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I think there's an obvious and more general question here to be answered: if a piece of software is good enough, namely, it "disappears" when you are trying to

• kodfodrasz 10y ago
  The users may perceive operation satisfying, yet it may not be so, eg. because of security issues, which on the other hand pose dangers to other users as well, so the it doesn't matter to me attitude doesn't stand. Given that the upgrade was free just as in the case of a linux upgrade the good enough point should consider these factors as well.
• izacus 10y ago
  Because developers want to make more money. This is why the app store format is so incredibly popular amongst the developer crowd - it forces people to keep paying you to upgrade app to follow breaking Apple/Google changes just to keep the functionality of the app the same and it appearing for users of new phones. 15 year old software that works well and you buy once does not bring a steady income.
  • Godel_unicode 10y ago
    I think that you're wrong about why developers love app stores. It's about someone else solving all of the problems which aren't "make your app". It handles updates, feedback, discoverability, CC info, password resets, etc. I've never had the experience you describe; which app(s) are you talking about which need to be bought repeatedly with no new functionality?
  • moosingin3space 10y ago
    Not a fan of the app store model, but I've literally never heard of people paying for updates on app stores. In fact I've heard many developers complain about the lack of paid upgrades on the Mac App Store.
• afghanPower 10y ago
  I get (maybe) your argument when it comes to Windows 7 -> Windows 10, but I think you're overestimating how hard it is to get up and running with Arch Linux. Following an Arch install tutorial shouldn't take anyone here on Hackernews more than 2 hours to get their DE, networking etc. up and going. You should try it. It's fun!
  • digi_owl 10y ago
    I worry more about the long term support workload than the initial install.
    • anowell 10y ago
      fwiw, I find the long term support pretty minimal. I'm only slightly more conservative in my use of`pacman -Syu` than I would be with `apt-get dist-upgrade`. If I notice a kernel or DE upgrade, I might hold off until the weekend on the off-chance that it needs a bit of extra maintenance. I appreciate handling these changes in smaller batches, as opposed to the 6-month system-wide major upgrade cadence. Of course, if I was just jumping between LTS releases, maybe only dealing with serious maintenance every other year would be an appealing trade-off.
      • anowell 10y ago
        (of course, I don't mean to undermine the argument for hesitating to jump to Arch on the grounds of maintenance. It certainly takes thinking about maintenance more often.)
    • dTal 10y ago
      I found this to be a real problem with using Arch in production. Updating is a bit of a catch-22: if you upgrade frequently, the workload of keeping up with the minutiae of not breaking your system is overwhelming. And the longer you leave it, the closer the chances of breakage when you do approach 100%. Result: you inevitably fall off the update treadmill at some point, usually during some sort of crunch time, and then never update again because who wants to tell their boss they spent a day debugging a self-inflicted problem? Safer to leave it alone and get on with your work. This is why I switched back to Debian. Updating is stress-free and there's no downside to doing it as often as you like.
• alex_anglin 10y ago
  I'm sure you would agree that security updates/upgrades are an exception to your rule.
  • akappa 10y ago
    Yes, and so does MS: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skylake-users-given-18-months-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skyla...
  • jasonkostempski 10y ago
    Forced, untimely, security updates are certainly unwelcome and the #1 reason I'm off Windows completely at home.
• gregmac 10y ago
  > I think there's an obvious and more general question here to be answered: if a piece of software is good enough, namely, it "disappears" when you are trying to do your job, then why bother to change it? I find I care about the applications I use: my IDE, git client, console, and the various web apps I use. I don't so much care about my browser UI, as long as it gets out of the way and shows me what URL I'm on and renders the page. Likewise, I don't care about the UI of the OS itself, as long as it does its job properly: lets me start and switch between apps, connects to wifi, manages the display power, and sleeps and wakes up. When I'm looking at the computer screen, I'm looking at what I'm doing, not the UI chrome. Even now, I'm only paying attention to this comment text box and your original message.. Everything else -- all the other tabs I have open, the visible bits of the OS, the other window open on my next monitor -- all blends into the background and gets ignored.
• vlunkr 10y ago
  I agree with you, but looking at the problem from Microsoft's perspective, they have to sell you something, whether you 'need' it or not. It's interesting that Microsoft is the only company still selling a consumer OS, everything else comes free with the device, including updates. This problem might be part of the reason for that.
  • mark-r 10y ago
    The best way to maximize sales is to align your interests with that of your customers. I wish Microsoft would realize that, because Windows 10 is heading in the opposite direction.
    • scholia 10y ago
      World has moved heavily into mobile, touch-screen operations, use of sandboxed apps from online stores, AI assistants, cloud integration, biometric security etc etc. Windows 10 has moved heavily into mobile, touch-screen operations, use of sandboxed apps from online stores, AI assistants, cloud integration, biometric security etc etc.
• modzu 10y ago
  MS forces the change to force a sale
  • Godel_unicode 10y ago
    You're aware that the overwhelming majority of those forced updates were free, right?
    • CamperBob2 10y ago
      Pro tip: If it's "free," it just means you're the product.
• Unbeliever69 10y ago
  All the time I've invested in acclimating to Windows 10 feels like a burden, while all the time I have spent tweaking OSx feels delightful. People don't hate change...we hate change that is painful. Windows 10 (to me) embodies painful change.
  • deburo 10y ago
    A lot of people resist change to things they are familiar with. Between each significant revision of Apple's desktop OS, my mother would get frustrated at settings that were moved elsewhere/renamed/removed entirely, for example. OSX is no stranger to unnecessary changes (or at least that's what my mother thinks of them).
    • Lio 10y ago
      Here's one small change to macOS that drives me nuts. At some point they changed how application hiding works. It used to be that cmd-h hid an application and moved it to the end of the application stack. If you wanted it back you could use cmd-shift-tab. Some suit, in their wisdom, decided to change that so cmd-h now only hides the app. It's a tiny change ...that's a stone in my shoe every single day. IMHO that change is was completely unnecessary and breaks my workflow.
• deburo 10y ago
  Indeed, Win7 being good enough and not degrading in any way is a big challenge facing Win10 adoption, and that has been said times enough before. Once Win7 is out of support, may it be from popular applications or simply security updates, we may see things changing. There's also the factor of familiarity to consider. People buying new machines will learn the new system, and overtime as they learn how to use it, they will prefer it to older system versions. However, this is another long-term factor, and as such Windows 10 seems doomed to only slowly gain adoption. Note: Considering the reputation Windows 10 got for itself at launch, this is less surprising. For non-technical users, the upgrade to Win10 has probably been pointless or frustrating: new concepts, new default applications and system UIs these users have learn to perform their ordinary tasks. What's more, for many users, upgrading their system to Win10 left them with an unusable machine. Win10's launch was a mess.
  • chinathrow 10y ago
    Some say Windows 2000 was good enough already. Everything worked well.
    • godzillabrennus 10y ago
      Windows 2000 was the best version I've ever used. Back in the day, when XP was relatively new, if I bought a machine and it came with XP I would try and retro fit 2000 onto it. The 2000 installation would be noticeably faster for what appeared to be a similar set of features.
    • deburo 10y ago
      Currently checking the history of Windows 2000. Seems W2K was aimed at enterprises while ME at consumers. A bit less than 2 years after W2K's launch, WinXP came out and unified the consumer and enterprise line. Then, almost 8 years after WinXP's launch, MS released Win7. There's a lot of improvements between the 2, but I wonder what were the major factors that made users upgrade to Win7. I only remember a few pain points in XP that were relieved in Win7: file/app search, connecting to the internet, system updates, and window management.
• mnm1 10y ago
  Profit. How else is Microsoft (or any other company) going to make money off software no one needs or wants? Other than rehashing the same old product and pushing it onto users for more money, more surveillance, or both, they have nothing of value to sell on the software side. Even if they did have something of value to sell, over 90% of the people have already bought their product. Gotta keep the cash rolling in so they tweak the UI, maybe in a way that people hate like removing the start menu. Or they add surveillance features you can't turn off and monetize that way while pretending to somehow be secure. Or forget all that, let's just push the new update forcefully onto people's computers and pretend that it's not malware. When you have no real, defined product that solves specific problems to sell anymore, you sell garbage that pretends to be a real product. Microsoft is far from alone here. Almost every successful software product that doesn't know when to stop building and start maintaining suffers from this degradation later on in life.
  • vvanders 10y ago
    There's been some really good progress made on the tablet mode in Win10. It's not really apparent if you're using it as a Desktop OS. Specifically the Surface Book does a really good job of making the windows "experience" work in a keyboardless scenario. I'm sure the same is true of the other convertable hardware that's been popping up lately. I'll concede that this isn't the majority of users but I would argue it's not just a rewrapping of existing software.
    • flukus 10y ago
      > There's been some really good progress made on the tablet mode in Win10. It's not really apparent if you're using it as a Desktop OS. It's very apparent to me, it puts itself back in tablet mode after every restart, it's a pain to get that slide out menu working with a mouse. I bet a lot of people unknowingly get stuck in it.
  • ryanplant-au 10y ago
    I don't quite follow. You seem to be saying that Microsoft make changes just to justify the release of a new OS version. But they announced quite a while ago that they would never release a new major version. There will never be a Windows 11, you will never pay to upgrade Windows to the new version again. They adopted the macOS platform, where the OS sticks to a single version and gets an incremental annual update (macOS has been on version 10 for 16 years, with no plan to ever create "OS XI", and stopped charging for updates 4 years ago). So why would change for change's sake relate to profit at all?
• 1_2__3 10y ago
  That's because in most cases the "change" is 90% costs externalized by the vendor, IT, or both. Imagine if it was 1955 and we thought it was a good idea to randomly go into every company every year or two and say "Alright, this inventory system, this time tracking system, this customer service system... All of it, right out. Progress is here folks, and you don't want to be change averse. Time for some new fresh paper." It's ludicrous. One thing you learn very quickly in business is that companies have little or not stomach for doing things that do not make them money. Every minute or dollar you spend on them appears to be money down the toilet. So if Microsoft wants people to use Windows 10 they need to offer more than hand-wavey bullshit about features and progress and security, because all of that stinks to high heaven of a company trying to convince its customers to give it more money because it wants more money - not because it's offering anything of real value to the customer.
• davidf18 10y ago
  Interesting, readers of HN should know that upgrades to the newest version of Windows and updates is essential for reasons of software security. Newer versions of Windows incorporates security measures not in older versions -- sometimes even taking advantages of new security features in Intel hardware. For example, Target and Home Depot were hacked because they failed to upgrade their point-of-sale hardware from Windows XP embedded to Windows 7 embedded or later which was an upgrade recommended by Microsoft. Windows XP embedded had a security flaw later patched in later versions of Windows.
  • jessaustin 10y ago
    You describe the proximate cause of those breaches, but perhaps the ultimate cause was the difficulty of updating that OS in the first place?
    • davidf18 10y ago
      The point-of-sale terminals have vendors that produce them in large quantity and they should have the expertise to upgrade the software of the machines that they built. One can always hire experts with a proven track record to help with the install of the new OS. Incidentally, many people may have trouble with upgrades to the new OS because 1. Running old hardware 2. Not running quality hardware -- e.g. for Windows laptops traditionally Thinkpads. 3. Do a fresh install. E.g. don't upgrade, but backup the data, clean the disk, do a fresh install. I use Mac and did the fresh install of Sierra 10.12.1 and then upgrades for point version updates. I also have been running Windows under Parallels and on Thinkpads prior to 2011 and not had problems with new versions of Windows.
  • testUser69 10y ago
    Most HN readers probably don't even use Windows. I think it's objectively the worst OS for a tech enthusiast.
  • kristianc 10y ago
    People vastly underestimate how massive, complex and heterogenous the likes of Target, Home Depot, Walmart's stacks are. I've worked with people very used to working with enormously complex systems and even they say Walmart etc is on the higher end of that scale. We're talking weeks of people on site to get new software stood up. This isn't to diminish your point about the need for upgrades, but it's nothing like a push button process.
• ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Is Windows XP still "good enough"? Even if it still got security fixes, the actual security model it was built on is definitively no longer adequate for the modern world. I'd very much argue Windows 7 is rapidly falling into that territory as well. It's easy to make this "forever Windows 7" argument today, just like it used to be that people could say they were never leaving XP. But in reality, we're rapidly approaching the point where we absolutely need to be able to sandbox apps and segregate them from the platform like with UWP. While the basic functionality of the OS you need may not change much, the constantly moving target of security definitely will, and both 8 and 10 introduced significant improvements in security.
  • Klathmon 10y ago
    And before that people were vowing never to upgrade to XP, and before that people said 98 would be the last version of windows they would ever run...
    • pessimizer 10y ago
      The difference is that after XP, the majority of users didn't upgrade.
      • scholia 10y ago
        Windows 7 did get a majority of the Windows market. Windows 10 will get a majority of the Windows market. In fact, in some areas -- the USA and the UK, for example -- Windows 10 overtook Windows 7 late last year, on StatCounter's numbers.
        • CamperBob2 10y ago
          Yes, when you trick and manipulate users into upgrading, it results in a substantial short-term boost in market share.
          • scholia 10y ago
• fooey 10y ago
  Microsoft has successfully trained me that OS upgrades can be very traumatic. I consider myself an early adopter, and I always run cutting edge on my phone or win laptop, but I only ever upgrade my primary workstation when it dies and I have to. Maybe in place upgrades are fine now, but I haven't trusted anything but a fresh install for as long as Windows has existed.
  • chris_wot 10y ago
    Not just OS upgrades - even updates alone are problematic.