person on the internet: Your feelings are spot on. I was really impressed with the clear shift in Microsoft. They were on their way to becoming the cool tech company I could kind of get behind (as much as one can have loyalty to any corporation), but then....Windows 10. The worst part of it, to me, is that MS seems to understand why it wants a new version of Windows, but hasn't done anything to convince me why I would want it. And sadly, Windows is the most visible part of the company for many, many people.
