16 ms·

Microsoft’s problem isn’t how often it updates Windows, it’s how it develops it

223 points by okket 8y ago

cft 8y ago
As a developer, Windows Home 10 became unusable. It is essentially an update machine, it seizes control and just updates, restarts, i have no control over the machine.
- oliveshell 8y ago
  I’m on Windows 10 Professional and I’m very happy with the control it (now) gives me over deferring updates— I hate that the feature isn’t available in Home.
  - inamberclad 8y ago
    I'm on Ubuntu and I'm slightly shocked that people will put up with a tiered operating system business model that causes so much grief for its users.
    - stagger87 8y ago
      You're shocked people will put up with inconveniences on an operating system in which they develop and sell software for a living?
      - antsar 8y ago
        Its not just developers. $job's entire IT department is full of willful Windows 10 users. When questioned, they defend all these "features" as if you'd insulted their baby. I'd call it Stockholm Syndrome, except nobody is forcing them to use it.
        jononor 8y ago
        Habit is a strong force.
        addicted 8y ago
        What are the alternatives? Mac OS means buying unaffordable or underpowered hardware. And being ok with living within the constraints allowed by Apple (on the hardware side). Linux is not a consumer option. Ubuntu, for all its flaws, was the first distro that could actually be considered consumer grade, and that’s why pretty much any mainstream PC maker offering a Linux option offered Ubuntu. But as you can tell by just glancing at the comments on the release for Ubuntu 18.10, even they have seemingly abandoned the desktop market in favor of servers and IOT, etc. And that’s before you get to Linux’s Applications problem. Windows is a fairly solid OS with a few remaining warts which MS stubbornly refuses to address. One of the issues was the years they spent trying to convert it into a Mobile first OS. That was such a waste of resources.
        throwaway4719 8y ago
        IT departments are often (not always) unfortunately full of intellectually weak people who have based their entire careers around knowing their way around Windows and not much else. Unfortunately it is taboo to acknowledge that people, and especially groups of people have varying degrees of intelligence. Just watch this comment being downvoted into oblivion, for instance.
    - Tsubasachan 8y ago
      Windows runs the software and hardware people use. Until that changes Windows will be around. The real competition to watch is ChromeOS.
      - apexalpha 8y ago
        >The real competition to watch is ChromeOS. In what way? Literally every OS has a browser and all ChromeOS is is an embedded instance of Chrome.
        DragoCubed 8y ago
        It can run Android and Linux apps. It's a shame we can't customise it as much as Android, despite it seemingly replacing Android on tablets.
- cheez 8y ago
  "As a developer, Windows Home 10 became unusable" You're not the target market. I haven't had to help my parents with their computers since they switched to Windows 10 home.
  - sureaboutthis 8y ago
    In the meantime, my restaurant chain's POS systems and my wife's laptop, which keeps the books for us, are constantly having issues. Support for the POSes say to restart the system every day to avoid problems. (Can you believe we have to do that? It doesn't solve all issues, though.) Haven't a clue what to do about my wife's problems except I hope, soon, to be able to just do a full reinstall. Even better, I hope to replace it altogether with a Linux desktop or, even better, a Mac.
    - will4274 8y ago
      > my restaurant chain's POS systems Just to state the obvious, home versions of operating systems aren't designed to run POS systems for businesses. That's what professional and enteprise versions are for.
      - Piskvorrr 8y ago
        Or even the embedded version.
      - volkl48 8y ago
        Well, those aren't either. That is the intended use-case of the special versions (W10 Embedded or maybe LTSB)
        nikbackm 8y ago
        The embedded and LTSB versions are practically the same.
      - sureaboutthis 8y ago
        Yes. We're using the Pro version at work. The Home version in the home office.
variable11 8y ago
Constant forced updates are a problem, whether their development process is pristine or trash. And it's trash.
Piskvorrr 8y ago
The process seems to be "we have so much lock-in, that literally no matter what we do, we're driving away only a fraction of a percent of users. We're erasing data left right and center, and users only bend over further." No wonder all stops are pulled out with this attitude.
- vezycash 8y ago
  I don't think it's this. It's more like they got bullied into this by the media, Apple and the tech community. For years people sang about the many vulnerability of Windows at every turn. IOS spat out new features at a steady pace. On the other hand, MS had to support the ever growing list of Windows versions and their incompatibilities - slowing down their rate of development. The tech community was singing the praise of Lean and MVP. Everyone loved to shit on IE for holding back the web. While praising Chrome for being chrome - having only one version to support. And somewhere along the line, Google got the bright idea to remove the ability to disable Chrome's automatic update. Add all these factors and more that I didn't mention and you'll see how MS came to the forced update decision. Lest I forget, Nadella saw how he could fire Microsoft testers, reduce expenses and raise stock price with a forced update stroke. Irresistible.
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Obviously I cannot speak for MS or for other users, but I see a major difference between (IE,Edge,Chrome,FF) and (OS). If an upgrade renders any of the former unusable, it's an annoyance, but there is a fallback a few clicks away. For an OS...sure, I could whip out a live USB (as opposed to most users), but I'm mostly locked out of my Windows apps, and some of my data. If you don't see how an OS upgrade is different from an app upgrade within an OS, I honestly have no better way to explain. (As for IE, don't tell a veteran what the Browser Wars were: IIRC, the rest of the browsers managed to move on without autoupgrades at first, so don't bring up that particular straw man: the issue wasn't autoupdate, it was "IE8 is the pinnacle of browsing, we're not going to update it for years, dev team dissolved.")
  - netheril96 8y ago
    You are defending Microsoft's decision to force updates, but as the title says, what drives users away is not that decision but its implementation.
samfisher83 8y ago
I think chrome started that trend with the the auto update. I am just not a fan. With software if you at least know the bugs you can work around them. With constantly changing software you have incompatibility new bugs. At least with pro version of Windows you can kind of disable auto update.
- vezycash 8y ago
  >At least with pro version of Windows you can kind of disable auto update. Since when? You can turn off Windows update service but it will turn itself back on. Even with Windows update turned off, they still have a way of quietly slipping stuff into your PC.
  - tmymt 8y ago
    >Since when? You can turn off Windows update service but it will turn itself back on. Use the Group Policy. >Even with Windows update turned off, they still have a way of quietly slipping stuff into your PC. No.
    - TwoNineA 8y ago
      Which policy? Does it work on non Enterprise versions?
      - tryptophan 8y ago
        No. Windows removed group policies for Pro users for some reason after win7.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        Falkon1313 8y ago
        No, it works fine in Windows 10 Pro. I got Pro specifically for that reason. When you alter the settings, then Windows Update shows "*Some settings are managed by your organization" and a link to see what group policies are set.
chmln 8y ago
Windows update is probably one of the worst engineered parts of the OS. On my quad core i7 with a dedicated GPU it used to take anywhere from 45 mins to two hours to install the big updates and around 30 mins for smaller ones. Not only they take ridiculously long, eventually you are forced to update upon booting in or shutting down. Never mind that you turned on your PC to, you know, get something done potentially urgently. In contrast, I can upgrade my months-stale arch Linux box in under 2-3 minutes. After seeing how much better the same hardware can run, there is no going back.
- codetrotter 8y ago
  The Windows Update system is engineered so that individual updates can be selected/deselected without affecting the ability to install other updates. The slowness of Windows Update, as I understand, is related to this fact. However, that being said, Windows Update for me as a user that would apply all updates anyway, was unbearably slow, and a big part of the reason that I switched to Linux and FreeBSD years ago and never looked back. I guess for enterprises that want to deselect certain updates for various reasons relating to their setup, Windows Update is probably a great selling point. I still don’t get why it has to be so slow for the default case where all updates are applied though.
  - danShumway 8y ago
    > The Windows Update system is engineered so that individual updates can be selected/deselected without affecting the ability to install other updates. This could be me being completely ignorant of the details, but doesn't Linux have the same thing? I can individually apply package updates, even mess with dependencies -- but my computer updates quickly and doesn't require multiple restarts during the process. Usually, unless I'm updating the kernel itself, I don't even need to restart. What are they doing that's even more granular than Linux's update process?
    - tomnipotent 8y ago
      Only this was 1st party updates from Microsoft only, but it felt like you were getting updates from a hundred 3rd party packages.
pmontra 8y ago
Microsoft could have a flawed development process but the slowness of the update procedure and how it seizes control of the machine is much worse in terms of UX. My Ubuntu laptop gets updates almost every day. I could make them happen in background but I want to know what's going on so I make it display the list in a window, check it and click OK. From now on it takes little time to finish, even if there are new versions of the kernel. I recently updated a Windows Server 2016 VM switched off since September and it was a half day long nightmare of downloading / updating / rebooting loops. If I ever considered to move back to Windows (I never did) that would have made me change my mind. Anything but Windows.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Doesn't sound like a relevant complaint. Your Ubuntu desktop only takes security and bugfix updates regularly. If you've tried going from an Ubuntu LTS to another Ubuntu LTS, 2+ years on, you'd find tons of things changed too -- even if your old LTS had everyday updates.
  - simion314 8y ago
    This is true, the difference is that your not forced into feature upgrades, you can stay with an LTS 5 years if it works for you. Second difference is that upgrades will take less times and reboots. There is also a risk that stuff will not work better after the upgrade.
    - Tsubasachan 8y ago
      The Windows equivalent is Enterprise LTSC. Its not available to the common public though.
      - simion314 8y ago
        That is unfortunate, why not have a Home edition that is an LTS, only security updates, less chances of bricking computers or deleting user data. I know MS hated that people were using XP and not buying Win7 but they exaggerated by pushing updates like Chrome browser does.
lawnchair_larry 8y ago
Pretty predictable result when you decide your company no longer needstesters because companies like facebook don’t have them.
oculusthrift 8y ago
am i the only one that’s doesn’t notice windows updates at all? like a lot of people seem to have this issue but i’ve never noticed it
- imandride 8y ago
  No I as well barely notice them. The only time I have is on my work laptop. But our IT department handles those updates.
- emsy 8y ago
  You'll notice if you use standby heavily. No problem on my Mac. I think at one point I had a year uptime. Windows will happily close my opened documents and reboot on its own.
  - rplst8 8y ago
    I use standby/sleep all the time no issues.
- rplst8 8y ago
  I have like 4 windows PCs, three laptops and a 5-6 year old desktop. Never an issue, ever.
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  I don't even use Windows, yet I still notice them when being at a game jam or a similar event. There's always somebody who complains about his Windows that started updating, with the best case being a guy waiting for his turn to connect his laptop and give a presentation, only to notice that it started updating meanwhile :D
- kyriakos 8y ago
  I'm an insider and i only notice them when i login and I get the "hi" message. they all happen overnight, I used to get warnings for them and a choice to postpone but I just set it up so it runs after 2am and since then never bothered me again.
- 8y ago
GnarfGnarf 8y ago
Since switching to Windows 10, my Visual Studio debug Output console is polluted with streams of debug statements from within Windows itself. Can't find my stuff. Someone forgot to turn off the debug trace statements in the Release version of Windows. WTF?
- chrisper 8y ago
  Are you attaching to the kernel?
  - GnarfGnarf 8y ago
    Not that I'm aware of. It's just a plain Win32 app, nothing fancy.
- taspeotis 8y ago
  “Someone forgot to turn off the debug trace statements in the Release version of Windows” You didn’t accidentally install a “checked” build, did you? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/checked-and-free-build-differences https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/de...
JoshuaJB 8y ago
I spent this summer working on a Windows team at Microsoft, and this article is incredibly insightful for an outside perspective. The dev process internally is basically just waterfall sped up 3x. While my team only permitted code commits after adding to and running the tests, that did not seem to be the norm. Almost weekly one of our sister teams would not only break a feature (that happened pretty much every day) but break the build. Things got so bad that as we approached this most recent release, management (under pressure to reduce the number of failing tests) just disabled the majority of our failing tests. While it might slow down some of the feature work, I think it's clear that an always release-ready master branch is the path forward for Windows. Some of my more enterprising managers were already working on splitting our subfeature out of the Windows release tree just so that we could do that when I left a couple months ago. I hope they succeed, otherwise I worry for the future.
- alxlaz 8y ago
  Hey, do you accept congratulations from someone who's used nothing but Unices for ages now? The stuff you and your (now former) colleagues have put up lately is remarkable. The last version of Windows I used on my home machine was Windows 2000, and Windows 10 is the first one I've looked at since then and said you know, I could actually use this thing, I guess. I don't trust your (former) bosses enough to make the switch, but you folks have done some pretty amazing stuff lately.
  - _greim_ 8y ago
    Ha! This makes me chuckle. I myself was a web developer during the decade of IE6 dominance, advocating for Mozilla all the while. Despite it being trendy and contrarian to praise "M$" nowadays, I feel like that ice is only now beginning to thaw. Not so much the coming of spring, but a slight decrease in the hoarfrost on the windowpane. Great shuddering booms as the lake ice cracks. That sort of thing. Yes, if Microsoft continues being non-horrible, I may eventually warm up to them :) Shuffles back to corner. Furtively plays with new TypeScript toy. Hisses at passerby.
    - 8y ago
tannhaeuser 8y ago
I'm aware not everybody will be able to switch, but for me, 2018 is actually the year of the Linux desktop as all my projects and customers in 2018 are using it (plus a decreasing number of Mac OS notebooks still, but Windows is a complete outlier in IT shops). And Ubuntu is not bad at all compared to the alternatives.
bkraz 8y ago
I disabled all wake timers so that the machine will never wake itself from sleep Then, I set the Windows Update active hours to be early in the morning. Now, when I use the computer I wake it from sleep with the keyboard, use it normally, then put it to sleep when done. This has allowed me to install updates when convenient for me since it effectively stops auto update behavior. Sort of like how it should be.
- rplst8 8y ago
  I like this answer. People who often complain about Windows just don't bother learning how it works. I like Linux just as much, but both have pros and cons.
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    This is not just "learning how it works", this is "learning how it works in order to come up with silly workarounds".
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > People who often complain about Windows just don't bother learning how it works It doesn't work this way, you can just sometimes abuse it to do what was not intended, but it's not meant to be done as in offering you options the official way.
- zer 8y ago
  Yeah I did the same. It's infuriating to put the machine to sleep only to see in the morning (or days later...) that Windows woke it up at 3am. Is it supposed to go back to sleep or is this honestly how someone at Microsoft wants it to work?
cpeterso 8y ago
I've reported bugs to Windows Insider's Feedback Hub, but none have ever been acknowledged or fixed. So I can relate to the recent stories about critical data loss issues reported but never acknowledged. An issue that affects me daily and would be easy for Microsoft to test: my Bose Bluetooth headphones' computer voice knows how to pronounce all my other devices' names (e.g. "Chris's iPhone"), but it must spell out my Windows machine name letter by letter. Even if I rename my Windows machine to something I know my headphones can pronounce (like "Chris's iPhone"), they spell it out. Perhaps this is a bug in my Bose headphones, but these are very common headphones so I'm surprised no one at Microsoft or Bose has addressed this problem. My hypothesis is that Windows machine names are UCS-2 encoded and the headphones interpret the "extra" bytes as word delimiters.
- p2t2p 8y ago
  Ha! CardDav and CalDav support tickets has been opened since 2014. Nope. I boot my surface (probably I should’ve sold it long time ago) every once in a while to see if it supports my calendar and contacts server yet. Nope. Every single OS does it. But not windows. What is even funnier is that they actually have support for iCloud which is CalDav and CardDav but nope, no custom config for you.
  - bpye 8y ago
    Sadly Android doesn't do CalDAV or CardDAV either, at least without a third-party provider.
    - cpeterso 8y ago
      If neither Windows nor Android, the two most widely-distributed operating systems in the world, do not support CalDAV or CardDAV, then who is using these standards? :) I guess Microsoft and Google want to promote their own calendaring solutions, Outlook/Exchange and Gmail.
rixrax 8y ago
I just wish we were able to time-warp back to Windows 7. And start again from there. I liked Windows 7 user experience. I had to boot up one in a VM the other day to debug a legacy issue. I realized how much I really did like it. I liked the control panel and all that. All that unified Metro(?) UI that has been developed since Win7 with mobile and touch in mind (that never happened?), with the new management tooling that seems to be only half way there combined with the near death of native Windows apps has effectively driven me to Ubuntu Desktop. Ubuntu userspace on Win10 is nice but then again, to me Win10 has been reduced to just something I run Firefox or Chrome when needed. Even Lightroom works well enough on Wine nowadays. I get it - I am an old grumpy guy lamenting on change, probably off-topic too...but still, oh boy I wish they had decided to go some other direction! ;-)
- buboard 8y ago
  I use windows 7. I still get updates and nothing is forcing me to update. Life is easy and I can enjoy my coffee.
  - jug 8y ago
    At least through next year, after which it’s EOL.
- illumin8 8y ago
  You can run Classic Shell and get the Windows 7 experience back. I recommend it if you must run Windows; it's probably the only way to get rid of the god-awful Start menu/adware junk that M$ has now.
  - DragoCubed 8y ago
    FYI Open Shell exists.
- amyjess 8y ago
  Honestly, I'd rather time-warp back even farther and start over from Win2k. It was the last version of Windows with a theme that wasn't butt-ugly.
johnchristopher 8y ago
Reminds me of this http://mark-lucovsky.blogspot.com/2005/02/shipping-software.html http://mark-lucovsky.blogspot.com/2005/02/shipping-software.... (from 2005, during the longhorn debacle that would turn into Vista). > I would argue that Microsoft used to know how to ship software, but the world has changed... The companies that "know how to ship software" are the ones to watch. They have embraced the network, deeply understand the concept of "software as a service", and know how to deliver incredible value to their customers efficiently and quickly.
acd 8y ago
Future prediction. Windows is no longer Microsofts core product, Microsofts cloud offering are its main revenue base. As a side effect Microsoft decides to open source the Windows code base. Microsoft is already the largest contributor of open source on Github. Windows becomes a application compatibility layer in Linux and are also ported to Mac OS X. You can now run Windows apps on Linux and Mac OS X including games without the update issue.
- thezultimate 8y ago
  Or maybe they will think that the Linux subsystem is very good that they adopt it as the "main" system. Then Windows becomes Microsoft's official Linux distro.
- EpicBlackCrayon 8y ago
  I'm not sure why I keep seeing this repeated around the net, but that isn't the case. They're working on a rewrite of Windows that is based around UWP called CoreOS. https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os-and-polaris https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os...
codedokode 8y ago
I don't like Microsoft's attitude toward users [1]: > Windows 10 Home users will receive updates from Windows Update automatically when it's available. Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Enterprise users will have the ability to postpone updates. The amount of time that Windows 10 Pro users can postpone updates is limited. Basically: unless you pay a ton of money, we will use you as a guinea pig for testing. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifications https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifica...
giancarlostoro 8y ago
Yeah, if updates were reliable I wouldnt care, but not only are they unreliable, but they autoclose all your important work. So many coworkers get annoyed when they come back to work and Visual Studio and Chrome was closed due to updates so now they have to go back and figure out where they left off. I may see if I can suggest our (uncommonly competent) IT guy to install Windows Enterprise instead for the sake of not being forced to update, although I might run it by our team lead to be sure.
- robbyt 8y ago
  With that attitude, I'll bet your IT guy thinks you're a bunch of complaining idiots. If you're actually respectful to him, and work with him to fix problems, your relationship will likely improve. Managing Windows 10 is hard, and he sort of has an impossible job, as MS updates have become so awful.
nikanj 8y ago
The Onedrive case seemed a bit weird, honestly. The complaint seems to boil down to "beta builds contained bugs". That's the point of having beta builds. It seems a lot of people are using a Google-esque vocabulary where "beta" just means "new and fancy", and are really surprised when the beta release has bugs in it.
captainmuon 8y ago
IMHO the problem is how monolithic the whole OS is built. How the hell is it possible that they "build Windows"? That includes things as diverse as file system drivers or notepad. If I want to make a small change to notepad, I should not have to check out the whole Windows source code, but just notepad. Then you could have different development methodologies for different projects. They should rip everything out piece by piece, and make it an addon. Then you'd have a minimal Windows core, a Windows shell, and the individual accessories. The shell alone would still be a huge project that you'd want to split up ideally. The challenge with such a model is that you have to be really strict with interfaces between components. You have to define these interfaces, you have to quickly provide other groups with interfaces they need, and you have to provide backwards compatibility as long as any other component uses your interface. It's much more work, but it's better than the ad-hoc coupling you get if everything is one monolithic build.

223 points by okket 8y ago

cft 8y ago

As a developer, Windows Home 10 became unusable. It is essentially an update machine, it seizes control and just updates, restarts, i have no control over the machine.

oliveshell 8y ago
I’m on Windows 10 Professional and I’m very happy with the control it (now) gives me over deferring updates— I hate that the feature isn’t available in Home.
- inamberclad 8y ago
  I'm on Ubuntu and I'm slightly shocked that people will put up with a tiered operating system business model that causes so much grief for its users.
  - stagger87 8y ago
    You're shocked people will put up with inconveniences on an operating system in which they develop and sell software for a living?
    - antsar 8y ago
      Its not just developers. $job's entire IT department is full of willful Windows 10 users. When questioned, they defend all these "features" as if you'd insulted their baby. I'd call it Stockholm Syndrome, except nobody is forcing them to use it.
      - jononor 8y ago
        Habit is a strong force.
      - addicted 8y ago
        What are the alternatives? Mac OS means buying unaffordable or underpowered hardware. And being ok with living within the constraints allowed by Apple (on the hardware side). Linux is not a consumer option. Ubuntu, for all its flaws, was the first distro that could actually be considered consumer grade, and that’s why pretty much any mainstream PC maker offering a Linux option offered Ubuntu. But as you can tell by just glancing at the comments on the release for Ubuntu 18.10, even they have seemingly abandoned the desktop market in favor of servers and IOT, etc. And that’s before you get to Linux’s Applications problem. Windows is a fairly solid OS with a few remaining warts which MS stubbornly refuses to address. One of the issues was the years they spent trying to convert it into a Mobile first OS. That was such a waste of resources.
      - throwaway4719 8y ago
        IT departments are often (not always) unfortunately full of intellectually weak people who have based their entire careers around knowing their way around Windows and not much else. Unfortunately it is taboo to acknowledge that people, and especially groups of people have varying degrees of intelligence. Just watch this comment being downvoted into oblivion, for instance.
  - Tsubasachan 8y ago
    Windows runs the software and hardware people use. Until that changes Windows will be around. The real competition to watch is ChromeOS.
    - apexalpha 8y ago
      >The real competition to watch is ChromeOS. In what way? Literally every OS has a browser and all ChromeOS is is an embedded instance of Chrome.
      - DragoCubed 8y ago
        It can run Android and Linux apps. It's a shame we can't customise it as much as Android, despite it seemingly replacing Android on tablets.
cheez 8y ago
"As a developer, Windows Home 10 became unusable" You're not the target market. I haven't had to help my parents with their computers since they switched to Windows 10 home.
- sureaboutthis 8y ago
  In the meantime, my restaurant chain's POS systems and my wife's laptop, which keeps the books for us, are constantly having issues. Support for the POSes say to restart the system every day to avoid problems. (Can you believe we have to do that? It doesn't solve all issues, though.) Haven't a clue what to do about my wife's problems except I hope, soon, to be able to just do a full reinstall. Even better, I hope to replace it altogether with a Linux desktop or, even better, a Mac.
  - will4274 8y ago
    > my restaurant chain's POS systems Just to state the obvious, home versions of operating systems aren't designed to run POS systems for businesses. That's what professional and enteprise versions are for.
    - Piskvorrr 8y ago
      Or even the embedded version.
    - volkl48 8y ago
      Well, those aren't either. That is the intended use-case of the special versions (W10 Embedded or maybe LTSB)
      - nikbackm 8y ago
        The embedded and LTSB versions are practically the same.
    - sureaboutthis 8y ago
      Yes. We're using the Pro version at work. The Home version in the home office.

variable11 8y ago

Constant forced updates are a problem, whether their development process is pristine or trash. And it's trash.

Piskvorrr 8y ago

The process seems to be "we have so much lock-in, that literally no matter what we do, we're driving away only a fraction of a percent of users. We're erasing data left right and center, and users only bend over further." No wonder all stops are pulled out with this attitude.

vezycash 8y ago
I don't think it's this. It's more like they got bullied into this by the media, Apple and the tech community. For years people sang about the many vulnerability of Windows at every turn. IOS spat out new features at a steady pace. On the other hand, MS had to support the ever growing list of Windows versions and their incompatibilities - slowing down their rate of development. The tech community was singing the praise of Lean and MVP. Everyone loved to shit on IE for holding back the web. While praising Chrome for being chrome - having only one version to support. And somewhere along the line, Google got the bright idea to remove the ability to disable Chrome's automatic update. Add all these factors and more that I didn't mention and you'll see how MS came to the forced update decision. Lest I forget, Nadella saw how he could fire Microsoft testers, reduce expenses and raise stock price with a forced update stroke. Irresistible.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Obviously I cannot speak for MS or for other users, but I see a major difference between (IE,Edge,Chrome,FF) and (OS). If an upgrade renders any of the former unusable, it's an annoyance, but there is a fallback a few clicks away. For an OS...sure, I could whip out a live USB (as opposed to most users), but I'm mostly locked out of my Windows apps, and some of my data. If you don't see how an OS upgrade is different from an app upgrade within an OS, I honestly have no better way to explain. (As for IE, don't tell a veteran what the Browser Wars were: IIRC, the rest of the browsers managed to move on without autoupgrades at first, so don't bring up that particular straw man: the issue wasn't autoupdate, it was "IE8 is the pinnacle of browsing, we're not going to update it for years, dev team dissolved.")
- netheril96 8y ago
  You are defending Microsoft's decision to force updates, but as the title says, what drives users away is not that decision but its implementation.

samfisher83 8y ago

I think chrome started that trend with the the auto update. I am just not a fan. With software if you at least know the bugs you can work around them. With constantly changing software you have incompatibility new bugs. At least with pro version of Windows you can kind of disable auto update.

vezycash 8y ago
>At least with pro version of Windows you can kind of disable auto update. Since when? You can turn off Windows update service but it will turn itself back on. Even with Windows update turned off, they still have a way of quietly slipping stuff into your PC.
- tmymt 8y ago
  >Since when? You can turn off Windows update service but it will turn itself back on. Use the Group Policy. >Even with Windows update turned off, they still have a way of quietly slipping stuff into your PC. No.
  - TwoNineA 8y ago
    Which policy? Does it work on non Enterprise versions?
    - tryptophan 8y ago
      No. Windows removed group policies for Pro users for some reason after win7.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - Falkon1313 8y ago
        No, it works fine in Windows 10 Pro. I got Pro specifically for that reason. When you alter the settings, then Windows Update shows "*Some settings are managed by your organization" and a link to see what group policies are set.

chmln 8y ago

Windows update is probably one of the worst engineered parts of the OS. On my quad core i7 with a dedicated GPU it used to take anywhere from 45 mins to two hours to install the big updates and around 30 mins for smaller ones. Not only they take ridiculously long, eventually you are forced to update upon booting in or shutting down. Never mind that you turned on your PC to, you know, get something done potentially urgently. In contrast, I can upgrade my months-stale arch Linux box in under 2-3 minutes. After seeing how much better the same hardware can run, there is no going back.

codetrotter 8y ago
The Windows Update system is engineered so that individual updates can be selected/deselected without affecting the ability to install other updates. The slowness of Windows Update, as I understand, is related to this fact. However, that being said, Windows Update for me as a user that would apply all updates anyway, was unbearably slow, and a big part of the reason that I switched to Linux and FreeBSD years ago and never looked back. I guess for enterprises that want to deselect certain updates for various reasons relating to their setup, Windows Update is probably a great selling point. I still don’t get why it has to be so slow for the default case where all updates are applied though.
- danShumway 8y ago
  > The Windows Update system is engineered so that individual updates can be selected/deselected without affecting the ability to install other updates. This could be me being completely ignorant of the details, but doesn't Linux have the same thing? I can individually apply package updates, even mess with dependencies -- but my computer updates quickly and doesn't require multiple restarts during the process. Usually, unless I'm updating the kernel itself, I don't even need to restart. What are they doing that's even more granular than Linux's update process?
  - tomnipotent 8y ago
    Only this was 1st party updates from Microsoft only, but it felt like you were getting updates from a hundred 3rd party packages.

pmontra 8y ago

Microsoft could have a flawed development process but the slowness of the update procedure and how it seizes control of the machine is much worse in terms of UX. My Ubuntu laptop gets updates almost every day. I could make them happen in background but I want to know what's going on so I make it display the list in a window, check it and click OK. From now on it takes little time to finish, even if there are new versions of the kernel. I recently updated a Windows Server 2016 VM switched off since September and it was a half day long nightmare of downloading / updating / rebooting loops. If I ever considered to move back to Windows (I never did) that would have made me change my mind. Anything but Windows.

coldtea 8y ago
Doesn't sound like a relevant complaint. Your Ubuntu desktop only takes security and bugfix updates regularly. If you've tried going from an Ubuntu LTS to another Ubuntu LTS, 2+ years on, you'd find tons of things changed too -- even if your old LTS had everyday updates.
- simion314 8y ago
  This is true, the difference is that your not forced into feature upgrades, you can stay with an LTS 5 years if it works for you. Second difference is that upgrades will take less times and reboots. There is also a risk that stuff will not work better after the upgrade.
  - Tsubasachan 8y ago
    The Windows equivalent is Enterprise LTSC. Its not available to the common public though.
    - simion314 8y ago
      That is unfortunate, why not have a Home edition that is an LTS, only security updates, less chances of bricking computers or deleting user data. I know MS hated that people were using XP and not buying Win7 but they exaggerated by pushing updates like Chrome browser does.

lawnchair_larry 8y ago

Pretty predictable result when you decide your company no longer needstesters because companies like facebook don’t have them.

oculusthrift 8y ago

am i the only one that’s doesn’t notice windows updates at all? like a lot of people seem to have this issue but i’ve never noticed it

imandride 8y ago
No I as well barely notice them. The only time I have is on my work laptop. But our IT department handles those updates.
emsy 8y ago
You'll notice if you use standby heavily. No problem on my Mac. I think at one point I had a year uptime. Windows will happily close my opened documents and reboot on its own.
- rplst8 8y ago
  I use standby/sleep all the time no issues.
rplst8 8y ago
I have like 4 windows PCs, three laptops and a 5-6 year old desktop. Never an issue, ever.
seba_dos1 8y ago
I don't even use Windows, yet I still notice them when being at a game jam or a similar event. There's always somebody who complains about his Windows that started updating, with the best case being a guy waiting for his turn to connect his laptop and give a presentation, only to notice that it started updating meanwhile :D
kyriakos 8y ago
I'm an insider and i only notice them when i login and I get the "hi" message. they all happen overnight, I used to get warnings for them and a choice to postpone but I just set it up so it runs after 2am and since then never bothered me again.
8y ago

GnarfGnarf 8y ago

Since switching to Windows 10, my Visual Studio debug Output console is polluted with streams of debug statements from within Windows itself. Can't find my stuff. Someone forgot to turn off the debug trace statements in the Release version of Windows. WTF?

chrisper 8y ago
Are you attaching to the kernel?
- GnarfGnarf 8y ago
  Not that I'm aware of. It's just a plain Win32 app, nothing fancy.
taspeotis 8y ago
“Someone forgot to turn off the debug trace statements in the Release version of Windows” You didn’t accidentally install a “checked” build, did you? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/checked-and-free-build-differences https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/de...

JoshuaJB 8y ago

I spent this summer working on a Windows team at Microsoft, and this article is incredibly insightful for an outside perspective. The dev process internally is basically just waterfall sped up 3x. While my team only permitted code commits after adding to and running the tests, that did not seem to be the norm. Almost weekly one of our sister teams would not only break a feature (that happened pretty much every day) but break the build. Things got so bad that as we approached this most recent release, management (under pressure to reduce the number of failing tests) just disabled the majority of our failing tests. While it might slow down some of the feature work, I think it's clear that an always release-ready master branch is the path forward for Windows. Some of my more enterprising managers were already working on splitting our subfeature out of the Windows release tree just so that we could do that when I left a couple months ago. I hope they succeed, otherwise I worry for the future.

alxlaz 8y ago
Hey, do you accept congratulations from someone who's used nothing but Unices for ages now? The stuff you and your (now former) colleagues have put up lately is remarkable. The last version of Windows I used on my home machine was Windows 2000, and Windows 10 is the first one I've looked at since then and said you know, I could actually use this thing, I guess. I don't trust your (former) bosses enough to make the switch, but you folks have done some pretty amazing stuff lately.
- _greim_ 8y ago
  Ha! This makes me chuckle. I myself was a web developer during the decade of IE6 dominance, advocating for Mozilla all the while. Despite it being trendy and contrarian to praise "M$" nowadays, I feel like that ice is only now beginning to thaw. Not so much the coming of spring, but a slight decrease in the hoarfrost on the windowpane. Great shuddering booms as the lake ice cracks. That sort of thing. Yes, if Microsoft continues being non-horrible, I may eventually warm up to them :) Shuffles back to corner. Furtively plays with new TypeScript toy. Hisses at passerby.
  - 8y ago

tannhaeuser 8y ago

I'm aware not everybody will be able to switch, but for me, 2018 is actually the year of the Linux desktop as all my projects and customers in 2018 are using it (plus a decreasing number of Mac OS notebooks still, but Windows is a complete outlier in IT shops). And Ubuntu is not bad at all compared to the alternatives.

bkraz 8y ago

I disabled all wake timers so that the machine will never wake itself from sleep Then, I set the Windows Update active hours to be early in the morning. Now, when I use the computer I wake it from sleep with the keyboard, use it normally, then put it to sleep when done. This has allowed me to install updates when convenient for me since it effectively stops auto update behavior. Sort of like how it should be.

rplst8 8y ago
I like this answer. People who often complain about Windows just don't bother learning how it works. I like Linux just as much, but both have pros and cons.
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  This is not just "learning how it works", this is "learning how it works in order to come up with silly workarounds".
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > People who often complain about Windows just don't bother learning how it works It doesn't work this way, you can just sometimes abuse it to do what was not intended, but it's not meant to be done as in offering you options the official way.
zer 8y ago
Yeah I did the same. It's infuriating to put the machine to sleep only to see in the morning (or days later...) that Windows woke it up at 3am. Is it supposed to go back to sleep or is this honestly how someone at Microsoft wants it to work?

cpeterso 8y ago

I've reported bugs to Windows Insider's Feedback Hub, but none have ever been acknowledged or fixed. So I can relate to the recent stories about critical data loss issues reported but never acknowledged. An issue that affects me daily and would be easy for Microsoft to test: my Bose Bluetooth headphones' computer voice knows how to pronounce all my other devices' names (e.g. "Chris's iPhone"), but it must spell out my Windows machine name letter by letter. Even if I rename my Windows machine to something I know my headphones can pronounce (like "Chris's iPhone"), they spell it out. Perhaps this is a bug in my Bose headphones, but these are very common headphones so I'm surprised no one at Microsoft or Bose has addressed this problem. My hypothesis is that Windows machine names are UCS-2 encoded and the headphones interpret the "extra" bytes as word delimiters.

p2t2p 8y ago
Ha! CardDav and CalDav support tickets has been opened since 2014. Nope. I boot my surface (probably I should’ve sold it long time ago) every once in a while to see if it supports my calendar and contacts server yet. Nope. Every single OS does it. But not windows. What is even funnier is that they actually have support for iCloud which is CalDav and CardDav but nope, no custom config for you.
- bpye 8y ago
  Sadly Android doesn't do CalDAV or CardDAV either, at least without a third-party provider.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    If neither Windows nor Android, the two most widely-distributed operating systems in the world, do not support CalDAV or CardDAV, then who is using these standards? :) I guess Microsoft and Google want to promote their own calendaring solutions, Outlook/Exchange and Gmail.

rixrax 8y ago

I just wish we were able to time-warp back to Windows 7. And start again from there. I liked Windows 7 user experience. I had to boot up one in a VM the other day to debug a legacy issue. I realized how much I really did like it. I liked the control panel and all that. All that unified Metro(?) UI that has been developed since Win7 with mobile and touch in mind (that never happened?), with the new management tooling that seems to be only half way there combined with the near death of native Windows apps has effectively driven me to Ubuntu Desktop. Ubuntu userspace on Win10 is nice but then again, to me Win10 has been reduced to just something I run Firefox or Chrome when needed. Even Lightroom works well enough on Wine nowadays. I get it - I am an old grumpy guy lamenting on change, probably off-topic too...but still, oh boy I wish they had decided to go some other direction! ;-)

buboard 8y ago
I use windows 7. I still get updates and nothing is forcing me to update. Life is easy and I can enjoy my coffee.
- jug 8y ago
  At least through next year, after which it’s EOL.
illumin8 8y ago
You can run Classic Shell and get the Windows 7 experience back. I recommend it if you must run Windows; it's probably the only way to get rid of the god-awful Start menu/adware junk that M$ has now.
- DragoCubed 8y ago
  FYI Open Shell exists.
amyjess 8y ago
Honestly, I'd rather time-warp back even farther and start over from Win2k. It was the last version of Windows with a theme that wasn't butt-ugly.

johnchristopher 8y ago

Reminds me of this http://mark-lucovsky.blogspot.com/2005/02/shipping-software.html http://mark-lucovsky.blogspot.com/2005/02/shipping-software.... (from 2005, during the longhorn debacle that would turn into Vista). > I would argue that Microsoft used to know how to ship software, but the world has changed... The companies that "know how to ship software" are the ones to watch. They have embraced the network, deeply understand the concept of "software as a service", and know how to deliver incredible value to their customers efficiently and quickly.

acd 8y ago

Future prediction. Windows is no longer Microsofts core product, Microsofts cloud offering are its main revenue base. As a side effect Microsoft decides to open source the Windows code base. Microsoft is already the largest contributor of open source on Github. Windows becomes a application compatibility layer in Linux and are also ported to Mac OS X. You can now run Windows apps on Linux and Mac OS X including games without the update issue.

thezultimate 8y ago
Or maybe they will think that the Linux subsystem is very good that they adopt it as the "main" system. Then Windows becomes Microsoft's official Linux distro.
EpicBlackCrayon 8y ago
I'm not sure why I keep seeing this repeated around the net, but that isn't the case. They're working on a rewrite of Windows that is based around UWP called CoreOS. https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os-and-polaris https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os...

codedokode 8y ago

I don't like Microsoft's attitude toward users [1]: > Windows 10 Home users will receive updates from Windows Update automatically when it's available. Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Enterprise users will have the ability to postpone updates. The amount of time that Windows 10 Pro users can postpone updates is limited. Basically: unless you pay a ton of money, we will use you as a guinea pig for testing. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifications https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifica...

giancarlostoro 8y ago

Yeah, if updates were reliable I wouldnt care, but not only are they unreliable, but they autoclose all your important work. So many coworkers get annoyed when they come back to work and Visual Studio and Chrome was closed due to updates so now they have to go back and figure out where they left off. I may see if I can suggest our (uncommonly competent) IT guy to install Windows Enterprise instead for the sake of not being forced to update, although I might run it by our team lead to be sure.

robbyt 8y ago
With that attitude, I'll bet your IT guy thinks you're a bunch of complaining idiots. If you're actually respectful to him, and work with him to fix problems, your relationship will likely improve. Managing Windows 10 is hard, and he sort of has an impossible job, as MS updates have become so awful.

nikanj 8y ago

The Onedrive case seemed a bit weird, honestly. The complaint seems to boil down to "beta builds contained bugs". That's the point of having beta builds. It seems a lot of people are using a Google-esque vocabulary where "beta" just means "new and fancy", and are really surprised when the beta release has bugs in it.

captainmuon 8y ago

IMHO the problem is how monolithic the whole OS is built. How the hell is it possible that they "build Windows"? That includes things as diverse as file system drivers or notepad. If I want to make a small change to notepad, I should not have to check out the whole Windows source code, but just notepad. Then you could have different development methodologies for different projects. They should rip everything out piece by piece, and make it an addon. Then you'd have a minimal Windows core, a Windows shell, and the individual accessories. The shell alone would still be a huge project that you'd want to split up ideally. The challenge with such a model is that you have to be really strict with interfaces between components. You have to define these interfaces, you have to quickly provide other groups with interfaces they need, and you have to provide backwards compatibility as long as any other component uses your interface. It's much more work, but it's better than the ad-hoc coupling you get if everything is one monolithic build.