6 ms·

Recently my mom ended up with windows 10, despite not intending to upgrade. No idea how it exactly happened. Anyway, as a result all her .docx files got associ

Recently my mom ended up with windows 10, despite not intending to upgrade. No idea how it exactly happened. Anyway, as a result all her .docx files got associated with microsoft office (yes, during the upgrade windows "forgot" her preference for libreoffice) and to add insult to injury, the files wouldn't even open, instead whenever she double clicked one of them she'd get an ad urging her to buy an office 365 subscription to allow her to see her own fucking files. I'm done with Microsoft, forever. No matter what they do, I will never trust them again.

MawNicker 10y ago
This is so strange. It's like the OS team is in another universe. The rest of the company is nailing it.
- oceanswave 10y ago
  Nailing their own coffin, I agree
- sametmax 10y ago
  You mean the phone team killing nokia, the legal team suying linux based companies or the Web team wanting to create a gigantic censorship database or the game team creating a console always online with an always on microphone, effectively creating the biggest spyware of all time ? But the PR team nails it, I agree, because despite everything microsoft does, people keep forgetting.
  - m_fayer 10y ago
    I've been working with .NET, Xamarin, and Azure for a while. Those Microsoft products really are a pleasure, I have very little to complain about. Shame that it's only these 3 MS products that justify that statement.
    - Nullabillity 10y ago
      Xamarin is hardly a MS product, and they shut down RoboVM pretty much immediately after purchasing Xamarin.
    - nisa 10y ago
      If they start annoying the developers they are lost. So they don't do stupid things there. But it looks like they never cared or plain stopped caring for the end users.
      - goda90 10y ago
        What they want is to go to developers and say "Look, we have millions of users, cross platform(PC/Phone/XBOX), and great developer tools. All you need is to develop for Windows 10 and forget those other platforms". And they think they can just force 1 & 2 which may actually be true...
    - cm2187 10y ago
      I must say .net is a bit of an exception in this sad sight of microsoft's decay. Pretty much everything they have done in the past 3 years in the .net space makes sense and is nice to Microsoft's customers (open sourcing .net, finally delivering on platform-independence, visual studio community being pretty much a complete and fully functional IDE, buying and making xamarin free, etc). For the other divisions. Windows has become an absolute shit show. Every time I go on the Azure portal I get lost. My xbox one is blowing like a leaf blower. They stopped developing Office 15 years ago (ah no, they changed the color from blue to green) and my surface pro is reminding me of my Windows 98 BSOD days. Ha not, their mouses are still pretty decent.
    - invalidname 10y ago
      Personally I had a horrible experience with Azure. It seems they spent too much time on the UI and too little time on making it usable to understand billing. I was amazed billing could be worse from Amazon. I used their IaaS which was a pain to setup and constantly rebooted but maybe that's just because of Windows which is pretty problematic to begin with...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - tunap 10y ago
    MCP=Microsoft Certified Peddler Marketing is what they are, and always have been, best at. They still overwhelmingly dominate despite the worst efforts of the last 2 CEOs. Reminds of the days when "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
  - codingmyway 10y ago
    I've never thought much or Microsoft's PR or marketing. Not to the public at least. There's no coherent brand unlike Apple and Google and they still can't shake the haters and this is just another reason to hate. To enterprise and devs the likes of Scott Hanselman do a brilliant job but they seem to be fighting against MS's bad tendencies.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  It's like the OS team is in another universe I'm sure it's not the entire team, engineers usually aren't sociopathic assholes. No, this is undoubtedly marketing or management. Maybe even top management. Maybe Nadella?
m_fayer 10y ago
Same happened to my mom just yesterday. My mom happens to be an anxious 75 year old woman who takes a long time to acclimate to anything new on her computer, and also relies on said computer for several critical areas of her life. She called me in a panic from 6 timezones away, and I had to drop what I was doing and spend a good half a day walking her through the various transition and setup steps. Every 30 minutes she would plaintively ask me why she had to do this - she was perfectly happy with what she had and had no interest in anything new. Every time she asked and I had no good answer, vague thoughts that included the words "class" and "action" swam through my head.
- Rangi42 10y ago
  One advantage to my grandmother still using Windows XP: it won’t auto-upgrade to Windows 10.
  - Piskvorrr 10y ago
    Meh. The safest and easiest migration path from XP now is to LXLE (which is Ubuntu Linux) with a similar theme (and the same set of apps); I wouldn't keep anyone on XP any more: if W7 is obsolete, XP is a rotting corpse.
    - luke-stanley 10y ago
      Or maybe http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/04/windows-xp-theme-lubuntu http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/04/windows-xp-theme-lubuntu
      - Piskvorrr 10y ago
        Haha, maybe. That's a bit over the top for me personally, I never liked the Luna theme :)
- pca 10y ago
  How many of the hundreds of millions of people using Windows computers are affected like this that don't have someone tech-savy to ask for help? There's no possible way Microsoft didn't think of this scenario, which can only mean that they simply do not care.
pca 10y ago
Thanks for the warning. I'm not sure if they're being sleazy or just unthoughtful and incompetent. I already lost an afternoon with family, which I don't get to see that often, because I was forced to fix things that went wrong on their devices after the unexpected update. I had told them to "Just click the red x for now,if a message about Windows 10 pops up".
vog 10y ago
This has consequences even in the medical domain! Recently I sat in the waiting room of a general practitioner (in Germany), where all patients had to wait because their main computer was unusable. That computer started an upgrade to Windows 10 against their will and almost all patients had to wait.
- eps 10y ago
  They weren't running the Windows Server on their server then, which is a pretty reckless thing to do even without going into T&C aspects of it.
  - somabc 10y ago
    Why would you run Windows Server on the receptionists machine?
    - goda90 10y ago
      I think he's trying to say that they didn't have a Windows update server to prevent that kind of thing. The only people dodging this are using a utility, manually deleting updates, or are running Enterprise.
      - somabc 10y ago
        It's pretty hard to buy enterprise. I could easily see many small companies going with Pro instead and getting unwanted upgrades to Windows 10.
    - eps 10y ago
      Unless I've been smoking something the comment I replied to originally said "main server."
- kuschku 10y ago
  My dentist – after having issues with this, and also hearing about the Snowden papers in the news in the past years – told me she was discussing with her IT guy to move to a Linux based system, as she’d just want it to work. I’m not sure how far Wine has come, or if dentist software for Linux already is a thing, but I’ve heard more and more people discuss these things recently. Windows 10 might finally be the time for Linux on the Desktop.
unixhero 10y ago
Install Linux Mint on it and you'll never get another phone call about using the computer again
- pmlnr 10y ago
  I wanted to write the same line. Mint looks, feels and works as a good windows XP, but with up to date security and drivers, and is perfect for anyone who's using their computer for generic activities, eg. browsing, watching movies, etc. Add a Google Chrome and you have Netflix & the rest, Skype works out of the box on Mint, and it has an 'app store' - also known as package manager for a decade in linux terms -, so there really is nothing missing from Mint for generic scenarios. ( No, you really don't need full back-and-forth MS Office compatibility in generic life and Libreoffice is doing a good job on compatibility. You also don't need Photoshop for generic, everyday users; there is Digikam, Gimp and Inkscape and countless others for the non-professionals, all of them are more than enough for someone who's not making a living of this. )
- ryanl0l 10y ago
  Yeah until the users ISP drops them because of the kaiten sending outgoing DDoS.
  - Piskvorrr 10y ago
    Or for being a part of any other botnet. Oh wait, it's you: all those Windows zombies are nonexistent, because "shouldn't happen = doesn't happen, Windows is secure, Linux suxx0rz, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia".
- RaleyField 10y ago
  Too bad Mint is done by cowboys. http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-the-linux-mint-hack-is-an-indicator-of-a-larger-problem/ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-the-linux-mint-hack-...
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  Until the next LTS dist upgrade? Linux doesn't solve the dist upgrade situation any better than Windows here: there's still a lot of cheese that moves around between dist upgrades. Sure, if you stick to LTS dist upgrades you restrict the amount of change to roughly once every two years, and if you use a particularly conservative distribution like Mint you can count on, for now, a fairly decent track record of trying to stay in a "Perpetual 90s" of GUI choices. But even with Mint there are lots of little differences between dist upgrades, and especially if you stray conservative and only do LTS dist upgrades then your relatives also don't benefit from the slow gradual updates and are forced into the changes more jarringly. (And yes, Windows 7 to Windows 10 is an LTS dist upgrade.)
yrro 10y ago
My brother's laptop (Dell Ispiron 15z) was upgraded to Windows 10 without his consent. After booting into Windows 10 wireless networking was non-functional. Dell themselves were fantastically passive-aggressive (and simultaneously useless, but at least I expected the latter): "Dell is not testing or developing Windows 10 drivers for this product. If you choose to upgrade, some features, applications, and connected devices may not work as expected." The laptop is only three years old! If I were him I would have returned it for a refund, but he doesn't have the time to migrate to another laptop right now so we eventually gave up, downgraded to Windows 7 and now he has to operate his laptop defensively, with Microsoft and their relentless upgrade treadmill as his adversary. His next laptop will be a Mac.
- toomanybeersies 10y ago
  There is always the option of Linux.
  - Piskvorrr 10y ago
    Better still, there's dual boot; and with virtualization, you could even run both at the same time :) Had that setup for a while: Win7 as the host - had some proprietary sw there that wouldn't run in a VM - and Kubuntu with the usual office apps on a separate partition, where I could either physically boot into it, or run it as a VM. Since it didn't share any partition with Windows (data was shared via VBox Shared Folders), all was OK. (Tried the other way around, but Windows - and the programs I was using - were really picky about HW changes and paravirtualization; didn't work so well.)
torgoguys 10y ago
It's not just MS pushing new stuff on people without much warning. A similar thing happened to my mom with the iOS 6 => 7 update that overhauled the UI. People (understandably) freak when you move their cheese. Apple seems to have gotten more of a pass for it than Microsoft is here though. If you read the actual dialog box, it reads fine. Really. It's not a trick. The big change is Windows 10 being classified as a "recommended" update. Turn off recommended updates (only take "critical" updates) if you don't want Microsoft changing functionality on your computer. It has been like that for a long time. This is a very extreme example of it though and MS knows that--that's why the box exists, I think--they don't "warn" you about other upcoming recommended updates. Yes, they could do more on that box to guide you towards cancelling the upgrade, but if they mean what they say that the update is "recommended," your dialogs should be guiding people towards getting it rather than away from it. Again, the bigger thing to question here is the choice to make it "recommended," not the dialog box.
- tunap 10y ago
  An as yet undetermined critical update just rechecked "recommended" for me yesterday when I specifically unchecked it before manually updating a fresh 7 install. Once the 1st round of 170 updates finished w/ a couple fails, I unintentionally/fortuitously clicked settings and saw the box checked. *This was updates before 3/27/2015, btw, I now need to vet the remaining ~170 of the 40 known/unwanted Win 10 malgrades.

MawNicker 10y ago

This is so strange. It's like the OS team is in another universe. The rest of the company is nailing it.

oceanswave 10y ago
Nailing their own coffin, I agree
sametmax 10y ago
You mean the phone team killing nokia, the legal team suying linux based companies or the Web team wanting to create a gigantic censorship database or the game team creating a console always online with an always on microphone, effectively creating the biggest spyware of all time ? But the PR team nails it, I agree, because despite everything microsoft does, people keep forgetting.
- m_fayer 10y ago
  I've been working with .NET, Xamarin, and Azure for a while. Those Microsoft products really are a pleasure, I have very little to complain about. Shame that it's only these 3 MS products that justify that statement.
  - Nullabillity 10y ago
    Xamarin is hardly a MS product, and they shut down RoboVM pretty much immediately after purchasing Xamarin.
  - nisa 10y ago
    If they start annoying the developers they are lost. So they don't do stupid things there. But it looks like they never cared or plain stopped caring for the end users.
    - goda90 10y ago
      What they want is to go to developers and say "Look, we have millions of users, cross platform(PC/Phone/XBOX), and great developer tools. All you need is to develop for Windows 10 and forget those other platforms". And they think they can just force 1 & 2 which may actually be true...
  - cm2187 10y ago
    I must say .net is a bit of an exception in this sad sight of microsoft's decay. Pretty much everything they have done in the past 3 years in the .net space makes sense and is nice to Microsoft's customers (open sourcing .net, finally delivering on platform-independence, visual studio community being pretty much a complete and fully functional IDE, buying and making xamarin free, etc). For the other divisions. Windows has become an absolute shit show. Every time I go on the Azure portal I get lost. My xbox one is blowing like a leaf blower. They stopped developing Office 15 years ago (ah no, they changed the color from blue to green) and my surface pro is reminding me of my Windows 98 BSOD days. Ha not, their mouses are still pretty decent.
  - invalidname 10y ago
    Personally I had a horrible experience with Azure. It seems they spent too much time on the UI and too little time on making it usable to understand billing. I was amazed billing could be worse from Amazon. I used their IaaS which was a pain to setup and constantly rebooted but maybe that's just because of Windows which is pretty problematic to begin with...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tunap 10y ago
  MCP=Microsoft Certified Peddler Marketing is what they are, and always have been, best at. They still overwhelmingly dominate despite the worst efforts of the last 2 CEOs. Reminds of the days when "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
- codingmyway 10y ago
  I've never thought much or Microsoft's PR or marketing. Not to the public at least. There's no coherent brand unlike Apple and Google and they still can't shake the haters and this is just another reason to hate. To enterprise and devs the likes of Scott Hanselman do a brilliant job but they seem to be fighting against MS's bad tendencies.
PhantomGremlin 10y ago
It's like the OS team is in another universe I'm sure it's not the entire team, engineers usually aren't sociopathic assholes. No, this is undoubtedly marketing or management. Maybe even top management. Maybe Nadella?

m_fayer 10y ago

Same happened to my mom just yesterday. My mom happens to be an anxious 75 year old woman who takes a long time to acclimate to anything new on her computer, and also relies on said computer for several critical areas of her life. She called me in a panic from 6 timezones away, and I had to drop what I was doing and spend a good half a day walking her through the various transition and setup steps. Every 30 minutes she would plaintively ask me why she had to do this - she was perfectly happy with what she had and had no interest in anything new. Every time she asked and I had no good answer, vague thoughts that included the words "class" and "action" swam through my head.

Rangi42 10y ago
One advantage to my grandmother still using Windows XP: it won’t auto-upgrade to Windows 10.
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  Meh. The safest and easiest migration path from XP now is to LXLE (which is Ubuntu Linux) with a similar theme (and the same set of apps); I wouldn't keep anyone on XP any more: if W7 is obsolete, XP is a rotting corpse.
  - luke-stanley 10y ago
    Or maybe http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/04/windows-xp-theme-lubuntu http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/04/windows-xp-theme-lubuntu
    - Piskvorrr 10y ago
      Haha, maybe. That's a bit over the top for me personally, I never liked the Luna theme :)
pca 10y ago
How many of the hundreds of millions of people using Windows computers are affected like this that don't have someone tech-savy to ask for help? There's no possible way Microsoft didn't think of this scenario, which can only mean that they simply do not care.

pca 10y ago

Thanks for the warning. I'm not sure if they're being sleazy or just unthoughtful and incompetent. I already lost an afternoon with family, which I don't get to see that often, because I was forced to fix things that went wrong on their devices after the unexpected update. I had told them to "Just click the red x for now,if a message about Windows 10 pops up".

vog 10y ago

This has consequences even in the medical domain! Recently I sat in the waiting room of a general practitioner (in Germany), where all patients had to wait because their main computer was unusable. That computer started an upgrade to Windows 10 against their will and almost all patients had to wait.

eps 10y ago
They weren't running the Windows Server on their server then, which is a pretty reckless thing to do even without going into T&C aspects of it.
- somabc 10y ago
  Why would you run Windows Server on the receptionists machine?
  - goda90 10y ago
    I think he's trying to say that they didn't have a Windows update server to prevent that kind of thing. The only people dodging this are using a utility, manually deleting updates, or are running Enterprise.
    - somabc 10y ago
      It's pretty hard to buy enterprise. I could easily see many small companies going with Pro instead and getting unwanted upgrades to Windows 10.
  - eps 10y ago
    Unless I've been smoking something the comment I replied to originally said "main server."
kuschku 10y ago
My dentist – after having issues with this, and also hearing about the Snowden papers in the news in the past years – told me she was discussing with her IT guy to move to a Linux based system, as she’d just want it to work. I’m not sure how far Wine has come, or if dentist software for Linux already is a thing, but I’ve heard more and more people discuss these things recently. Windows 10 might finally be the time for Linux on the Desktop.

unixhero 10y ago

Install Linux Mint on it and you'll never get another phone call about using the computer again

pmlnr 10y ago
I wanted to write the same line. Mint looks, feels and works as a good windows XP, but with up to date security and drivers, and is perfect for anyone who's using their computer for generic activities, eg. browsing, watching movies, etc. Add a Google Chrome and you have Netflix & the rest, Skype works out of the box on Mint, and it has an 'app store' - also known as package manager for a decade in linux terms -, so there really is nothing missing from Mint for generic scenarios. ( No, you really don't need full back-and-forth MS Office compatibility in generic life and Libreoffice is doing a good job on compatibility. You also don't need Photoshop for generic, everyday users; there is Digikam, Gimp and Inkscape and countless others for the non-professionals, all of them are more than enough for someone who's not making a living of this. )
ryanl0l 10y ago
Yeah until the users ISP drops them because of the kaiten sending outgoing DDoS.
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  Or for being a part of any other botnet. Oh wait, it's you: all those Windows zombies are nonexistent, because "shouldn't happen = doesn't happen, Windows is secure, Linux suxx0rz, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia".
RaleyField 10y ago
Too bad Mint is done by cowboys. http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-the-linux-mint-hack-is-an-indicator-of-a-larger-problem/ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-the-linux-mint-hack-...
WorldMaker 10y ago
Until the next LTS dist upgrade? Linux doesn't solve the dist upgrade situation any better than Windows here: there's still a lot of cheese that moves around between dist upgrades. Sure, if you stick to LTS dist upgrades you restrict the amount of change to roughly once every two years, and if you use a particularly conservative distribution like Mint you can count on, for now, a fairly decent track record of trying to stay in a "Perpetual 90s" of GUI choices. But even with Mint there are lots of little differences between dist upgrades, and especially if you stray conservative and only do LTS dist upgrades then your relatives also don't benefit from the slow gradual updates and are forced into the changes more jarringly. (And yes, Windows 7 to Windows 10 is an LTS dist upgrade.)

yrro 10y ago

My brother's laptop (Dell Ispiron 15z) was upgraded to Windows 10 without his consent. After booting into Windows 10 wireless networking was non-functional. Dell themselves were fantastically passive-aggressive (and simultaneously useless, but at least I expected the latter): "Dell is not testing or developing Windows 10 drivers for this product. If you choose to upgrade, some features, applications, and connected devices may not work as expected." The laptop is only three years old! If I were him I would have returned it for a refund, but he doesn't have the time to migrate to another laptop right now so we eventually gave up, downgraded to Windows 7 and now he has to operate his laptop defensively, with Microsoft and their relentless upgrade treadmill as his adversary. His next laptop will be a Mac.

toomanybeersies 10y ago
There is always the option of Linux.
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  Better still, there's dual boot; and with virtualization, you could even run both at the same time :) Had that setup for a while: Win7 as the host - had some proprietary sw there that wouldn't run in a VM - and Kubuntu with the usual office apps on a separate partition, where I could either physically boot into it, or run it as a VM. Since it didn't share any partition with Windows (data was shared via VBox Shared Folders), all was OK. (Tried the other way around, but Windows - and the programs I was using - were really picky about HW changes and paravirtualization; didn't work so well.)

torgoguys 10y ago

It's not just MS pushing new stuff on people without much warning. A similar thing happened to my mom with the iOS 6 => 7 update that overhauled the UI. People (understandably) freak when you move their cheese. Apple seems to have gotten more of a pass for it than Microsoft is here though. If you read the actual dialog box, it reads fine. Really. It's not a trick. The big change is Windows 10 being classified as a "recommended" update. Turn off recommended updates (only take "critical" updates) if you don't want Microsoft changing functionality on your computer. It has been like that for a long time. This is a very extreme example of it though and MS knows that--that's why the box exists, I think--they don't "warn" you about other upcoming recommended updates. Yes, they could do more on that box to guide you towards cancelling the upgrade, but if they mean what they say that the update is "recommended," your dialogs should be guiding people towards getting it rather than away from it. Again, the bigger thing to question here is the choice to make it "recommended," not the dialog box.

tunap 10y ago
An as yet undetermined critical update just rechecked "recommended" for me yesterday when I specifically unchecked it before manually updating a fresh 7 install. Once the 1st round of 170 updates finished w/ a couple fails, I unintentionally/fortuitously clicked settings and saw the box checked. *This was updates before 3/27/2015, btw, I now need to vet the remaining ~170 of the 40 known/unwanted Win 10 malgrades.