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The stated purpose of telemetry is to improve their products. Yet the telemetry itself is a massive problem in their products. Does anyone know what, if any,

by nfoz 7y ago

The stated purpose of telemetry is to improve their products. Yet the telemetry itself is a massive problem in their products. Does anyone know what, if any, product improvements have been made thanks to telemetry?

suby 7y ago
Microsoft gave two examples where telemetry helped them in an Arstechnica article a while back. One was fixing a bug in their alarm clock app, the other was fixing an audio driver issue. If these are their go to examples, seems to very much not be worth the price of admission in my opinion. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/microsoft-opens-up-on-windows-telemetry-tells-us-most-of-what-data-it-collects/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/micro... "As an example the company offered us, there was a problem with the Windows Alarm app. The Alarm app can have more complicated interactions than one might think, due to its interactions with system sleep (it can wake a machine up if necessary) and the notification framework. Some Windows users reported that their alarms weren't consistently going off. As is often the case with annoying bugs, the problem was intermittent, appearing to occur randomly and hence difficult to reproduce for debugging. With information collected at the Full level from a broad range of affected machines, the company's developers were able to ascertain the precise combination of factors leading to problems, and discovered that alarms became more unreliable as they grew older. The bug was fixed, and a patch was deployed. Another problem the company described to us was that certain combinations of audio drivers and audio hardware were resulting in audio that was broken or missing certain special effects. The telemetry data enabled the exact pairings of drivers and hardware that had issues to be pinpointed, enabling a fix to be developed."
- stordoff 7y ago
  > If these are their go to examples, seems to very much not be worth the price of admission in my opinion It's an especially hard sell for me as, anecdotally, I've had _far_ more issues with Windows 10 than I ever had with 7. Recent one (1903 update) - virtually all text disappeared (desktop icons, menus, Notepad docs all appeared blank, and it made the address bar in Chrome take up about half the screen for some reason). On about 1/10 reboots, it would _eventually_ work if I restarted explorer.exe (text would start appearing in Task Manager, which was my cue to restart explorer). Safe Made, clean installing my graphics divers (assuming it was some sort of rendering bug), and sfc/DISM all failed to fix it. I eventually fixed it by (which was a shot in the dark more than anything): 1. Taking ownership of C:\Windows\Fonts 2. Deleting everything in \Fonts except files that are in use 3. Using sfc /scannow to restore to contents of \Fonts 4. Restoring ownership to Trusted Installer All in all, not a fun process, and a couple of hours lost. I then wasted another 20 minutes or so as subsequent Windows Updates were failing, so I rebooted a few times to retry and was troubleshooting Windows Update. Apparently it was just installing in the background, but didn't feel like telling me that (it was just saying "Install now", then giving me a generic error code). Similar issues have happened often enough that I'll delay updates until I know I don't _need_ my machine for at least a day. I never got to that stage with XP/Vista/7.

by nfoz 7y ago

suby 7y ago

Microsoft gave two examples where telemetry helped them in an Arstechnica article a while back. One was fixing a bug in their alarm clock app, the other was fixing an audio driver issue. If these are their go to examples, seems to very much not be worth the price of admission in my opinion. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/microsoft-opens-up-on-windows-telemetry-tells-us-most-of-what-data-it-collects/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/micro... "As an example the company offered us, there was a problem with the Windows Alarm app. The Alarm app can have more complicated interactions than one might think, due to its interactions with system sleep (it can wake a machine up if necessary) and the notification framework. Some Windows users reported that their alarms weren't consistently going off. As is often the case with annoying bugs, the problem was intermittent, appearing to occur randomly and hence difficult to reproduce for debugging. With information collected at the Full level from a broad range of affected machines, the company's developers were able to ascertain the precise combination of factors leading to problems, and discovered that alarms became more unreliable as they grew older. The bug was fixed, and a patch was deployed. Another problem the company described to us was that certain combinations of audio drivers and audio hardware were resulting in audio that was broken or missing certain special effects. The telemetry data enabled the exact pairings of drivers and hardware that had issues to be pinpointed, enabling a fix to be developed."

stordoff 7y ago
> If these are their go to examples, seems to very much not be worth the price of admission in my opinion It's an especially hard sell for me as, anecdotally, I've had _far_ more issues with Windows 10 than I ever had with 7. Recent one (1903 update) - virtually all text disappeared (desktop icons, menus, Notepad docs all appeared blank, and it made the address bar in Chrome take up about half the screen for some reason). On about 1/10 reboots, it would _eventually_ work if I restarted explorer.exe (text would start appearing in Task Manager, which was my cue to restart explorer). Safe Made, clean installing my graphics divers (assuming it was some sort of rendering bug), and sfc/DISM all failed to fix it. I eventually fixed it by (which was a shot in the dark more than anything): 1. Taking ownership of C:\Windows\Fonts 2. Deleting everything in \Fonts except files that are in use 3. Using sfc /scannow to restore to contents of \Fonts 4. Restoring ownership to Trusted Installer All in all, not a fun process, and a couple of hours lost. I then wasted another 20 minutes or so as subsequent Windows Updates were failing, so I rebooted a few times to retry and was troubleshooting Windows Update. Apparently it was just installing in the background, but didn't feel like telling me that (it was just saying "Install now", then giving me a generic error code). Similar issues have happened often enough that I'll delay updates until I know I don't _need_ my machine for at least a day. I never got to that stage with XP/Vista/7.