I don't use Windows, but have to touch it once or twice a year for various reasons. It's absolutely wild whenever I do. I go to launch Notepad and the Start menu decides to inform me about some mass murder situation or the latest horrible politics news or some natural disaster?! I just wanted to write down some text, not spiral into depression. Who asked for this?
It was being shown a tweet from Nigel Farage (Brexit starting British ‘politician’ [never elected as an MP]) in the start menu that made me start swearing at work one day when I had to do some Dev on Windows. Like, yeah anyone can tweet all they like and what have you, go nuts - but I don’t want that crap shown to me at work when I have to get stuff done.
Honestly would have been frustrated if it was a politician I actually liked.
But I agree it's absolutely nuts that advertisements and "suggested content" is included as standard without a very clear prompt on first use saying "you can turn this off if you like"
-- or perhaps a "set this PC up as a work machine" choice in installation that automatically shuts the noise off and adds the Windows classic theme rather than the weird start-metro hybrid we have now.
I'm not sure I'd pay any price for modern Windows 2000, but I'd certainly sing its praises which is something I've never been able to do.
I'd pay to remove the 2021 social media/marketing BS, sure.
But there's no reason for them to do that. They can instead offer Windows VIP down the line as a subscription-model recurring payment to keep ads and other shit away.
This isn't anything specific to Microsoft, this is what any company that wants to maximise its profits would do.
Doing the right thing isn't "what's right for the consumer" any more, it's "what's right for everybody" -- but where "everybody" is defined as the provider, its shareholders, and perhaps whatever subset of all customers contribute the most to the bottom line.
Has to benefit the provider, "they're running a business not a charity" -- an innocuous line of dialogue from the movies that can be used to justify almost any shitty, consumer-fucking decision you can think of, because we're capitalists, it's 2021, if you're not squeezing every dollar out, you're not doing it right.
Except people in the movies who said shit like that were typically gangsters or at least crooks. But they're the heroes now. The notion that they did wrong never really stuck -- they made lotsa money, you can't blame them. But they got caught, so work hard, run after that dream, they got the idea right -- money is what you want, just gotta be smarter than those silly gangsters.
Do it cleverer -- make your racket legit. It's not extortion, it's a subscription. It's not protection, it's premium. It's not more than they can afford, it's almost too little, they don't even know it's gone.
You can't, really. De-Crapifying Windows 10 (and I imagine 11) is a never-ending task.
Doing it manually is exceedingly painful. Doing it even with Scripts is fraught with danger and may result in things just being broken because of stupid dependencies.
And then there's a good chance that you'll find it's been undone with the next Windows update. That chance goes to 100% over the course of a year or so.
I think this is what made me so annoyed - we were doing lots of interesting low level, performance related stuff across platforms so this machine must have been the extra ++ Enterprise whatever version of Windows and the associated development software, cost was pretty much not a concern.
And yet, this is what we have to put up with. If it was free I’d understand…
The problem with Enterprise isn't the cost. It's that in 2021 Microsoft still can't make a webpage that asks for credit card details and gives out product keys.
To acquire an Enterprise license legitimately, you need to go through a reseller and pad the order with inexpensive client access licenses to reach the 5-license minimum order.
I wonder if part of it is a "covering ears and singing" thing.
Right now, the trend is all about the recurring revenue. Not just Windows, every bloody product is that way. It doesn't matter what bridges they burn in making a horrible customer experience, as long as they can show Wall Street a chart saying it returns 35 cents per month per customer in ad/behavioural tracking data sales.
But what happens if we have something that shows that's not a winning strategy? If, say, the Windows Enterprise license at $175 ends up outselling a $100-plus-$50-in-nickel-and-dime-revenue-over-the-next-five-years Windows crammed with bloatware? How would investors respond?
I don't use Windows, but have to touch it once or twice a year for various reasons.
I'm in a similar situation.
I have to fire up the company ThinkPad every other month or so. It's amazing to me what is permitted in an so-called "Enterprise" edition of Windows 10.
The part I find most annoying is the way Windows 10 automatically connects to my wifi, even when the setting to not permit auto-connect is enabled. I didn't care when I was in the office, but now that I'm in a work-from-home situation, no, Windows, you don't get to connect to my LAN whenever you feel like it.
After checking and re-checking the setting probably a dozen times, but it persisting in auto-connecting to my router, I had to ban the ThinkPad at the router level. Now on those occasions when I use the machine, I have to remember to un-ban it from my network for the duration of the task, then re-ban the machine.
Microsoft (and my billion-dollar healthcare company) are working with a definition of "Enterprise" with which I was previously unfamiliar.
The part I find most annoying is the way Windows 10 automatically connects to my wifi, even when the setting to not permit auto-connect is enabled.
Have you tried disabling the network adapter? That's something it won't try to revert... (and I'm almost tempted to add "for now", given all the other abusive behaviours they've introduced.)
haha I started using a Windows 10 laptop from work recently and had a similar experience. I asked IT why they didn’t suppress it in their controlled deploys and they said no one knows how to do that...thankfully it’s not my only computing platform, I’d go mad.
Jeez at the beginning of the day I just want to write code with only the distraction of measuring my work against user requirements. shouldering aside Guilt tripping adware all day harshes my mellow, upsets my flow, makes me waste my energy daydreaming of revenge hacks (fantasies of course, I’m very mellow at heart, but with a wellspring of ideas definitely NotSafeForPublicAttribution).
There is a group policy to "turn off windows consumer experience". To edit local group policies win 10 pro is needed. It is also possible to change the register value. See the link for more info.
I'm pretty sure they think it's good for "engagement" --- the new euphemism for distracting users and pulling them into scenarios where they can be monetised via ads or otherwise.
The older versions of Windows were definitely far "quieter", but I guess MS saw how a lot of average users had installed adware themselves, and thought that they could also profit from bundling it by default.
