According to their analysis, Windows XP doesn't even know what the word "telemetry" means: the first DNS traffic from the freshly-installed OS was to try and contact the Windows Update service, and that's all. No market research, no browsing tracking, nothing at all.
Windows from that era was indeed absolutely quiet, and the first-boot experience from a fresh install was basically a "blank slate". It just sat there on the desktop without doing anything, and waited for you, the user, to do something with it.
Now the first-boot experience comes with disturbingly creepy patronising messages, a start menu filled with ads, and immediate "notifications" which are even more ads, and while that's happening, it's doing tons of stuff in the background that they probably don't want you to know about. All of this "modern" stuff just has a very repugnant aesthetic, and acts like you're not the user, but an unknowing idiot to be milked for $$$. I guess MS saw how much spyware many users would eventually install themselves, and wanted to get their suck of the sav.
Yes, the default listening services were the worst as they were easily exploited; but most users are behind a NAT, and you could still disconnect from the Internet and apply the update first, or disable them. More precisely, it was common in those days for connecting to a network to be one of the last things to do, after already having set up a lot of other things before that.
The fact that some versions of Windows 11 require an Internet connection just to install and go through the initial setup seems like it could be even worse.
Windows from that era was indeed absolutely quiet, and the first-boot experience from a fresh install was basically a "blank slate". It just sat there on the desktop without doing anything, and waited for you, the user, to do something with it.
Now the first-boot experience comes with disturbingly creepy patronising messages, a start menu filled with ads, and immediate "notifications" which are even more ads, and while that's happening, it's doing tons of stuff in the background that they probably don't want you to know about. All of this "modern" stuff just has a very repugnant aesthetic, and acts like you're not the user, but an unknowing idiot to be milked for $$$. I guess MS saw how much spyware many users would eventually install themselves, and wanted to get their suck of the sav.