This.

I'd like to emphasize the QA part and their using the public as beta testers (absolutely true and totally unacceptable). Microsoft's quality control on everything has been terrible lately, which is saying a lot because their quality control has always been crap.

Good thing they have a great marketing team. They will keep producing cool looking ads and presentations that imitate Apple and hope that their customers will forget every buggy and disastrous launch

I don't find the QA part that terrible, freeloaders are the kind of users that would pirate Windows, so rather than being a nuisance they're volunteering themselves to test the OS.

Although it would had been better if they kept their QA teams, since there are issues that only a QA engineer would be able to find.

I agree the privacy and cripple ware issues are bad, but to me that pales in comparison to the decade-plus of shipping vulnerable code that allowed anyone to root your system by serving one bad ad or emailing you one jpeg. I can't fathom how many families lost their photos, or paid hundreds of dollars for a tech to run mbam. How many identities were stolen, how many small businesses lost money, how much productivity lost. All because of the license agreement absolving them of ALL liability and product guarantees.

This is grave, it had a substantial negative impact,spanning over 10 years, and nothing was done about it. If there ever were an unforgivable offense, this was it.

So... you're also going to hate Linux since they left Dirty Cow unpatched for 9 years?

Get real, perfect and secure code doesn't exist.

Then what are their customers paying for? You are aware that paying for something is a contract, presumably for a product or service of value. So effectively you consider the malware a value to the customer ? . You think ignoring security is acceptable?

An EULA is displayed the first time you turn your PC on (or during the Windows setup), if you had read it you would probably know what are you paying for.

Anyway, I suggest you to read the Open Source licenses before hating on Windows about malware, all of them basically say: "If you break your computer it's not our fault", like the following excerpt from the GPL:

  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
  GNU General Public License for more details.

I don't condone malware, but it is pretty obvious that the most popular platform will be the most targeted by malware authors. Too many people fall for the "I don't need AV, I don't use Windows" fallacy, but every software is vulnerable.

The best advice I can give you is the following one: Don't run untrusted code.

So because FOSS has bugs it's OK for a multi-billion dollar corporation to have wanton disregard for quality?

It's "pretty obvious to me" that the biggest software vendor on earth would be aware that their product would be targeted as you say and provide adequate or even reasonable protection for their customers. Not hide behind their EULA as their product was being used in organized crime. This is the "unforgivable offense" I mentioned.

Have you ever heard of "Windows Defender"? They got more than 96.2% of detection rate according to AV Comparatives in September 2016[1].

Have you ever heard of "Windows 10"? They got less CVE vulnerabilities reported in 2016 than Android, Debian, Ubuntu, Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Mac OS X, The Linux Kernel, iOS, even Chrome and Firefox[2].

If these are not examples of "adequate or even reasonable protection", then you got really unrealistic expectations or you're simply hating Microsoft for the sake of hating them.

As I said, it is not possible to deliver bug-free code, and you learn to live with it or you die hating every software vendor in the world.

Just remember, falling in the "I don't need AV, I don't use Windows" fallacy will bite you, and will bite you hard[3].

[1] https://chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php

[2] https://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php?year=2016

[3] https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/the-kernel-org-hack...

Have you heard of System Restore? You know, the utility that was supposed to put things back the way they were should the system ever get messed up? Oh but it doesn't work against malware.

Security is more than being impervious to every conceivable attack. Just being able to restore an infected system would have made their platform "reasonable". But they didn't.

Also, windows defender was YEARS too late. Which was why I specified the 10 year window.

> So because FOSS has bugs it's OK for a multi-billion dollar corporation to have wanton disregard for quality?

That's not what he said. You said you hated Windows because of its vulnerabilities, and he was asking you if you apply that same standard to FOSS, and if not, why not.

I don't think it's healthy to hate Windows or Microsoft, but every reasonable person should at least dislike them with passion for antifeatures, dark patterns and their other stunts, as well as for their lack of respect to customers. Few years ago I had to call Microsoft as a business customer and it was one of the worst companies I ever dealt with. I would never run Windows or Micrapsoft anything in any business setting, even for non critical stuff.

I have a different perspective on this: much of malware these days is state-sponsored. Would you blame the architect who built your house if it fell over in a bombing raid? So why blame the people who built your OS if it falls over due to a discharge of cyberwar materiel? An insurance company wouldn't find the OS-maker at fault, any more than they'd find the architect at fault. (The legal term here is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure .)

> these days

My original comment specified a roughly 10-year period, from about '02-'12. Most of the malware then was not state sponsored. And I'm not blaming MS for having a few vulnerabilities. But literally hundreds, perhaps more. Patch Tuesday ? Really ? Their product was so bad they had to dedicate a day of each calendar month to addressing vulnerabilities.

But what's worse, was the response. They had time to patch all these holes, but not to write code that fixed users' systems from the damage that the exploits did. Or to address the underlying vulnerable model that lets these exploits happen. They just played "poke-a-hole/plug-a-hole" for most of a decade. Someone brought up Windows Defender, wasn't released till October 06, and it didnt' work. Everytime I removed spyware from someones machine I used free tools such as MBAM made by third parties who weren't even being paid by MS! Even with all these vulnerabilities, it would have been better if System Restore actually did just that. They should have architected a system that, in the worst case, could restore you back, _including virus removal_. Thats how you take responsibility in that situation.

Instead, they used the situation to further profit, by releasing more versions of windows. Thats a weaker version of racketeering: "oh, version XP has major security bugs...better pay us to upgrade to Vista!... then to 7...then to 8".

If this were any non-software product, there would have been massive class action lawsuits and recalls. And that would send a message to the whole community that you can't harm people and leave them high and dry

What's your point here? I'm pretty sure companies paying for RHEL or SUSE are happier than they ever could be with Windoze

There's insecure code, and then there's a company that will threaten to fire you if you don't run insecure internal code on their corpnet. Hacked-together internal test app running on an alpha version of .NET that was expected to run on my machine 24x7 that (as one example) wrote to %PROGRAM_FILES, requiring that it be run as admin. Told my manager, "I'm not running that, it's a threat to my machine and the corpnet." "Run it or else", I was told. Not that it mattered, I was probably one of only three people in Visual Studio that didn't run their machines as admin.

This was after the Gates and Valentine emails on how MSFT was going to start taking security seriously. The point is not that I had an asshole for a manager, but that even though MSFT said "security", the boots on the ground often took as just another barrier to their greatest that was to be ignored as much as possible, and implemented just enough to shut up the gatekeepers.

Yeah! Give them back their money! Oh... Wait...

And you are not alone. It has been too much. If not for certain high value programs that run best on a native system, I would not start the old VMWare-virtualized Windows 7 up again.

There are sufficiently good (and cheap) solutions in the Linux community. First Microsoft has to fix what they have been doing wrong for years. And then then have to answer the question what additional value they are providing for the money a company has to pay for their "services".

Hype articles can not undo evil.

I don't forgive the sneaky and forced migration to 10 meaning I get family support calls for the first time in ages. Or the hours spent sorting the laptop that's not fully compatible but got upgraded anyway. Last I don't forgive you for not finding a way that 7 can't bloody ruin 10 via chkdsk. Yet more family support.

Just about everyone likes Aero, so they drop it, as it doesn't fit the failed one desktop, every platform cult. At least other flat gui's actually have some design rather than try to emulate Gem and just use 3 colours. Unlike Microsoft, I understand that's subjective.

Mind, I never really forgave the world for adopting cooperative multitasking and the most horrific API and programming model I've encountered and that was 3.1. Scared me back to *nix for the rest of my career. Trust? Not likely I need to reach neutral first.

I did quite like C# though, despite some wtf moments in the docs! :)

> putting ads on my Start Menu. Or on my lock screen

Anecdotal, but I haven't seen any ads in those places. Been using Win 10 since the preview. I'm not a fan of the "metro" interface/apps. I am a fan of the underlying tech in Windows and the general focus on usability and reliability. My laptop "just works" in every sense of the phrase, and it feels more responsive to my choices and demands than competing platforms (OSX and Ubuntu).

There are ads for Microsoft products in the app store and ads for Office on the start menu in "stock" Windows (installed from MSDN ISO - not from a hardware vendor). The lock screen has an (optional?) theme which displays high-res photos from Microsoft. Some of those photos have been game ads.

I personally think it's unobtrusive, but the ads are there.

The lock screen is especially annoying. They can show ads fine but it takes several seconds to start accepting input from my keyboard.

I don't see the logic of a lock screen. Why doesn't it directly enter my password? Why must I swipe away the wallpaper to access the password box? I mean it's not like my phone that I wake up the laptop just to look at the lock screen notifications. If I wake up my laptop, I'm gonna unlock it! Really dumb ui.

Probably because it is the phone UI.

I agree. Additionally (at least in my experience) - the steps to go through to show the password box are maddeningly different. Sometimes moving the mouse works, sometimes typing on the keyboard works, sometimes neither work and I have to use ctrl-alt-delete.

I have seen both, once or twice months ago on my W10 Pro. [0]

Now they just have new and ever updating artwork on my login screen and it is actually really nice. Often there is a link to "see more" or something in the top left corner and very often I click it and spend up to two minutes looking at nice photos on bing[1]. Yep. I know I have been binged, but i kinda like it, just don't try to search for programming questions, those belong on ddg, worst case with a !g appended.

[0]: this is a bit shameful IMO, pushing ads on paying customers. Please Microsoft employees who hang around here: spread this inside MS, - don't spam paying customers!!!

[1]: this is totally OK with me as long as you do it like you do today with a bit of taste. I actually enjoy it quite a bit. Hopefully it is easy to turn off for those who don't like it.

Microsoft is imitating Google and switching their business model to spyware-as-a-service.

And almost everyone's falling for it, just like they did for Google.

Monopoly can be forgiven. What's happening now cannot be forgiven.

Microsoft is more dangerous now, but it seems people just don't care. They use Windows despite having no assurance that Microsoft won't copy their data unbeknownst to them or spy on them in some way they don't realize or install some software they don't want. If this is better, give me 90's Microsoft anytime. At least they were just out for profits and domination then. I don't know what they're after now, but considering the revelations of the past few years and what this "operating system" does, the fact that they're making this information available to dangerous third parties is almost guaranteed.

The gullibility and stupidity of developers (like the author) is simply mind-boggling sometimes.

With Linux, you could get just what you want or need and it's gratis, courtesy of the community. With Windows, they decide on what you get and encourage you to live with it, even though you cough up lots of dough for it :)

It's almost as if the Windows teams think they're still under Ballmer.

(for them to regain your trust)