WX 1809 update negligence gets worse

So, do you remember that "bug" in the 1809 update, that finally prompted Microsoft to pull it yesterday? Well, here's the thing about that... funny story... it's not new. As reported by ZDNet:

As ZDNet reported yesterday, the Windows 10 October 2018 version 1809 upgrade hasn't gone well for a bunch of users who lost documents and photos after updating.

What's worse, it appears that Microsoft may have let this bug slip through testing with Windows Insiders during the preview of Windows 10 version 1809.

As noted by MSPoweruser, Windows insiders hit the exact same snag during Microsoft's preview phase of the Windows 10 version 1809 when updating from version 1803.

For some unknown reason, moving up to Windows 10 version 1809 may delete all the files in user folders. The folders remain, but the files within them are gone, leaving users in potentially a worse pickle than ransomware victims experience.

WX's spring update was delayed from its originally planned April launch into May by an unspecified-but-serious issue, but Microsoft never did say what the issue was. Apparently this was the issue, and it's certainly enough of an issue to have justified the delay of the 1803 update's rollout. The fact that WX still has this issue, though, and that Microsoft didn't think it important enough to delay the 1809 update's rollout, elevates this from incompetence to malice. It's simply mind-blowing.

And the only defense against this happening to you, both with this update and with and and all future updates, is Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage service, which is not free if you need to back up more than 50GB of data. It's as if Microsoft is engaged in a low-key shakedown of the entire WX user base. Holy ransomware, Batman! Except this ransomware is your OS, and thus can't be avoided.

I've said it before, I'll say it again, and I'm not alone in saying it: I don't care if it comes from Microsoft, Windows 10 is malware.

I'm starting to think that Microsoft really burned their OneDrive bridges...

Spotted on MSPowerUser:

Windows 10 users finally have a cloud storage option which offers actual privacy

[...]

Cloud storage is great and increasingly essential, as we move to PCs with small SSD storage and multiple mobile devices with even less.

Unfortunately, these usually come with very stringent terms of service which mean companies are free to snoop on the content of these online drives and explicitly forbid uploading items which may raise copyright or obscenity concerns.

Fortunately for Windows users, there is one company which has always thumbed their nose at both of those community standards, and they have now released a UWP app for Windows 10 users on phone and PC to try out.

Currently, in alpha, the MEGA Privacy app is a secure cloud storage service that gives you 50 GB free storage space. Unlike other cloud storage providers, your data is encrypted and decrypted by your client devices only and never by the company itself, which means they never know what your online archive contains.

Yes, you're reading that correctly: that's Kim Dotcom's MEGA, being touted as a better option than OneDrive, because privacy. That's the same Kim Dotcom who's been fighting extradition from New Zealand to the U.S. for years, and who founded MEGA because his previous cloud storage venture, MegaUpload, is totally frozen on dead servers, preventing data from being accessed by those who legally own it; that's the legal legacy of the man who founded MEGA, which is now being touted as a preferred alternative to OneDrive, because Microsoft has fucked up the privacy file that badly in Windows 10.

Ouch.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Creators Update, which was supposed to help jump-start Windows 10's stalled adoption among consumers and businesses alike, is still garnering headlines exclusively for its bugs and rollout delays, making it only slightly less of a disaster than the Anniversary Update... by which I mean that it took over a week for the issues to become the exclusive public focus of all the coverage, rather than being the focus from day one. All this is happening with only one more day to go before we get to see what sort of an impact the CU is actually having on those aforementioned adoption rates. 

Ouch, again.

Oh, and Microsoft's bid to take over Apple's position as a consumer electronics juggernaut, selling not only the software but also the hardware to consumers who would then become captives to its walled garden Windows 10 ecosystem? That's hit a snag, too, with sales of Surface tablets dropping as better, cheaper alternatives start to take over the marketplace, and Microsoft trying to handwave off dropping sales numbers as the result of "product end-of-lifecycle dynamics." Yes, having neglected the mobile market until after iOS and Android had divvied up all the territory, and having then neglected Windows Phone to death, they're now apparently neglecting their Surface division. The Surface line was the one thing Microsoft had going that looked last year like an unqualified success, but even Surface is now also starting to decline, as nimbler competitors push Microsoft out of the hardware market without selling enough units to really bolster Windows 10's adoption rates, more broadly.

Triple ouch, I guess?

There's no particular mystery about the Windows 10 strategy; it's pretty obvious what Microsoft need to happen, here, for their long-term plans to continue being viable. I do have to wonder, though, if anyone's actually assessing their progress towards those strategic goals, and starting to wonder if maybe their current tactics were unwisely chosen. Because they seem to be all over the fucking place, tactically, unable to maintain any kind of focus or messaging tone for any length of time at all. Every time they take a baby step in a positive direction, they follow it with a month of fuck-ups and missed opportunities, blindly sticking to a play-book that doesn't seem to be working, really. 

Microsoft are big enough, and have a large enough lead in the desktop OS market, that they can afford to absorb the associated costs of these missteps for a while yet, but I have to wonder how much longer they can keep it up before their shareholders start to catch on? It's one thing for Satya Nadella to want to take Microsoft in a bold, new direction, but it's another thing entirely for them to alienate their customers, to the point where Kim fucking Dotcom looks like better option, by insisting on an array of consumer-unfriendly practices that keep coming back to bite them over and over and over again. All of these lingering issues, these unforced errors, seem to be keeping them off-balance, unable to talk and their chew gum simultaneously, while consumers (and, thus far, enterprises) continue using what we know works, rather than becoming part of Windows 10's highly experimental way of doing things.

Is Windows-as-a-Service even viable, given Windows' complexity and the range of hardware that it's already running on? I'm not the only person who's asking that question, and the evidence in favour is far from conclusive. So far, Microsoft has rolled out exactly two major updates to Windows 10, both disastrously, but they're still committed to rolling out two such updates a year, every year, for the rest of time. How is that going to work? And if they can't even deliver on that part of the Window 10 package reliably, how in hell are they planning to win back the hearts and minds of consumers who are choosing MEGA over OneDrive because they don't trust Microsoft anymore?

We're just hours away from NetMarketShare's end-of-April snapshot of the PC OS market place; I'm not expecting Windows 10 to have made any significant gains at all (significant, remember, meaning greater then the margin of error of the report itself, which I've been guesstimating at +/- 0.05%). So, my question is, exactly how long does Windows 10's adoption have to stay flatlined before Mr. Nadella will admit that his chosen strategy, or at least his chosen tactics, were chosen unwisely? Or, failing that, how long can he retain the confidence of Microsoft's shareholders, while the glorious Windows 10 future remains maddenly out of reach?

This is why I'd like to see Cortana become an optional thing.

From PC Gamer:

Windows 10's search is a constant source of frustration

Small, unsolved issues with finding files and settings menus persist while Cortana hogs the spotlight.

Two years and two major updates later, Windows 10 is mostly the OS I want it to be. It's fast, stable, and the recent Creators Update included a lot of small changes we liked. But search—a feature I use every day—still annoys the hell out of me. The Windows 10 Creators Update did nothing to improve Windows 10's basic file system search results, which will on occasion omit program results for no obvious reason, bury its own menus, and default to searching the internet with a browser I don't use instead of surfacing one of my own files. These failings are a daily reminder that Microsoft's search priorities and my search priorities are not identical.

[...] When I want to set up a task to complete, I use Asana. When I want to send an email, I use Gmail in my browser. I think the real problem is less being old fashioned, and more that I already have specialized tools or preferences for doing the kinds of tasks Cortana can handle, and I don't solve most of those problem with Microsoft services.

When I hit the Windows key and start typing, there's one thing I want Microsoft's help with: getting to my files as quickly as possible. Windows 10 has some problems with that.

This, in a nutshell, is why half of PC users, and over half of Windows users, are still using Windows 7.  

Microsoft wants to be in control of every aspect of your PC use, from your choice of OS, to updating your OS, to buying the software, to accessing your own damn data. They want to be Apple, serving apps to a captive marketplace with them taking a cut of every single program installation; and they want to be Google, replacing your browser of choice with their own, and using Bing for fucking everything, even though nobody uses Bing outside of Microsoft's employees; and they want to be Amazon, skimming a little more off the top by storing your data on their cloud-based OneDrive service, and selling you extra storage space when your OneDrive is full, in spite of the fact that your Terabyte-sized hard drive almost certainly isn't. 

And, you know what? I understand that. I understand why Microsoft would love to leverage their dominance on desktop and laptop PCs into market share dominance of the cloud-based businesses that they hadn't cared about until companies like Google, and Apple, and Amazon all started challenging (or surpassing) their market cap. I get it. I really, really do Get It. I just don't care.

Here's the thing: Microsoft having missed the boat on web search, or mobile computing, or cloud-based server and storage services? Those are Microsoft's problems. They're not our problems, and I personally don't give a flying fuck about any of them. Microsoft keep trying to make their problems into our problems, and I hate that. Seriously, there are very few things that will piss me off faster, almost none of which are things that I come across on regular basis. 

And Microsoft just keep doing this, shoving all things Windows 10 under users' noses at every opportunity, over and over again as if we haven't been refusing Windows 10, by which I mean actively avoiding the fucking thing, for nearly two years now. We can't ignore their shit, and we can't forget their shit, because they won't let us.

Seriously, Microsoft, how can we ever start to miss you, if you never fucking leave us alone?

Microsoft's OneDrive app runs like @$$ on Windows OS rivals.

Have I mentioned yet, that I kinda love The Reg's tech writers? Because I do.

From The Reg's Iain Thomson:

Ever since Satya Nadella took over the reins at Microsoft, the Windows giant has been talking up how much it loves Linux – but it appears this hasn't trickled down to its OneDrive team.

Plenty of Linux users are up in arms about the performance of the OneDrive web app. They say that when accessing Microsoft's cloudy storage system in a browser on a non-Windows system – such as on Linux or ChromeOS – the service grinds to a barely usable crawl. But when they use a Windows machine on the same internet connection, speedy access resumes.

Crucially, when they change their browser's user-agent string – a snippet of text the browser sends to websites describing itself – to Internet Explorer or Edge, magically their OneDrive access speeds up to normal on their non-Windows PCs.

In other words, Microsoft's OneDrive web app slows down seemingly deliberately when it appears you're using Linux or some other Windows rival. This has been going on for months, and complaints flared up again this week after netizens decided enough is enough.

"Microsoft has been pulling this stuff for the last 30 years and won't stop any time soon," huffed one penguinista on Tuesday. "If you commit to using their products, expect to be jerked around if you try to do anything other than live in their expensive walled garden."

We asked Microsoft for comment, but the software giant didn't want to talk about it. If we're being charitable to Redmond, we'd say this is a case of Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Yeah, once again, I don't think that Hanlon's Razor applies: Microsoft does this shit so often, and so consistently, that it can't simply be incompetence. Don't get me wrong, a company that large almost certainly employs at least a few idiots, but for this idiocy to keep happening in every aspect of their business, it has to intentional, and it has to be systemic. Once is an accident, and twice is a coincidence, but we're well past the point of this being one or two isolated incidents; this is a well-established Microsoft pattern.

It is cool to know what that malice/stupidity saying is called, though: Hanlon's Razor. Thanks, Iain!

Now, full disclosure: I don't use OneDrive, so this issue isn't affecting me. My objection here is not a personal one. This is a matter of principle. Microsoft have been working very hard to give the impression that they're big on Linux, and gaining some decent PR in the process, but it's bullshit. When Forbes opined that "Microsoft has decided that the operating system is no longer an important battleground, and that it’s more important to gain market share in cloud (Azure and Office 365) than it is to put energy into battling Linux for application market share," they were mistaken. Microsoft is all about forcing users onto Windows 10, right now, to establish the walled garden ecosystem on which they're clearly relying heavily for their future.

Microsoft really have bet the farm on this strategy. They really don't have a plan B. And their mounting desperation is becoming increasingly obvious, too. This is systemic; they really are doing this, and they really don't care how much damage they do to their own brand and reputation in the process, but they really haven't left themselves any other options. They need the ad revenue. They need their cut of Windows 10 Store sales. They've given too much away, at this point, and don't have any way to walk that back. At least, not one that Satya Nadella can see, or one that he'll sign off on.

GG, Satya Nadella. GG.