I think using ad-based monetization was short-sighted and will damage their brand in the long term, but presumably they did the math and decided it was a good idea anyways.

Can you give me some examples of ad-based monetization, please? I'm on Windows 10 Pro with suggestions turned off, so all I've seen is a popup that suggests using Edge.

I don't see this as being particularly different from Google showing me an advert for Chrome every time I do a search....

I expect ads when I visit someone's store. I don't expect ads in my home, even if I'm just renting it from someone else. That's the difference that I see.

And now you have.

Just had a look at my Windows 10 Pro with suggestions turned off and there aren't any ads like that. Or maybe it's because I've never downloaded a game.

However, if I had found one, it doesn't seem like it would be worth too much hysteria.... though I confess that the Chrome adverts on Google's search page actually do annoy me. Slightly.

Of course, I use Google Search much much more often than the Windows 10 start menu ;-)

It's a very useful 5GB, given that its part of the OS and you can save to it like an internal drive.

Of course, in the long run, Microsoft wants people o sign up for Office 365, which provides 1TB per person. That way you get 5TB of storage for peanuts, as well as the full desktop Office and integrated smartphone and tablet apps.

I double-checked to be sure. My "free" 15GB of storage in Gdrive is actually 0GB (ie zero, nada, nothing) because I have almost 15GB of email in Gmail.

The same amount of email in Outlook still leaves 5GB free in OneDrive, for new users. (I have 25GB because Microsoft grandfathered my earlier storage.)

If you're a normal person then you'll probably use 200MB (my wife) to 1.5GB (me) shooting jpegs. I checked my folders.

If you think 5GB of OneDrive is a suitable option for a pro/semipro/serious photographer shooting RAW then I suspect you may have more serious problems than OneDive...

Also, Microsoft is not currently monetizing users, except via Bing. Microsoft does almost no ad selling (it farmed ad sales out to AOL), and it's the opposite of Google. There's roughly a 95/5 split, but with Microsoft, it's more like 5% ad revenues.

Unlike Google, Microsoft doesn't read any of your content (eg emails) for advertising purposes.

I can't stand the trend toward flat design. It was stupid with Windows 8, and I held out on Windows 7, hoping that 10 would bring some sense back to the interface. Instead, they doubled-down on the poor design, and I'm finding just how little I need to use Windows on a day-to-day basis, when Linux is becoming more and more user-friendly.

Unfortunately, it does mean that I only have until 2020 to finish up my backlog of Windows-only video games, before the long-term support of Windows 7 runs out.

The UI in Windows 10 is inconsistent and ever changing. Do you have to do something in the flat design portion or in the older Win7 style? It's akin to having to attempt to plug a USB2.0 cable into your computer three times.

I'm so sick of the inconsistency of the GUI that I just pop open PowerShell and gwmi things I want to manipulate.

One example is networking. I have a Windows 8 based tablet that I upgraded to 10. The networking is very iffy when rebooting and I often have to disable it and then re-enable the device in "Network and Sharing Center-->Change Adapter Settings". Trying to do this in the flat design way never works. Now what if I want to manage the list of WiFi networks or prioritize them? There use to be a link in the Network and Sharing Center in the bottom left. Once upon a time you could also click on the icon on your current active network which would then give you an option to manage.) That doesn't work for me anymore. I now have to do that in the flat design "Settings".

I also had to go into the registry to get a full pop-up keyboard. The option to enable it was just greyed out. And upgrading to the Anniversary edition on this 32GB tablet required a full reinstall and very carefully timed insertions/removals of a USB hub. Upgrading to Win10 from Win8 actually shortened the OS support lifetime for many of the 32GB tablets. Continued Win10 support requires updating of Win10...

Combine that with the Metro apps that I've paid money for just disappearing for good from my library, and I wonder why anyone puts up with this?

It was actually easier to do the 32 bit Linux UEFI workaround than reinstalling the Win10 Anniversary update.

You're not gonna like 2017 Linux then. The superflat, super-trendy themes have the most users and are pretty much the only ones that see regular updates. Which are required because tl;dr GTK3.

Vertex and -- honest to God! -- a Win 3.x lookalike are virtually the only decent alternatives that work for more than six months.

Someone built a "smaller" version a while ago, but it hasn't been updated, so it no longer works on recent GTK versions.

I used Linux on the desktop from 2004 to 2008; I cannot stand it today.

Welcome to data-driven software development. Good luck turning back that tide....

Obviously Microsoft itself realises this, because Windows 10 Enterprise is essentially a different product. In the spirit of sharing good luck, I wish you luck in finding any large corporate IT department that will adopt an OS as their standard platform without the ability to control exactly what gets updated and when.

The trick Microsoft seems to be trying to pull with Windows 10 is getting everyone else to be the beta testers for its enterprise customers. Commercially, I imagine that makes a lot of sense if you can do it, since surely those enterprise customers are far more valuable to you.

Other customers, who can choose from ever more alternatives for activities that used to use a Windows PC by default, might not be so keen. Casual home users rely more on alternative devices like phones, tablets, and consoles these days. "Prosumers" and small businesses can work with Apple gear or Linux, either on their own merits or simply because if a lot of the services you use are available online then it doesn't much matter what OS you're running locally anyway. With Windows 10 Pro being such an odd beast, I wonder how much longevity Microsoft's apparent strategy actually has.

Welcome to the modern world.

> Windows 10 Enterprise is essentially a different product.

Windows 10 Enterprise is essentially the same product. The timing is slightly different.

> I wish you luck in finding any large corporate IT department that will adopt an OS as their standard platform without the ability to control exactly what gets updated and when.

Try the US Defense Department, Accenture, and Bank of America.

Adaptiva Names Surge in Windows 10 Adoption Among Major Enterprise IT Industry Predictions for 2017 http://www.adaptiva.com/blog/2016/adaptiva-names-surge-windo...

100% Windows 10 Adoption Rate by 2019; 50% by 2017, Say Gartner and Citrix http://1reddrop.com/2017/01/05/100-percent-windows-10-adopti...

That doesn't make it a good thing, though. Getting to our usual dashboard now takes about half a minute on Google Analytics instead of about two seconds, thanks to their latest UI update. Facebook have lost a small fortune in advertising revenue from my businesses because of all the times that they've changed their management pages so they simply didn't work when we were going to run ads.

So are a lot of other programs, including browsers.

And with my professional web development hat on, "evergreen" browsers that update every six weeks are among the worst things that have ever happened to the industry. It's the same culture that also brings us a new JS framework every five minutes and a new half-baked, non-standardised CSS feature every ten. None of this is good unless it actually helps people to do more online, and all too often the reverse is true.

Welcome to the modern world.

Thanks, but I'll keep my old school systems where things like stability and reliability matter more than this week's shiny new UI chrome. That's why we still run Win7, we run Linux servers, our web sites and apps only rely on standardised, well-established features, and so on.

Try the US Defense Department, Accenture, and Bank of America.

Are you seriously claiming that the US DOD and major financial institutions let Microsoft install arbitrary updates and reboot their systems whenever they feel like it? I find that impossible to believe.

As I said, Windows 10 Enterprise is essentially a different product.

They are among the organizations moving to Windows 10. In fact, most organizations are moving to Windows 10.

DoD-Wide Windows 10 Rapid Deployment to Boost Cybersecurity https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/688721/dod-wide...

Clearly, it is...

> and whether giving up control over the update process is acceptable to everyone

Clearly, it's not. But the adoption rates for Windows 10 show that it's acceptable to the vast majority of people.

> by having a very different upgrade regime for Windows 10 Enterprise

Really? How is it "very different".

It isn't clear at all that bundling security and UI updates is the way things are going. That may be true if you look at very narrow parts of the market, but for example all of our servers and pretty much every piece of software we run on them get separate, individually installable security updates that very deliberately don't change any other functionality (and with extremely high reliability, don't break anything in the process either).

But the adoption rates for Windows 10 show that it's acceptable to the vast majority of people.

That's still a stretch. Nearly two years after release, even with very aggressive promotion including literally giving it away to home users for one of those years, it looks like Windows 10 still has far less market share than Windows 7. I don't know see you can get to "vast majority of people" from there.

As for businesses, large enterprises may be moving towards 10, though I note that the citations you gave earlier were invariably future predictions by analysts rather than actual adoption numbers. However, as I keep saying, large enterprises are getting a version that is very different, because it doesn't suffer from problems like having mandatory updates (or telemetry etc.) that have been widely criticised in other editions.

In contrast, and in complete opposition to your earlier claim that most organisations are moving to Windows 10, I mostly work with smaller tech businesses, where approximately none are currently moving to Windows 10 as their standard platform and several are actively looking into alternatives. If that experience is even remotely representative of the wider customer base, the nerfing of the Pro edition is going to hurt Microsoft if they don't fix it before the 2020 deadline. These companies don't have "IT departments" and they don't want "enterprise licensing deals". They want to buy new PCs that they can use to do their work, and for the less technical businesses, they usually want those PCs to be something Bob from Customer Support can set up because he knows a bit about how the office network works and has a list of which software they usually install for new starters. Getting away from all the other hassle is a big part of why cloud-based services are so popular.

On Statcounter numbers, Windows 10 has more usage than Windows 7 in the USA and the UK. That's unheard of for a new Microsoft OS, where most people don't update until they buy a new PC.

> I note that the citations you gave earlier were invariably future predictions by analysts rather than actual adoption numbers.

Some are already doing roll-outs and pilots are at an all-time high. It normally takes corporates much longer to get to this stage.

> by having a very different upgrade regime for Windows 10 Enterprise

Really? How is it "very different".

Here are a few more sources for you to consider:

StatCounter global[1]: Win7 47%, Win10 34% (of Windows desktops)

Wikimedia[2]: Win7 22%, Win10 9% (of all platforms)

USA government analytics[3]: Win7 25%, Win10 17% (of all platforms)

The only serious source I know that has consistently shown Win10 coming out ahead for a while is Steam, which is obviously looking specifically at the gaming market:

Steam survey[4]: Win10 49%, Win7 37% (of all platforms)

That's unheard of for a new Microsoft OS, where most people don't update until they buy a new PC.

It's also unheard of for a new Microsoft OS to be not just given away to home users for a year but promoted through a campaign that was widely accused of trying to trick people into upgrading even if they didn't want to.

Some are already doing roll-outs and pilots are at an all-time high.

There seem to be a lot more pilots than roll-outs, though, even in enterprise land. That in itself is quite telling.

Really? How is it "very different".

Enterprise users have full control over which updates to install and when. Home/prosumer/small business users do not.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/de...

[2] https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit...

[3] https://analytics.usa.gov/

[4] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

The difference is that I don't have a freeing of privacy on a cloud (and especially here it's an automated computer program that's doing the reading, it's not that engineers are reading my emails).

I do not care if the ads in my file manager are free or paid for today. What reason do you have to believe the in-OS ad-delivery infrastructure that is currently operational will not be monetized? It's a reasonable extrapolation, especially given the following caption from the article "How can you tell this is an ad? The dollar sign is one clue."

...which is precisely what a large portion of the userbase who chose Microsoft did not want.

In fact the upgrade is still free through the "assistive technologies" loophole, which while MS has officially said they would close "very soon"...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4vmz19/regarding...

...that was 7 months ago and yet the page is still up and AFAICS lets you download the upgrade installer.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/windows10upgra...

(I have not tried actually running the installer, because I have no intention to deliberately use Windows 10.)

Also, MS has posted the full ISOs for free download on their site, so if you're really desperate and know how, you could just download them and crack it yourself. That would be unheard of a few years ago. The general message seems to be louder than before, although it has been the same for many years: if you really don't want to pay for it, we still want you to use Windows 10.

Do you have any evidence that it's a large proportion of the user base? Windows 10 already makes up the majority of PC usage share in the USA and the UK (on Statcounter), and Microsoft says corporate adoption is at unprecedented levels for a new version of Windows. (Mostly pilots at this stage, obviously.)

More people use Window 10 than have used all versions of Mac OS going back to 1984, and in its first month, it had more users than Linux got after 20-odd years.

There are always hold-outs: I gather some people still cling to OS/2 and maybe even Amigas. There used to be a cult that said you'd have to prize XP out of their cold dead hands.

However, the fact is that Windows 10 absolutely has to work for the US Defense Department (which is already switching to Windows 10), Bank of America and practically all the S&P500, so you can be confident that it will.

Hasn't that always been Microsoft's modus operandi? They could have cracked down on pirated versions of their software (Windows, Office), but they didn't because they knew that piracy helped in making their software the de-facto standard.

I should note that though I switched away from Windows back in 2001, I think they're definitely on the right track under Satya Nadella. I'm a big fan. It would have been very, very easy for Ballmer's successor to nail the lid shut on the coffin into which they were climbing. He's turning that around and winning fans along the way.