See? "Blah blah blah not MS problem (plus a poorly veiled accusation of piracy, to add insult to injury)"
Anyway, doesn't matter now if the GWX fiasco was malicious or not. Damage is done.
Re:Ask: Has Microsoft spent your trust
by WorldMaker on Thursday July 21, 2016 @11:08AM
(#12137346)
Sorry, was not accusing of piracy, only possible ignorance. I've worked with companies that didn't know the difference between Home and Pro and Enterprise SKUs and I don't think everyone realizes how many small and medium sized business run on Windows Home editions.
Windows is a huge ecosystem and there is a lot of blame to pass around in every direction. I admitted that it was an MS problem, but I was also trying to point out that it was an ecosystem problem too. (There hasn't been a major driver architecture change between Vista and 10 and it blows my mind how many drivers needed new releases every Windows version between Vista and 10 and weren't just magically compatible.) Apologies if that point did not come across well.
Thank you for the clarification; my apologies for venting at you as if you were MS. There were ways that the organization should have blocked the upgrade better; and I agree that the need for new drivers where old ones ought to be fine is definitely not MS's fault.
I don't attribute that to malice but an honest mistake. I think there was a combination of engineering pride involved ("Why wouldn't people want to upgrade as soon as they could?") and engineering obstinacy ("We don't want another XP!"), perhaps even more than that marketing metric everyone thinks they were focused on.
As for the anecdote of the business outage. My condolences. It sounds like the HW vendor should have done a better job at messaging to Microsoft that their existing hardware driver was not testing compatible with Windows 10 (and maybe a better job at their driver in general). Also, companies had the options to use System Center and Group Policy to drive GWX away, and admittedly that's not an easy admin task, but generally something companies should do for mission critical PCs anyway. (Not to mention that GWX is/was different on Enterprise SKUs and possibly a sign your anecdotal company was using not properly licensed Home or Pro SKUs on mission critical machines.)