There is something I don’t get. I do get that there is still a lot of people running Windows 7. I do get that there is a fair amount of discontent in
[See the full post at: Patch Lady – what gives?]
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
|
Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don't do it. |
-
Patch Lady – what gives?
- This topic has 33 replies, 20 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 4 months ago.
AuthorViewing 15 reply threadsAuthor-
What I never understood regardless of whether it is a good idea or not to use Home users as beta testers and telemetry is why they didn’t try this approach without firing their QA staff until QA staff stopped finding issues for a few months despite the telemetry/home beta testing filter.
This could have given them the answer as to whether it is working or not without having to anger people. Of course, I never thought and I still don’t think it can work well enough without QA and I am still puzzled by how someone with IT training could believe in the miracle of AI to solve that kind of problem in a complete way just by itself. To me, there is something not understood as to the conceptual limits of the technology itself.
5 users thanked author for this post.
-
Well, one relatively little-known thing about Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure: the number of Linux servers they employ has been rising each year for quite a while now. Plus, of all the VMs Azure hosts, nearly 50% are Linux. Just google “Linux now dominates Azure”.
Kind of says a lot (at least to me) about Micrsoft’s commitment and regard of Windows 10. They’ve become one of those tech companies that won’t eat their own proverbial dog food.
With any big ‘tech company, one needs to focus on what they actually spend money on & do, rather than what their marketing folks shovel…
-
Is it Microsoft or their customers who are running Linux?
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
Is it Microsoft or their customers who are running Linux?
Susan Bradley Patch Lady
Both. Over 50% of customer VMs are Linux/Unix. As for Microsoft’s backend cloud servers: I don’t know the current number – but, by now, I would guess at least 25-30% are Linux/FreeBSD. Maybe more. The number keeps growing.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
The market analysts do not look at the technical decisions made by Microsoft, they look at their business decisions. They have been convinced that the corporate strategy – Cloud and AI first – is where MS should lead. (MS says they are leaders in this and the market has bought in to that). They are #2 in cloud revenue generation – the billions they are hauling in here is what is convincing them that they are on track. AI is not doing so well, but the market can see it has potential – they have a wait and see on this even though they have reservations on MS being a leader in the field.
Windows will be mentioned by the analysts in January 2020 in relation to the migration to W10 from W7. The analysts are bullish on the fee based services that will come from that and on the massive Office365 revenues that MS are projecting. That is it for the tech side as far as analysts are concerned – revenue generation.
However, 80% of corporations are expected to put their businesses at risk in 2020 and that is scary. Small and medium sized businesses are at even greater risk. They either stay on W7 or explicitly trust MS. Susan is right, the market is ignoring the elephant in the room. Can MS deliver a stable business environment in the cloud considering their current inability to do so out of the cloud? I think the analysts see this as mere technical issues that will be easily addressed over time. They are ignoring Microsoft’s struggle with stability but if it continues through 2019, that may change. They have to question the projected risk. The MS corporate strategy is a monumental shift from what they have been doing for the past 50 years.
10 users thanked author for this post.
-
Meh. Microsoft is, and has always been, the company that can do no wrong. (Well, maybe not always. First, there was IBM. But I digress…)
No matter what MS does, right or wrong, good or bad, Wall Street just loves them.
Contrast that with Apple (or Google, for that matter). Both are companies that Wall Street loves to hate. One little misstep and their stock is in the proverbial toilet, while MS invariably gets a pass under similar circumstances.
No rhyme nor reason for it. Collective insanity of the Financial Analysts cadre. Same kind of group think that brought us the Great Meltdown of ten years ago. So it goes…
9 users thanked author for this post.
-
Yes. Insanity.
-Noel
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
The for me are several factors that prevent me from even thinking about downgrading to win 10
but the key ones are the snooping cannot be terminated completely, even with 3rd party s/w it often is re-enabled following an update,
Lack of user control over updates like i have in win7,
It’s non-desktop pc syle of gui, and apps i don’t like or want them, it’s like they have forgotten that PC means PERSONAL (my) Computer and not Microsofts, imo
And finally win 10 is sold as a service unlike all previous versions so at any point in time they could introduce a subscription business model
-
-
-
One problem with that though….. here’s your choices: Linux, where the GUI changes radically every few years and you’ll get into regular fights with the command-prompt when drivers stop working for whatever reason
There’s no such thing as “the GUI” in Linux. Linux is a kernel, and it doesn’t have a UI as such. It can run processes that give it a UI, whether that be Bash, a desktop environment under Xserver, or one under Wayland. Linux is not a unified OS where everything comes in one package like Windows or MacOS, and to think of it in such terms doesn’t work.
There are bunches of desktop environments, and some change more than others. Xfce changes very little from release to release, and Cinnamon hasn’t changed much either since its first incarnation. I guess GNOME changed a lot when it went from 2 to 3, which is what triggered the MATE and Cinnamon forks. KDE (which I now use in its v5 Plasma incarnation) doesn’t even feel that different than when I first tried it as 3.5 years ago, and it supposedly changed a lot going to v4 and then again going to v5. There are differences, and I am sure it would be a lot more apparent if I was using it consistently before and after the big changes, but none of it is as radical as the change from Windows 7 to 8, or from 8 to 10.
As far as the driver issue: I understand this kind of thing used to be pretty common, but for the three years I’ve been using Linux on a bunch of different PCs, I haven’t seen it happen. Most of the time, it has worked just fine from the moment it was installed, but in those instances where I had to do some config work, it hasn’t just decided one day to stop working. I’m not sure what constitutes “regular,” but I will say that if anything like that happened now, I would think of it as being highly irregular, given the experience so far.
YMMV, of course, and perhaps you have experience with Linux that goes farther back than mine. Even so, the way it works now is a lot more important to me than how it used to be. Windows, after all, used to be quite a bit better than it is now. Windows 2000/XP in “Classic” remain my high-water mark for Microsoft GUIs, and they’re still the blueprint for how I configure a GUI now. Windows was quite good then, but things change. It’s a shame, because Windows 10 could be a great OS, if Microsoft would just allow it. As long as they’re more interested in having an OS that serves their own needs, it won’t ever be great… or even fit for purpose.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)7 users thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
-
-
If I, as a small business owner with basic software needs (no custom programs or platform-specific ones, at least) am going to be faced with replacing functioning, completely sufficient equipment, operating systems, application packages, and training to get up to speed on replacements mandated for the sake of replacement with a subscription package, riddle me this:
Why pick a vendor who is going to do this to me again in 18 months – forever? Why not pick a different group of vendors, if I am going to have to pay to qualify those replacements anyway, and choose someone who may cost more initially in equipment, but less in ongoing software/training/maintenance expenses, or someone who offers nearly as much variety in equipment at lesser cost and pay a bit more in training?
When that 80% tidal wave of corporations start to choose replacement systems in 2020, does Microsoft intend to hire away all of the MBA school grads who can do a basic ROI just ahead of time? I truly think that it will be time to unload any holdings in Microsoft and Microsoft-specific packages about 6 months into 2019.
5 users thanked author for this post.
-
-
I think you made a very strong argument for ditching MS and adopting either MacOS or Linux. You can get Linux preinstalled by Dell and others such as System76. So you can have hardware vendor support. Both options may be initially a little pricing as Apple charges more for their hardware and preinstalled Linux tends to be on higher end boxes. But as you noted, spending some upfront money for hardware and some training may be money well spent when the boxes ‘just work’.
You describe a common enough scenario, you are business that does not really rely on Windows specific application types. So switching to some other offering such as different office suite is very doable.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
-
It is very natural on a board like this, which has at it’s essence the real world technical behaviour of Windows with a strong focus on desktop, to conflate the deficiencies of Windows 10 and the financial performance of Microsoft. This product is .#%#%#$#?#%….. Microsoft will suffer…..
But it won’t.. Windows revenue (OEM and desktop licensing) is what 11 or 12% of Microsoft and falling.
Wall Street and the other financial markets care not one jot about your issues with Windows, they just care about the headline numbers/money. The very real issues raised by Patch Lady that some of Microsoft’s new house may be built on sand from a technical viewpoint are not factored into the share price because analysts/investors don’t understand them. (The juxtaposition that the financial markets are now based on very complicated tech but the people who enrich themselves there understand almost nothing about it astonishes me)
But… If the trials of the last couple of years re updates and OS bugs are actually indicative that Microsoft has lost it’s competency with its core code, and not just a lack of interest in a desktop OS, then that may “switchback” viciously on Microsoft and it’s stock value. Not because of any problems with Windows but because they will be unable to deliver the growth numbers in the cloud/AI/Enterprise that now constitutes their business.
Their “sudden” embrace of open source may have already signposted their own jitters that they had no chance of hitting their cloud targets without Linux. No great wish to be “part of the community”, just a hard nosed money choice?
-
We are seeing an example of the stock market’s short-term focus and analysts’ disinterest in investing the effort to study longer-term impact or real fundamentals.
Years ago, my father taught me that if you want to understand how much Wall Street and the media know about the world, just ask yourself what they know about the industry in which you work every day.
The phenomenon Susan describes is currently the subject of much passionate criticism by well-informed observers of the rail industry, where I worked for many years. Railroads have something in common with Microsoft, namely the need to make long-term and sometimes long-shot investments in revenue producing assets and the corresponding temptation to settle for milking those franchises rather than reinvest the cash flow.
“Wall Street”–mainly the bystanders who pose as analysts, loves cash flow and thinks railroads are doing all right, some better than others. The customers and retired executives (who are finally free to express their views), not so much. They see the railroads hunkered down, buying their own stock back, taking a pass on what they could make of themselves–perhaps because, like Microsoft, they are blind to the opportunities.
I marvel at the stupidity, just as Susan does. This is why we have bubbles and stock market crashes. The stock market does not now and never has perfectly capitalized risk and return.
5 users thanked author for this post.
-
IMHO, “What gives” is the same old Emperor’s New Clothes thing. People are prone to bouts of irrationality when they get worked up about the next big thing (think stocks in the 1920s and real estate in the 2000s), and even more so when the herd is collectively heading in the same direction. If the entire group is talking about how innovative and wonderful Microsoft is now, it becomes incredibly easy to deny the incredibly obvious negatives and “go with the herd” in terms of opinion. It’s the same as the discussion about “the cloud,” not surprisingly, given Microsoft’s desire to re-invent itself as a cloud company.
People who know computers enough to realize the negatives to all of this are written off as not understanding the “new paradigm,” while marketers who are skilled in spouting buzzwords they don’t understand are hailed as if they are prophets of wonderfulness. The people who know computers know enough about the terms being thrown around to recognize that the sales pitch is a bunch of nonsense, but they’re not the intended audience.
Bosses who want to seem “with it” and knowledgeable (rather than being derided as out-of-touch Luddites like the members of the IT department, as bizarre and contradictory as that is to suggest that the people who know the most about computers understand the least about computing) fall into line behind the marketers, fearing that not doing so will give a clue to everyone else that they didn’t understand the marketing spiel (which nobody else did either, because it didn’t actually make any sense in the first place). No one seems to notice that all of the things the so-called Luddites have been predicting all along seem to happen with alarming regularity, being in the news on nearly a daily basis.
If the corporate yes-men have a choice between being called a Luddite who doesn’t get the new paradigm or being called a visionary who has his finger on the pulse of innovation, they’re going to choose the second one– and they do. Analysts who want to be relevant have to trumpet the new thing as being the greatest ever, because failing to do so will get them thrown into the “doesn’t get it” dungeon with the IT department. If living and breathing computers (as the IT department does) isn’t enough to protect a given person against the accusation of not “getting it,” what hope does a market analyst who actually sees things for what they are have in the face of all of this irrational exuberance? What good does it do to be a Cassandra, being the odd one out who says that all of this is a house of cards, only to be ignored until it’s too late? It’s great to be vindicated, but it doesn’t pay the bills. If you want to get paid, you have to tell people what they are paying to hear, and right now, that’s that the cloud is awesome (and so is Microsoft, because they’re all about the cloud now).
That’s how we get to a point where the real money is in promoting the next great thing, not in telling the truth. As an analyst, you can miss the mark time and time again, but if you’re telling people what they want to hear right now, they’ll happily pay you anyway to validate their already-made decision. A reputation for accuracy means nothing if no one is willing to pay you for accurate predictions that happen to run counter to the outcome they wanted to hear.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)7 users thanked author for this post.
-
I really wish that when someone says “the cloud” as if it is it’s own independent thing, that a genial flash mob popped up and chorused back “someone else’s computers”!
Talking consumer environment, not managed systems by pros. But dangers lurk there too…..
-
-
What’s to get? There is MS’ (lack of) user commitment and there is MS’ spin. What makes PC operators rant is that the spin insults our intelligence.
2 users thanked author for this post.
-
As I watch MS slither off into the back waters of the IT industry it is because of monumental blunders made by the current management team I find they are playing out the same type of mistakes IBM made before. MS is at a crossroads, either they become the staid, boring vendor of useful products like an OS and an office suite or they jump on the latest bandwagon. The first means they transition from a company that will be like Ford or Toyota, if done right, that is profitable in a mature market. This is not how the IT industry views itself. Or they jump on the latest marketing bandwagon with a ‘me to’ offering. The second means they have to constantly find the new bandwagons and time the jump well. Miss and a lot of money is wasted. If they make the play of being the staid and boring they will have good profits going forward as people do need computers and applications to make them useful. Someone has to provide the OS and applications for this. This is an area MS understands well.
My personal opinion there are no mass growth areas in IT for the foreseeable future. The only sales growth will from population growth and economic development of 3rd world countries. Neither is sexy or going to have high sales growth. In fact in the near term there could a sales decline as replacement rate settles down. The cloud and other buzzword bingos are mostly niche plays with a relatively short high growth periods. Miss them as large companies typically do and miss the growth spurt.
There is a pattern in economic history when a major industry develops. In the early period there is a lot of innovation as problems are solved and practical solutions become worked out. In this period, the product is not widely adopted. Towards the end of this period, the product becomes both usable and affordable enough that it transitions from a luxury to a ‘necessity’. During the transition period there is industry consolidation and rapid sales growth. At some point, the product is being used by about everyone who will actually use it (which is some fraction of the population) and the sales will flatten out and innovation slows. In a mature market, an elderly model is often still very serviceable as it still does what people what it to do. So sales are more driven by the retirement of worn out items and repairs becoming uneconomical not by the release of a new model or version. Phones and computers are basically mature products which are more likely to be replaced as the device wears out than there is new X just released.
5 users thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
-
Viewing 15 reply threads
Plus Membership
Donations from Plus members keep this site going. You can identify the people who support AskWoody by the Plus badge on their avatars.
AskWoody Plus members not only get access to all of the contents of this site -- including Susan Bradley's frequently updated Patch Watch listing -- they also receive weekly AskWoody Plus Newsletters (formerly Windows Secrets Newsletter) and AskWoody Plus Alerts, emails when there are important breaking developments.
Get Plus!
Recent Topics
-
Windows 10: Microsoft 365 Apps will be supported up to Oct. 10 2028
by 43 minutes ago
-
Add or Remove “Ask Copilot” Context Menu in Windows 11 and 10
by 50 minutes ago
-
regarding april update and may update
by 2 hours, 19 minutes ago
-
MS Passkey
by 8 hours, 5 minutes ago
-
Can’t make Opera my default browser
by 9 hours, 59 minutes ago
-
*Some settings are managed by your organization
by 32 seconds ago
-
Formatting of “Forward”ed e-mails
by 8 hours, 53 minutes ago
-
SmartSwitch PC Updates will only be supported through the MS Store Going Forward
by 1 day, 4 hours ago
-
CISA warns of hackers targeting critical oil infrastructure
by 1 day, 13 hours ago
-
AI slop
by 3 hours, 41 minutes ago
-
Chrome : Using AI with Enhanced Protection mode
by 1 day, 14 hours ago
-
Two blank icons
by 2 hours, 36 minutes ago
-
Documents, Pictures, Desktop on OneDrive in Windows 11
by 1 day, 23 hours ago
-
End of 10
by 2 days, 2 hours ago
-
Single account cannot access printer’s automatic duplex functionality
by 1 day ago
-
test post
by 2 days, 8 hours ago
-
Privacy and the Real ID
by 1 day, 22 hours ago
-
MS-DEFCON 2: Deferring that upgrade
by 55 minutes ago
-
Cant log on to oldergeeks.Com
by 2 days, 12 hours ago
-
Upgrading from Win 10
by 1 day ago
-
USB webcam / microphone missing after KB5050009 update
by 1 day, 4 hours ago
-
TeleMessage, a modified Signal clone used by US government has been hacked
by 3 days, 4 hours ago
-
The story of Windows Longhorn
by 2 days, 16 hours ago
-
Red x next to folder on OneDrive iPadOS
by 3 days, 6 hours ago
-
Are manuals extinct?
by 6 hours, 48 minutes ago
-
Canonical ditching Sudo for Rust Sudo -rs starting with Ubuntu
by 3 days, 15 hours ago
-
Network Issue
by 3 days, 2 hours ago
-
Fedora Linux is now an official WSL distro
by 4 days, 3 hours ago
-
May 2025 Office non-Security updates
by 4 days, 4 hours ago
-
Windows 10 filehistory including onedrive folder
by 4 days, 5 hours ago
Remembering Woody
