6 ms·

> Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control? While I appreciate the rest of your comment, I personally find comment like these are obnoxious. I sincer

> Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control? While I appreciate the rest of your comment, I personally find comment like these are obnoxious. I sincerely doubt that vote and comment brigading are anywhere near as prevalent as reddit and this community seem to so routinely imply. Perhaps I'm the naive one, but it is tiresome to so regularly see comments (especially those close to one's own personal beliefs) consistently labeled indicators of a social media PR campaign because someone just can't believe they might be genuine. Or maybe I should get my head out of the sand, I do not know.

mung 11y ago
Anyone who believes that it's okay to force unwanted updates onto someone's computer without unexpectedly and without their consent is a bit obnoxious.
- HelloMcFly 11y ago
  I don't think it's OK. Is that what you wanted?
mrmondo 11y ago
I'm not going to go into detail right now, but believe me it happens from Microsoft more than any other company I've seen.
- cududa 11y ago
  That's just it though - I don't believe you.
carapace 11y ago
For what it's worth I believe you are being wildly naive. Have a nice day.
- HelloMcFly 11y ago
  It isn't worth much, but - believe it or not - it's not totally worthless either. Note my wording though: I believe it does happen at times, I doubt it happens with the frequency claimed on HN and reddit. Hearing more first-hand accounts of it occurring is required for me to move substantially on my opinion. As is, it's primarily speculation and people asking others to "trust them, it happens." That said, I could do without the insincere well wishes.
  - marvy 11y ago
    First hand accounts? As in someone saying "yes, I do this"?
    - HelloMcFly 11y ago
      Well I was more thinking along the lines of "yeah, I personally saw this done for my product/company." So, second-hand I guess. But first-hand experience of the second-hand account, if that makes sense. At any rate, the point is this: I'm not going to take it on faith, and I won't naturally assume the most sinister thing is occurring.
    - carapace 11y ago
      Does this count? http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-internet-trolls-are-trained-to-spread-propaganda-in-three-person-teams-2015-3?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-internet-trolls-are-t...
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    >I believe it does happen at times Rather like a forced OS upgrade - how many times is too often?
  - carapace 11y ago
    I apologize for the "Have a nice day." I meant it ironically rather than insincerely, it can be difficult to convey tone on the Internet. To provide context: I was telling people for years before Snowden that "they" were recording everything. Of course, I was dismissed as a wearer of the tin-foil hat, yes? I'm afraid I find naivete a bit frustrating. No excuse for rudeness though! Sorry about that! :-) Warm regards, and sincere wishes of kindness to you and yours.
existencebox 11y ago
I'm going to make a few statements here to address the parent and children; but let me put the normal disclaimers here: I ONLY can speak for myself, I do not speak for MS or any of my coworkers. Simply put, the sort of behavior implied (vote brigading) doesn't mesh with my understanding of how I or any of my coworker/HN reader peers tend to behave. I could be totally off the mark with this but it just doesn't mesh with the culture I've been exposed to. More relevantly however, and more in line with how I typically approach HN threads regardless of topic, let me try and pose a more "occams razor" explanation: MS has been gaining a lot of positive press lately. The tech community WANTS to see our biggest entities succeed and "do good". We hate seeing suggestions that a "new convert" to the good side might have changed face again. Realizing that a company can do both good and "evil" simultaneously is a degree of mental dissonance I don't often see handled "cleanly" so to say. Long and the short; I am not happy with the forced upgrades. I am still using 7, and would be rather irked if they broke everything for the sake of forcing through content I do not want. However, I do tend to attribute much more naïve explanations for the patterns we're seeing, over some sort of PR conspiracy. There was a wonderful quote a while back, "we're not organized enough to be that evil" :) I don't mean to be any sort of MS apologist in this, my comment is entirely directed at the discussion regarding some degree of astroturfing, if I got asked about my opinions on the updates, well, that's a whole can of worms on its own and the remaining comments in the thread seem to speak to the resounding sentiment in that respect.
- shostack 11y ago
  Out of curiosity, are you an engineer there? If so I'm wondering how close you are and how much visibility you have into the marketing and PR side of things over there. This strikes me as the kind of thing that engineers might be kept in the dark about, but some PR agency somewhere may have outsourced something like this and done so in a way as to provide plausible deniability. A quick googling shows this wouldn't be the first time MS has resorted to astroturfing [1]. So while I don't doubt the sincerity of how you or any of your immediate coworkers/HN reader peers tend to behave, I think the facts speak a bit more clearly to the possibility of other parts of the MS organism being willing to do this sort of thing. [1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=microsoft%20astroturfing https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
robertelder 11y ago
It is just shocking to see people complaining of data loss, and other extreme inconveniences caused by this update, but then on the other hand people going so far as to flag this thread (see comments below), despite this having been experienced by thousands of people. Being skeptical makes sense, but flagging the thread? I don't see that kind of polar opposite reaction often on HN. It can be relatively economic to pay people to post favourable comments if they already enjoy doing it anyway. I suspect that it happens more often than you think, and often takes the form of just paying people to hold biased opinions. It is not hard to imagine that if someone was holding onto a large amount of Microsoft stock, it would be easy to maintain cognitive dissonance.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  > everyone disagreeing with me is a shill Well you could just go see post history and call out the obvious one, letting downvotes take care of the rest. Anyway I had win 10 preinstalled on a laptop and since the last patch craze my wifi stopped working reliably. I think MS managed to bork something there independently from the os upgrade, but even more interestingly all other computers around here, same make same model, upgraded just fine, so I'd give some credit to the other voices until the actual technical issue is pinned down. At least for the driver issues, the sneaky os update is maddness.
chris_wot 11y ago
I would normally agree, but Microsoft have a very well known pattern of astroturfing. Hell, they invented practically invented the Internet version in 2001. I'd like to think that under Satya Nadella's reign they would have stopped, but they are still doing dodgy shit like forced upgrades to Windows 10. To say that this is an utter PR nightmare is a complete understatement. If, as some comments indicate, they have bricked hardware then I think a class action lawsuit wouldn't be out of the question! Whoever made the decision to auto upgrade literally hundreds of millions of computers should be fired. I believe that before the auto upgrade Microsoft said there were 110 million installs of Windows 10, but that was still only roughly 10% of total computers. There were still something like 40% of computers running Windows 7. Even if only 1% of computers that get upgraded automatically get bricked due to incompatible drivers, or whatever then that's still well over a million computers Microsoft have borked due to this stupidity. Look, I can accept automatic upgrades for an existing operating system on consumer grade workstations. But I cannot understand or accept that automatically upgrading to a new major release is a responsible business decision. Microsoft are getting this in the neck, and rightly so. This alone is a good reason for me to recommend to my friends and family that they only buy a Mac, and if they can't that I work out if it's worthwhile installing Ubuntu or Fedora and spun up a VirtualBox VM to run their legally purchased copy of Windows.
- makecheck 11y ago
  A lawsuit would be very reasonable. The hard part would be deciding on suitable damages, because the reality is that we’re not just talking about the cost of restoring a computer; these days, a trashed machine is more like somebody breaking into your room and destroying all of your personal stuff. The really sad thing is that it should have taken about 2 or 3 people at Microsoft, tops, to anticipate the first 10 things that could not only go wrong with their upgrade plan, but very, very wrong. Were those reasonable people shouted out of the room?
- Terr_ 11y ago
  I think it's much easier to believe in Microsoft Astroturfing given all the other pretty-well-documented sleazy stuff going on at the same time. In for a penny, in for a pound...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
CamperBob2 11y ago
It's suspicious as hell that Microsoft isn't being taken to task over this. If it had happened in the 2000->XP transition era, or even in the Vista->7 era, Ballmer would have been crucified. Anyone who doesn't find the relatively tolerant/benign online reaction to Windows Update's recent behavior to be suspicious either a) hasn't been paying attention for about 20 years now; b) isn't very bright; or c) is being paid. Downmod all you want, but somebody has to call BS on this.

mung 11y ago

Anyone who believes that it's okay to force unwanted updates onto someone's computer without unexpectedly and without their consent is a bit obnoxious.

HelloMcFly 11y ago
I don't think it's OK. Is that what you wanted?

mrmondo 11y ago

I'm not going to go into detail right now, but believe me it happens from Microsoft more than any other company I've seen.

cududa 11y ago
That's just it though - I don't believe you.

carapace 11y ago

For what it's worth I believe you are being wildly naive. Have a nice day.

HelloMcFly 11y ago
It isn't worth much, but - believe it or not - it's not totally worthless either. Note my wording though: I believe it does happen at times, I doubt it happens with the frequency claimed on HN and reddit. Hearing more first-hand accounts of it occurring is required for me to move substantially on my opinion. As is, it's primarily speculation and people asking others to "trust them, it happens." That said, I could do without the insincere well wishes.
- marvy 11y ago
  First hand accounts? As in someone saying "yes, I do this"?
  - HelloMcFly 11y ago
    Well I was more thinking along the lines of "yeah, I personally saw this done for my product/company." So, second-hand I guess. But first-hand experience of the second-hand account, if that makes sense. At any rate, the point is this: I'm not going to take it on faith, and I won't naturally assume the most sinister thing is occurring.
  - carapace 11y ago
    Does this count? http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-internet-trolls-are-trained-to-spread-propaganda-in-three-person-teams-2015-3?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-internet-trolls-are-t...
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  >I believe it does happen at times Rather like a forced OS upgrade - how many times is too often?
- carapace 11y ago
  I apologize for the "Have a nice day." I meant it ironically rather than insincerely, it can be difficult to convey tone on the Internet. To provide context: I was telling people for years before Snowden that "they" were recording everything. Of course, I was dismissed as a wearer of the tin-foil hat, yes? I'm afraid I find naivete a bit frustrating. No excuse for rudeness though! Sorry about that! :-) Warm regards, and sincere wishes of kindness to you and yours.

existencebox 11y ago

I'm going to make a few statements here to address the parent and children; but let me put the normal disclaimers here: I ONLY can speak for myself, I do not speak for MS or any of my coworkers. Simply put, the sort of behavior implied (vote brigading) doesn't mesh with my understanding of how I or any of my coworker/HN reader peers tend to behave. I could be totally off the mark with this but it just doesn't mesh with the culture I've been exposed to. More relevantly however, and more in line with how I typically approach HN threads regardless of topic, let me try and pose a more "occams razor" explanation: MS has been gaining a lot of positive press lately. The tech community WANTS to see our biggest entities succeed and "do good". We hate seeing suggestions that a "new convert" to the good side might have changed face again. Realizing that a company can do both good and "evil" simultaneously is a degree of mental dissonance I don't often see handled "cleanly" so to say. Long and the short; I am not happy with the forced upgrades. I am still using 7, and would be rather irked if they broke everything for the sake of forcing through content I do not want. However, I do tend to attribute much more naïve explanations for the patterns we're seeing, over some sort of PR conspiracy. There was a wonderful quote a while back, "we're not organized enough to be that evil" :) I don't mean to be any sort of MS apologist in this, my comment is entirely directed at the discussion regarding some degree of astroturfing, if I got asked about my opinions on the updates, well, that's a whole can of worms on its own and the remaining comments in the thread seem to speak to the resounding sentiment in that respect.

shostack 11y ago
Out of curiosity, are you an engineer there? If so I'm wondering how close you are and how much visibility you have into the marketing and PR side of things over there. This strikes me as the kind of thing that engineers might be kept in the dark about, but some PR agency somewhere may have outsourced something like this and done so in a way as to provide plausible deniability. A quick googling shows this wouldn't be the first time MS has resorted to astroturfing [1]. So while I don't doubt the sincerity of how you or any of your immediate coworkers/HN reader peers tend to behave, I think the facts speak a bit more clearly to the possibility of other parts of the MS organism being willing to do this sort of thing. [1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=microsoft%20astroturfing https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

robertelder 11y ago

It is just shocking to see people complaining of data loss, and other extreme inconveniences caused by this update, but then on the other hand people going so far as to flag this thread (see comments below), despite this having been experienced by thousands of people. Being skeptical makes sense, but flagging the thread? I don't see that kind of polar opposite reaction often on HN. It can be relatively economic to pay people to post favourable comments if they already enjoy doing it anyway. I suspect that it happens more often than you think, and often takes the form of just paying people to hold biased opinions. It is not hard to imagine that if someone was holding onto a large amount of Microsoft stock, it would be easy to maintain cognitive dissonance.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
> everyone disagreeing with me is a shill Well you could just go see post history and call out the obvious one, letting downvotes take care of the rest. Anyway I had win 10 preinstalled on a laptop and since the last patch craze my wifi stopped working reliably. I think MS managed to bork something there independently from the os upgrade, but even more interestingly all other computers around here, same make same model, upgraded just fine, so I'd give some credit to the other voices until the actual technical issue is pinned down. At least for the driver issues, the sneaky os update is maddness.

chris_wot 11y ago

I would normally agree, but Microsoft have a very well known pattern of astroturfing. Hell, they invented practically invented the Internet version in 2001. I'd like to think that under Satya Nadella's reign they would have stopped, but they are still doing dodgy shit like forced upgrades to Windows 10. To say that this is an utter PR nightmare is a complete understatement. If, as some comments indicate, they have bricked hardware then I think a class action lawsuit wouldn't be out of the question! Whoever made the decision to auto upgrade literally hundreds of millions of computers should be fired. I believe that before the auto upgrade Microsoft said there were 110 million installs of Windows 10, but that was still only roughly 10% of total computers. There were still something like 40% of computers running Windows 7. Even if only 1% of computers that get upgraded automatically get bricked due to incompatible drivers, or whatever then that's still well over a million computers Microsoft have borked due to this stupidity. Look, I can accept automatic upgrades for an existing operating system on consumer grade workstations. But I cannot understand or accept that automatically upgrading to a new major release is a responsible business decision. Microsoft are getting this in the neck, and rightly so. This alone is a good reason for me to recommend to my friends and family that they only buy a Mac, and if they can't that I work out if it's worthwhile installing Ubuntu or Fedora and spun up a VirtualBox VM to run their legally purchased copy of Windows.

makecheck 11y ago
A lawsuit would be very reasonable. The hard part would be deciding on suitable damages, because the reality is that we’re not just talking about the cost of restoring a computer; these days, a trashed machine is more like somebody breaking into your room and destroying all of your personal stuff. The really sad thing is that it should have taken about 2 or 3 people at Microsoft, tops, to anticipate the first 10 things that could not only go wrong with their upgrade plan, but very, very wrong. Were those reasonable people shouted out of the room?
Terr_ 11y ago
I think it's much easier to believe in Microsoft Astroturfing given all the other pretty-well-documented sleazy stuff going on at the same time. In for a penny, in for a pound...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

CamperBob2 11y ago

It's suspicious as hell that Microsoft isn't being taken to task over this. If it had happened in the 2000->XP transition era, or even in the Vista->7 era, Ballmer would have been crucified. Anyone who doesn't find the relatively tolerant/benign online reaction to Windows Update's recent behavior to be suspicious either a) hasn't been paying attention for about 20 years now; b) isn't very bright; or c) is being paid. Downmod all you want, but somebody has to call BS on this.