Security without usability is worthless.
Windows always sucked at this, it just took a turn for worse in Windows 7 and 10. If I tried to come up with a more annoying updates system I really couldn't. It's incredible how difficult it is for them to pull their act together on this one.
I am not sure about windows 7 and 10. We are arguably better off today than in the ActiveX days. It made no sense to require using windows internet exploder to download windows update.
That's what happens when you 1) don't understand the problem you're solving, and push things that aren't appropriate updates through an update mechanism, and 2) lose user trust.
Compare the number of patches vs windows 7 or the number of cases that require a reboot since XP...they are working towards a better system. That being said, I really, I'm not trolling here, think that you can't make users happy in this age. People have been trained by interactions with crap companies, Microsoft included, to go from 0 to apoplectic immediately just to get a resolution. There's no benefit to being a happy user, you won't get your issues looked at...and there are always issues!
Yes. Every single person who turns Windows Update off should be considered a critical bug, and their use case should be understood and fixed. The fact that they instead still use it to push anti-features means they still don't understand why people still turn it off.
If they started, today, focusing heavily on getting people to trust Windows Update again and leave it turned on, they'd have a massive uphill battle. But I've seen no signs that that's a focus at all.
Something that is an "anti-feature" to you is someone else's (in the case of windows, several million someone else's) every day must have.
It has to be unobtrusive to achieve acceptance.
>Lost productivity to malware = 0hrs. Lost productivity to windows auto updates = 28 hrs. Sitting here right now losing time and money to an unauthorized update. I know how to avoid malware on my work laptop.
That's a bit like how some people (who weren't THERE) think the Y2K-thing was a non-event: they didn't see all the work that got done fixing things before the big day.