> Can you imagine trying to fix something when some of your users are just unwilling to let you try anything to fix it?

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.

Do you really think that they don't understand what problem they are solving?

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!

> Do you really think that they don't understand what problem they are solving?

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.

Wow, man. Talk about back seat driving. Why do you think that they have spent over a decade refactoring the operating system into smaller components that can be installed and updated independently? What about peer-to-peer updating and all of the updates that not only don't require a reboot but don't require any user intervention whatsoever?

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.

That's not what I'm referring to. I'm talking about things like misclassifying updates as "important" or "critical" rather than "optional" to get them installed onto more systems, which makes people stop trusting that distinction.

The laptop which reboots at an inconvenient time isn't "fixed", from the user perspective it's "broken".

It has to be unobtrusive to achieve acceptance.

You say sorry and you try to make the upgrade process less disruptive.

They've been doing that over the last couple of OS versions. XP to 7 to 10. Granted it's still not great, but it's improved vastly. It has a long way to go. I just think that it's really hard to please end users these days for a variety of reasons that don't all relate to software quality.

Windows 10 updates are far more disruptive than XP's ever were.

That's just not the case. I've been a system administrator for a very long time and I can promise you that updates on XP were much worse. Much, much, worse. XP was better than 2K, but wow is 10 better. It's a different world altogether.

They've had a problem of upgrades being painful/slow/difficult, and so people not doing the upgrades. They've fixed the second part by taking away the choice; the first is barely changed.