I think sometimes you have to break it to make it good/great again, like the first Mac OS X release. That's my 2¢.

The fact that Microsoft is increasing revenue on Azure, for example, shows they are jumping on a bandwagon that should give them another revenue stream that they can use to reinvest. I might be wrong, but that's how I see it.

As someone that primarily uses windows, that's not my experience at all.

Windows 7 was great; Windows 8 was a parade of misguided user experience experiments, Windows 8.1 was at best a patch over 8 (I still needed third party extensions to make the experience decent).

Windows 10, I no longer need third party extensions, I no longer need the VMs for Linux that I use to keep around with the WSL. Honestly, I've been pleased on the whole.

We can talk about privacy and the biggest misfeature that has cropped up in Windows 10 (automatic upgrades, especially automatic restarts... which I've since disabled)... but on just day-in-day-out user experience Windows 10 is vastly superior as compared to Windows 8.x.

But is 10 significantly better than 7?

Not particularly, I would think, for the average user. The WSL stuff is a major improvement for me personally, I also recently bought a new workstation class system where I had the choice of 10 Pro or 7 pre-installed and, not having any legacy software issues to worry about, chose 10. I was happy with 7 and am happy with 10. All other things being equal, the newer version would seem to make more sense.

Again, unless you're concerned about the privacy issues or have special need for non-automatic updates/restarts, which really I think are a minority of users, 10 carries incremental improvements in my experience. Having said that, the free upgrade period would have likely been a good thing to take advantage of for the average 7 user... paying for the upgrade now, not so much.

> 10 is definitely a step back from 8.1, from what I've seen

10 has been an advance in every single aspect I can think of. What are you seeing as being ruined?

I agree mostly, however there are the issues of privacy, ads embedded into the OS and forced updates.

> issues of privacy

I'll definitely give you that.

> ads embedded into the OS

If it's the lock screen ads, I have to say as ads go, I think they are actually the most unobtrusive ads I've ever seen. I actually just had to look up what they were, because I keep seeing them getting mentioned. Turns out, I have seen them, I've just ignored them every time, because when I'm looking to unlock my computer it's generally because I'm about to do something, and spending time futzing around with a small text overlay on the lock screen image isn't it.

So, I don't particularly feel like the lock screen ads are especially egregious. Though, I also got the free upgrade from Windows 8, so maybe that effects my opinion.

> forced updates

I am fully for this. We've seen what a world without forced updates looks like. The only reason the recent major DDOS attacks didn't have a bunch (or as many?) of windows PCs participating is because MS has gotten really serious about security, and making sure it's actually applied.

Also, there is a way to disable forced updating, and that's through a registry hack. You might think that's too complex, but I think that's the perfect level of complexity for what we are talking about. If someone isn't comfortable finding a specific location in the registry and manually changing a value, they definitely have no place determining whether their system should opt out of auto-updating.

I don't know. From what I (and many others) have seen, Windows 10 is a big improvement over 8.1.

How so? I personally don't like all the pre-installed and unremovable stuff like Xbox, the fact that turning off Cortana is now really difficult, and how many knobs you have to turn to keep the os from sending everything you type to MS. Is that what's is ruining it, or is there something else?

It is easy to use Windows Firewall to block XBox, Cotana, etc from access Internet. I blocked all windows 10 services (svrhost) layer from Internet except DNS and NTP. In my windows 10 system, only firefox get to the net unrestricted.

After that, windows 10 is actually a joy to use.

I did that, but it meant I couldn't use Bing anymore (I like it because I can use the "ip:" search operator to find domains hosted on a certain ip address).

That's been the argument since Windows XP and to a lesser extend Windows 98SE were released. Too much has been added! From my experience the thing I dislike about Windows 10 is how often I find myself using WidnowsKey+X to use it.

I've been around a bit longer. I remember that pretty much every "major windows version" (including the first) drew ire from Microsoft PC users. People complained about the transition from DOS to Windows (which was rough), from Windows 3.1 (and WFW) to 95, 98 to ME (probably one of the worst transitions), 98 to XP, XP to Vista (which had 90% of what everyone loved in 7), 7 to 8, and now 7 to 10.

Each iteration people hated it, then loved it. I don't think it's any kind of "Stockholm syndrome", each version introduced and refined new functionality that people grew to love. What a "Desktop OS" means seems to be really in a state of flux right now, so it remains to be seen if people love 10 (I'm enjoying it, but then again I liked Vista).

The "consumer" editions have become more restrictive indeed. But the professional editions, Microsoft bread and butter, is the same as always as best i can tell.

I wonder if Terry is more to blame.