The irony behind this is that Upgrade as a word becomes scary once you've already lost ownership of said devices.
We have whole industries that have to rely on Windows 7 and self-built Windows 10 images because they can't upgrade into a shitty cloud-prioritizing OS. Microsoft just completely ignored them, essentially alienating whole industry branches.
Try justifying that a Candy Crush Saga download shut down a high oven, wasting millions of EUR in energy costs, for example. And yes, that happened at a steel factory here. They switched to open source afterwards and reimplemented everything from scratch.
Every industry around chemistry, energy, production, factories, debugging... heck, even the damn hospital ... They all switch away from Microsoft because it just doesn't work without internet. Honestly I don't know how a CEO can be so asleep and out of touch at the wheel. But I guess that's just collateral damage?
> Try justifying that a Candy Crush Saga download shut down a high oven, wasting millions of EUR in energy costs, for example. And yes, that happened at a steel factory here. They switched to open source afterwards and reimplemented everything from scratch
I'm searching for this but not getting any results. Could you share a link where I can read about it?
Well, I must have remembered it incorrectly then. Because not disclosing such a technical failure like this would be at least insurance fraud ... right?
I disable auto-updates for apps on my phone. The Play Store sometimes notifies me about updates, and I ignore them. Today I hit "Update all". The app for my Sony headphones has now been changed, and has an EULA and opt-ins. Skimming through them, I think Sony now wants to upload titles and artist of music and videos that my phone plays... Oh how fucking wonderful.
My WH-1000XM4 is buggy as shit too, I had to disable power-saving (turn off if nothing is playing) because it would randomly switch off in the middle of music playback. And there's a touch gesture to enable "mute when speech is detected", which, when enabled, means when I say something in a Zoom call I can't hear anyone else anymore.. And I can't disable this single gesture, just all gestures in general.
Calvin Trillin is one of my favorite writers. The nonfiction—both serious and humorous—he has written for the New Yorker since the 1960s is particularly good.
Microsoft is perhaps the worst offender in this regard. Every update to Windows makes it worse in one way or another, and it's become quite exhausting.
I would have cut Microsoft a lot of slack if the purpose of Windows 11 was to cut down on the sheer amount of cruft and legacy jank that Windows has acquired over the years.
Alas, Windows 11 is merely rounded corners, a worse file explorer, telemetry galore, and a mandatory Microsoft account meant to hock OneDrive and Copilot on unsuspecting laypersons everywhere.
Even simple applications like calculator and photo viewer now launch with a noticeable delay, no doubt because they have to try and communicate with some Microsoft service somewhere in the cloud before letting someone use an application locally.
Correct, for now. It is getting increasingly difficult to bypass and it’s not unreasonable to think that the command line and registry tweaks that are still available today will get disabled in the near future. Microsoft has already disabled a few bypasses.
Command line and registry tweaks? I didn't bother with any of those and got an unlinked account set up the minute I first booted up Windows, as did all the non-technical folks in my family. Sure, the option is obscured very much during the first launch process, but it's still very much doable by someone without any technical chops.
I bought a gaming PC last year after having not used windows for a long time. It's crazy how much slop has been added. Felt like i had to opt out of 10000 different things to just use my computer without internet/cloud accounts
FYI, it's one of the articles that does not even start scratching the title topic surface in the first 3 paragraphs.
Regarding upgrades. It always requires QA to exist (as some rumor says that for example MS went with telemetry only in win11 instead of a proper QA approach) for users to consider upgrading at all.
When my family would go shopping, the cashier would invariably ask "Did you find everything OK?" and my father deduced that this informal polling was actually so that they could figure out when a large percentage of people answered "Yes", they would then go and reconfigure ("upgrade") the store, rearranging all the shelves and products, so that the regular customers could not, in fact, "find everything OK".
Because for any store, or any shopping mall or city, for that matter, the worst kind of shopper is the one who knows what he wants, makes a beeline for that product, picks it off the shelf and checks out, without having any opportunity to get lost and see other aisles, other shelves, and other products that he doesn't need, but may decide to purchase nevertheless.
That's the cynical take. If a product was hard to find and the customer gives up, that's a lost sale. The store might also want to know if the customer was looking for something that wasn't in stock or not carried by the store, which is also a lost sale.
We have whole industries that have to rely on Windows 7 and self-built Windows 10 images because they can't upgrade into a shitty cloud-prioritizing OS. Microsoft just completely ignored them, essentially alienating whole industry branches.
Try justifying that a Candy Crush Saga download shut down a high oven, wasting millions of EUR in energy costs, for example. And yes, that happened at a steel factory here. They switched to open source afterwards and reimplemented everything from scratch.
Every industry around chemistry, energy, production, factories, debugging... heck, even the damn hospital ... They all switch away from Microsoft because it just doesn't work without internet. Honestly I don't know how a CEO can be so asleep and out of touch at the wheel. But I guess that's just collateral damage?
I'm searching for this but not getting any results. Could you share a link where I can read about it?
Couldn't find another one mentioning unplanned shutdown or similar.
[1] https://www.ssab.com/en/news/2018/08/blast-furnace-shutdown-...
My WH-1000XM4 is buggy as shit too, I had to disable power-saving (turn off if nothing is playing) because it would randomly switch off in the middle of music playback. And there's a touch gesture to enable "mute when speech is detected", which, when enabled, means when I say something in a Zoom call I can't hear anyone else anymore.. And I can't disable this single gesture, just all gestures in general.
Enjoyed them both very much!
I have a mother who uses a desktop to log into her MyChart and VA health systems, and I often have to help her figure out how to log in.
I'm adaptable, but I do lament when features are taken away or made worse.
It's like the phrase "user friendly" has been made into something to avoid.
Alas, Windows 11 is merely rounded corners, a worse file explorer, telemetry galore, and a mandatory Microsoft account meant to hock OneDrive and Copilot on unsuspecting laypersons everywhere.
Even simple applications like calculator and photo viewer now launch with a noticeable delay, no doubt because they have to try and communicate with some Microsoft service somewhere in the cloud before letting someone use an application locally.
Just means you might eventually have to pirate some special SKU of Windows that you can't buy as a normal user.
Regarding upgrades. It always requires QA to exist (as some rumor says that for example MS went with telemetry only in win11 instead of a proper QA approach) for users to consider upgrading at all.
Because for any store, or any shopping mall or city, for that matter, the worst kind of shopper is the one who knows what he wants, makes a beeline for that product, picks it off the shelf and checks out, without having any opportunity to get lost and see other aisles, other shelves, and other products that he doesn't need, but may decide to purchase nevertheless.
Can't imagine that's cheaper than just making stuff easy to find.