Reminder: Windows 7 really is the new XP

Back during the darkest days of Microsoft's GWX campaign, when they'd abandoned all pretense of believing in the quality of the product and offering Windows users a free upgrade, and instead started switching users' systems to Windows 10 no matter how many times they'd refused previously, it was already becoming clear that Microsoft had done lasting harm to their own brand, and to the relationship of trust and goodwill that they'd previously enjoyed with users of Windows 7.

I wasn't alone in referring to Microsoft's GWX fiasco as "upgrade-gate," or to point out the consequences with which Microsoft would have to deal for the next several years; pieces like this one, from Makeof.com, were pretty easily found at the time:

Steve Jobs famously said “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Microsoft must think this is true for Windows 10. And so its developers keep finding new ways to trick Windows 7 and 8 users into upgrading because surely they will like Windows 10 once the see it. Or they’ll just surrender.

Personally, I do like Windows 10, but I also appreciate the reasons of those who oppose the upgrade. And I think what Microsoft has been doing is deeply disturbing and unethical. Microsoft acts as if its goal for 1 billion Windows 10 users supersedes the company’s responsibility for its existing Windows customers.

This reckless battle has unintended consequences, which not only hurt Microsoft’s customers, but also its business.

From loss of trust in the Windows; to users simply turning off Windows Update to avoid the hated GWX payloads; to actual monetary costs in the form of lost time, bandwidth, and productivity; reasons abounded why Microsoft's overly-aggressive GWX push was a bad idea. And while the worst of these for Microsoft, "Home Users Will Abandon Windows," hasn't yet come to pass, there's still no sign that consumers have forgiven Microsoft for the liberties, excesses, and borderline (or actual) abuses of GWX.

Microsoft's GWX push was of a piece with Terry Myerson's Windows-centric strategy, which Microsoft has since abandoned. Two years after GWX's failure, Myerson is no longer at Microsoft; his Windows and Devices Group no longer exists, its various teams having been redistributed across other business units which, according to Microsoft, are actually the future of the company. And Windows 10 is still not as popular as Windows 7... depending on who you ask, of course.

The fallout from GWX still hasn't stopped falling, either. Every month, Microsoft delivers updates for Windows 7, and every month, the description of those updates includes the same disclaimer: "does not include windows 10 upgrade functionality." That's still necessary, more than two years after GWX; that is truly epic levels of fail.

But it actually gets worse for Microsoft.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

Do you remember when Microsoft's vision for Windows 10 involved blocking normal program installation by default? When they had to make a big deal of the ability for users to enable "side loading," as if it was some sort of fucking gift that Microsoft were giving us out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than because Windows Store was a wasteland of shit that consumers wanted no part of?

They didn't stay backed down for long, though. It was only six months later that they were announcing Windows 10 S, a gimped version of the OS which didn't even allow the option of turning side-loading on unless you paid to upgrade from WX S to WX Pro. They ended up making upgrades free for the rest of 2017, because the Windows (later Microsoft) Store was still a wasteland of shit that consumers wanted no part of. Oh, and WX S was also unusably bad, because there were no apps for fucking thing.

Well, it turns out Microsoft still isn't done trying to force Windows users onto their horrible, horrible digital storefront for fucking everything, because they're trying yet again to do exactly that. Just, you know, not with people who've already switched over. No, it's only new WX users who'll get fucked.

From Tech Republic:

Windows 10: Get ready for more PCs that only run Microsoft Store apps by default

Microsoft is planning to update all versions of Windows 10 to incorporate S Mode, which will limit the machine to only installing apps from the Microsoft Store, according to a leaked roadmap.

Because of course they are. This has always been the plan.

English & Windows 10 gain some Steam

The Steam Hardware & Software Survey for January is out, and it would seem that the Steam community has finally stopped bucking the overall OS market trend: WX's share of Steam users is up, and substantially, from last month, even as Windows' overall share of Steam declined in favour of MacOS:

Interestingly, W7's losses to WX track pretty closely with another trend that Steam Survey watchers have been keeping an eye on in recent months: the rise (and now fall) of Simplified Chinese as Steam users' language of choice:

The last few months' surge in Steam market share of both W7 and Chinese had been attributed to the surging popularity of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) in China.

PUBG is still the top-selling game on Steam, a position that it's now held for nearly a year, and it's unlikely that we'd have heard anything about declining PUBG concurrency numbers, since attention tends to be paid only when concurrency records are being broken, but it's possible that PUBG's popularity has finally cooled the slightest little bit, allowing market norms to reassert among Steam's users. Keep an eye peeled in the coming weeks for stories about PUBG "dying," though, since the other thing that media outlets of all types love is a good "falling from grace"narrative.

Still, it looks like WX is finally starting to climb back towards parity with W7 among Steam users, even as Windows overall loses users to OS X, which is exactly what we see in the broader OS market, too. For a change. This is just one month's data, though, and you know what they say about once being a freak occurrence; I'll want to see three months' of consecutive WX gains in the Steam Software Survey before I'll call this a real trend.

There's no denying that these numbers fit with the overall trend, though. We'll just have to wait and see if the trend continues into next month, or if WX starts to eat into W7's overall market share more in coming months than it's done to date.

Do you remember when WX was supposedly on pace to surpass W7 by November?

NMS's end-of-January numbers are out, and once again, WX has managed modest gains at the expense of Windows XP, while W7 and W8.1 remain mostly unchanged. And, no, WX still hasn't caught up to its nine-year-old rival.

WX gained, of course, from 32.93% to 34.29% (+1.36); W7 ticked down, from 43.08% to 42.39% (-0.69); W8.1 ticked down slightly, from 5.71% to 5.56% (-0.15); and XP slid the most, from 5.18% to 4.05% (-1.13). Except for W8.1's, all of these results are above the ±0.5% "noise threshold," but WX's gains are not enough to encompass the losses of W7, W8.1, and XP. Some of those former Windows users are going elsewhere.

Where are they going, you ask? By the looks of it, Apple. Windows' overall market share slid from 88.51% to 87.79% (-0.72), while MacOS grew its overall market share from 9.02% to 9.95% (+0.93), propelled by MacOS X 10.13 (from 3.53% to 4.46%, +0.93). An overall decline in Windows' user base probably isn't something that Microsoft want to see; yes, WX gained more than a percentage point to start the year, but the fact that those gains are mostly coming at the expense of the 16½ year old XP, rather than the market-leading W7, can't be good news, either.

Windows 10 can still be had for free, weeks after they claimed to have closed the last free-WX loophole

BTW, I've just decided to start abbreviating Windows 10 to "WX," which is both shorter and consistent with GWX branding already used by Microsoft. For brevity and consistency, I'll also be using "W#" for earlier versions (i.e. W7, W8, W8.1), and simply adding the appropriate suffixes for other flavours of WX when needed for clarity (WX-Home, WX-Pro, WX-Core, WX-S, etc.).

It took Microsoft until two full weeks after their Dec. 31st deadline, and change, to finally close the Assistive Technologies loophole, which allowed users to upgrade to WX for free if they were willing to say that they used any kind of Assistive Technology... up to, and including, hot keys. You might thing that the end of the last of the Microsoft's officially free WX offerings would mean the end of stories about how you can still get WX for free.

Well, you would be wrong. Check out the "most relevant" result that Google News returns for "Windows 10."

Yes, that's Forbes, with yet another piece on how WX can still be had for free, now two weeks after the last free WX window was allegedly closed.

Windows 10 was free for a year after launch for anyone who had an older version of Windows. For those who missed this transition period it was possible to get an upgrade right up until the end of 2017, a loophole Microsoft has now closed - although it wasn't much of a loophole, as the company knew all about it.

However there are other ways to upgrade to Windows 10 that don't involve getting the upgrade assistant from the official site.

Yes, apparently this has always worked... meaning that this also isn't much of a loophole, since Microsoft clearly also knows all about it, i.e. working as intended.

It's unclear as to why this works, but if you have a product code for an old version of Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 you should be able to enter this into a copy of Windows 10 and get an activation. You will be given access to the version of Windows 10 that matches the original product key. So Windows 8 Pro will get Windows 10 Pro, while Windows 8 Home will get, you guessed it, Windows 10 Home.

Hmmm.... so it's possible to upgrade from W7-Pro to WX-Pro? It's a shame the GWX app didn't work the same way; I might have been tempted to switch.

Right about now, you might be wondering why Microsoft would still have a WX upgrade left open that's large enough for an auto-truck to drive through? Well, Microsoft themselves are pretty quiet on the issue, but Forbes' Ian Morris has some ideas:

As I pointed out in my article about the closing of the accessibility loophole, I don't think Microsoft really cares about end users getting free upgrades. It makes more money from OEM sales of Windows 10 on new laptops and revenue from corporate users than the slender pickings of home users. Indeed, Microsoft makes more money - and more margin - on selling cloud offerings these days.

Windows isn't a cash cow when it comes to home users, so I suspect there's a lot of give built into the system.

Which makes a lot of sense, actually. It's just a shame that Microsoft are being so disingenuous about it all. I mean, they could easily partner with PC-OEMs to promote new PC sales ("Get the most out of Windows 10 with the latest AMD/Ryzen hardware!"), while also continuing to let tech-savvier users upgrade for free if they still want to... and without the fucking hard sell, this time. Because, honestly, the hard sell of the GWX campaign was a big part of the continued appeal of W7, which culminated in Microsoft simply switching over users who didn't take active steps to avoid the unwanted "upgrade," even after they'd repeatedly refused Microsoft's malware-laden Home version of WX.

Hell, Microsoft even have a better product to give away than they did a few years ago, with more features and (crucially) better privacy protections, and even better privacy tools due to be added to the platform in a couple of months. And if I can also use my W7 Professional license to upgrade to WX-Pro, rather than the gimped Home version, to gain even more features and even better privacy tools... when, that becomes one hell of a sales pitch, doesn't it?

So, what's the problem?

Still alive...

Months after announcing that they would tighten requirements on the Assistive Technologies upgrade path for Windows 10 on Dec. 31st, effectively closing the free upgrade path for people who didn't use a very limited set of accessibility devices, it appears that Microsoft has now missed that deadline. Yes, the morally challenged among you who still want to upgrade to Windows 10 for free can still do so, a situation about which Microsoft apparently give zero fucks, as reported by TechRadar:

Microsoft’s offer to upgrade Windows 7 or Windows 8 to Windows 10 for free for users who need assistive technologies was supposed to run out at the end of 2017, but according to reports the method is still valid right now.

The assistive technologies upgrade page is indeed still live, and allows you to download the Windows 10 upgrade executable, despite the page stating that the offer expires on December 31, 2017.

According to Ghacks, and other sources including readers who tipped MS Power User, you can fire up that file and still upgrade, so you haven’t missed the boat yet.

The caveat is that you may run into an error message during the upgrade process, but this is easily fixed as discussed by Ghacks (essentially, you have to copy a specific DLL file across).

[...]

It seems that the other route of upgrading to Windows 10 – using an existing Windows 7/8.1 product key to activate the installation of the new OS – also still works as we’ve headed into 2018.

Ultimately, Microsoft probably isn’t too fussed about closing these loopholes because pumping up the numbers of Windows 10 users is obviously not a bad thing for the company.

At this point, I would add only that I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

Of course the loophole is still open. Of course Microsoft are taking their own sweet time about closing it, now two and a half years after Windows 10 was released, and counting. By some projections, Windows 10 adoption may not surpass Windows 7 until November, even with this free upgrade path, and Windows 7 may well retain at least a 39% user share when its extended support window finally closes in 2020. With those numbers staring them in the face, the only thing which is at all surprising about Microsoft's indifference to "abuse" of the Assistive Technologies loophole, is that anyone is at all surprised by it.

If Microsoft want my advice (which they don't, but I'm going to give it anyway), not only should they continue to allow free Windows 10 upgrades indefinitely for all users, but they should allow free upgrades to Windows 10 Professional for users who have Professional licences of Windows 7 and 8/8.1 tight up until Windows 8.1's end-of-life date in 2023. No more cute games and sly winks; just do it, already. MS should either admit that they're still giving it away, or close the loopholes, in exactly the way they said they would, and clearly have no intention of doing. Because there's really no excuse for not having tightened up this policy loophole after a year and and a half of watching people abuse it; at this point, we have to assume that continued abuse is the desired result.

Of course, all of this assumes that there are Windows 7 and 8.1 users who (a) want to "upgrade" to Windows 10, and (b) haven't already done so, neither of which appears to be the case. I expect to keep reading about this on Windows-friendly tech blogs and media sites for months to come, though, which is something of a disappointment; I really was hoping that the high-pressure Windows 10 sales pitch would finally be over, but apparently, that glorious day (may it soon come) is still months away.

Le sigh.

UPDATED JAN. 4th:

It looks like Microsoft have finally, officially, extended the deadline on the loophole to their loophole, as reported by Winbuzzer:

We’ve been advising assistive technology users to grab a free Windows 10 for several months. It was due to end on December 31, but the new year came and the offer remained. A new update to the webpage reveals that Microsoft has extended the offer to January 16, 2018.

“If you use assistive technologies, you can upgrade to Windows 10 at no cost as Microsoft continues our efforts to improve the Windows 10 experience for people who use these technologies. Please take advantage of this offer before it expires on January 16, 2018,” says the webpage.

You can upgrade from versions of Windows 7 and 8.1, avoiding the regular $120. The only requirement is the use of some form of accessibility tech, but Microsoft doesn’t check. As a result, anyone with the earlier OSes can upgrade for free.

Winbuzzer end their piece with this knee-slapper:

It seems unlikely that the company will extend the deadline again, so make you take advantage of it.  

Really? Because, from where I'm sitting, Microsoft have done nothing but extend the deadline on their free Windows 10 giveaway, every chance they've had. Why would anyone believe that they really, really, double-pinkie-swear mean it, this time?

Le sigh.

Is Windows 7 the new Windows XP?

Or is the situation actually much, much worse than that for Microsoft?

Well, according to this piece at Computerworld, it's looking like the latter:

In April 2014, when Microsoft rescinded Windows XP support, that version accounted for about 29% of all copies of Windows worldwide. Currently, the best-guess for Windows 7 at its end-of-support is a full 10 percentage points higher.

But that's not even the half of it.

In 2012, two years before XP shuffled off the support scene, Computerworld, using the same 12-month trend that produced a 39% user share for Windows 7 in January 2020, figured that XP would have a mere 17% in user share at retirement. The fact that Computerworld's back-of-the-envelope forecast for XP was off by 12 percentage points does not make for much confidence in the 39% mark for Windows 7 in 24 months.

In other words, today's calculation may be significantly lower than the reality of 2020.

Microsoft has at times resorted to some of the same name calling it used in 2012 for Windows XP when it has talked about the venerable Windows 7, which remains the stock enterprise OS. A year ago, for example, the head of Microsoft Germany said Windows 7 was "long outdated" and argued that the operating system did not meet "the high security requirements of IT departments."

Expect Microsoft to ramp up that line of attack as Jan. 14 [2020] approaches, when Microsoft is almost certain to remind customers that the Windows 7 drop-dead date is two years away and closing fast.

Worse yet, comparisons with Windows XP seem to be ignoring another important trend in personal computing: the  end of Moore's Law as personal computing's driving principle. When Windows 7 was released in 2009, Moore's Law was still driving the tech industry, with shrinking dies resulting in the shrinking size and increasing power of, e.g., smartphones, even as the PC power growth curve was already levelling off. Now, though, even smartphones' computing power has plateaued, and PC and laptop sales have been decreasing year-over-year for six years and counting.

All of which means that new PC sales will not drive Windows 10 adoption with individual consumers, in the way that it did for Windows 7. Even if large corporations and institutions adopt Windows 10 in a yooge way this year (something which isn't at all certain, IMHO), Windows 7 is clearly set up to hold its user base much, much longer than Windows XP did, with a dug-in user base that distrusts Microsoft's every utterance just on principle. Trash talk from Redmond is unlikely to yield any more positive results in two years' time than it's yielding now.

It's unclear what, if anything, Microsoft can do to earn back the trust and goodwill of those Windows 7 die-hards. GWX damaged that relationship pretty thoroughly, and their ongoing efforts to push Bing, Cortana, Edge, and other Microsoft products on consumers that simply aren't interested are probably not helping. Two years is a long time, but the clock is ticking; if Microsoft really want to win over Win7 users, then they need to start work now on some positive messaging that will appeal to these consumers, rather than continuing to rely on the same tired negative messaging which has clearly not been working, up to now.

Given Microsoft's track record (going all the way back to 2012, remember), I'd say that it's unlikely, but the Redmond team have managed to surprise me once or twice over the last couple of years, so I guess we'll see. Either way, though, I think that Microsoft's master plan to take over the computing world with Windows 10 is in something of a shambles, and people are clearly starting to notice.

Steam's software survey continues to confuse

Steam's software survey has a long history of bucking the trend when it comes to OS market share numbers. When Windows 10 was struggling month to month, and often losing market share to older Windows versions, the Steam community were racing to 50% adoption. And when Windows 10 was actually growing, albeit slowly, the Steam survey showed surging popularity for Windows 7.

Some speculated that this was being driven by PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' popularity in China, a market where Windows 10 isn't even available and Windows 7 is still king. So, does this month's Steam survey, which shows almost every OS version except Windows 7 gaining market share at Win7's expense, mean that PUBG's Chinese bubble has burst?

Betanews has this take on things:

Depending on which analyst firm you believe, Windows 10 is either a whisker away from overtaking Windows 7 as the most popular desktop operating system, or still quite a distance off.

Steam’s monthly usage survey, which shows usage share from the gamers’ perspective, paints an entirely different picture however. It has consistently reported Windows 10 as the top operating system of choice, until recently, when Windows 7 roared into the top spot.

At the same time that Windows 7 gained in popularity, so did the growth of Chinese gamers on the service, which was clearly not a coincidence. If you want future [sic] proof of a link between the two, December’s updated stats help prove it.

In the last month of 2017, Windows 7 had a share of 56.45 percent (made up of 54.79 percent for the 64-bit build, and 1.66 percent for the 32-bit version). In November, its share was a whopping 71.3 percent, meaning it fell 14.85 percentage points in a month.

Also in December, Simplified Chinese -- currently the most popular language on Steam -- fell 15.31 percentage points to 49.04 percent. (Second placed English grew 6.40 percentage points and now sits on 23.42 percent.)

I've been waiting for the PUBG bubble to burst for a while now, as the game's buggy, unpolished reality caught up with the breathless hype of its gaming media coverage, so it should be interesting to see just how closely PUBG's fortunes track with Windows 7's fortunes on Steam over the coming months.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Windows 10 gains market share, while Windows 7's share continues to remain the same.

There's both good news and bad news for Microsoft in NetMarketShare's latest market share statistics. On the up side, Windows 10 has gained nearly a full percentage point, moving from 31.95% to 32.93%. On the down side, those gains seem to be coming almost entirely at the expense of Windows 8.1, which dropped 5.97% to 5.71%; and Windows XP, which dropped from 5.73% to 5.18%. And Windows 7 stayed pretty much stable, dipping from 43.12% to 43.08%, a change which drops below my ±0.5% "noise threshold."

So, Windows 10 is still growing slowly, mostly at the expense of the and the least-popular Windows versions, while the most-popular Windows version, 7, continues its run as the new XP. With the new numbers being such an arguably mixed bag, it was really anyone's guess whether tech media sites would continue trumpeting Windows 10's modest gains as if they were some sort of triumph, or recognize that Windows 10 has failed to close the gap for yet another year, in spite of being freely available for the entirety of that year.

You can colour me slightly surprised, then, that MS Power User are taking the latter route, first out of the gate:

Around the middle of last year, we predicted, based on the then trend, that Windows 10 will overtake Windows 7 worldwide by the end of 2017.

Now the latest Netmarketshare numbers are in, and at least by their numbers, it appears that date may be pretty far off still.

It appears in the last quarter of 2017 the decline in Windows 7 numbers stabilized, while Windows 10 lost some momentum.

[...]

Last month Microsoft revealed there were 600 million active Windows 10 users, and we expect it would take around 800 million Windows 10 users to overtake Windows 7, something which may be achievable by the end of next year as enterprise users switch over in increasing numbers to Windows 10.

The change in tone, here, from confidently predicting that Windows 10 would overtake Windows 7 in 2017, to describing that same feat as something that "may be achievable," but isn't certain, in 2018, speaks rather eloquently to how much momentum Windows 10 lost as the year went along. Again, it's good news/bad news: Microsoft (mostly) stopped stepping on the self-laid rakes in their own yard as the year went along, but with no bad news to report, people also (mostly) stopped talking about Windows 10 entirely.

Windows 10 isn't new anymore. It isn't interesting, or exciting; consumers (and tech writers) seem to have tired of the relentless updating cycle, and now greed new feature announcements with a collective shrug, and the resigned knowledge that it means another round of problems while Microsoft tries to manage yet another updating cycle, even before the last one is complete. At least this time they'll at least be half-way there, which beats the Spring Creators Update's 33.7%, but still.

I've still got two more months to go before I can call it, but I'm still feeling pretty good about my Windows 10 prognostication.

UPDATE:

It looks like StatCounter's numbers show basically the same trend, according to Betanews:

While NetMarketShare’s monthly usage share figures show there to still be a fairly significant gap between Windows 7 and Windows 10 (in the older OS’s favor), rival analyst firm StatCounter has long reported the battle for the top spot to be much, much tighter.

So close is the race in fact, that in October it looked as if Windows 10 would easily pass Windows 7 at some point in the following month. Surprisingly, that didn’t happen, although the gap did narrow. It seemed all but guaranteed that Windows 10 would claim pole position in December, but incredibly it didn’t.

Unlike NMS, StatCounter show Windows 8.1 gaining market share over the past month, to 9.16%, which is exactly the opposite of NMS's result, leading me to suspect that something is up with StatCounter's methodology. Considering that NMS recently revamped their entire product offering to filter out bots and botnets, which were skewing their results, one has to wonder if StatCounter has done the same, or if there's some other reason for Windows 8.1's popularity in their data sets.

Thanks, but I’m still saying no to Windows 10

This article, by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at Tech World, really tickled my fancy this morning:

I’ve been hearing a lot from friends recently about how Windows 10 is the best Windows ever and people would be stupid not to switch. These being friends, I don’t want to be rude, but — cough, ahem — I don’t buy it.

Is security your No. 1 concern? Well, Windows 10 is no more secure than Windows 7 — which is to say it is a profoundly insecure operating system. There have been a lot of serious Windows security patches in the last year, and Windows 10 had all the same problems as Windows 7.

[...]

I also wouldn’t care to be “upgraded” against my will, as happened to Windows 10 users who had toggled what they needed to toggle to tell Microsoft, “Please don’t move me from Windows 10 1703, Windows 10 Fall Update, to 1709, Fall Creators Update.” As my colleague Woody Leonhard points out, this happened via Windows Update with the November patches, when there were “so many issues with this month’s security patches that it’s hard to decide where to begin.”

By the way, I want it on record that I don’t want Windows 10’s rapid release cadence, with its short-lived support timelines. Two major upgrades — or service patches, as I still think of them — a year is one too many. I can’t make sure everything works with a significant update every six months. I don’t know anyone who can.

[...]

What it all adds up to is that, while Windows 10 is certainly a good operating system, it’s far from great. For the time being, I’m sticking with Windows 7 on my Windows machines, and I recommend you do too. I know what to expect from Windows 7, but with Windows 10, every new forced update is a roll of the dice.

Great stuff, and well worth a read, so go give the man some clicks. And if you haven't switch from Windows 7 to 10 yet, either... well, I also recommend that you don't. I haven't, and still don't plan to. Not unless Microsoft get a handle on their anti-consumer bullshit, anyway, which doesn't look like it's going to be happening anytime soon.

Windows 7 continues to gain Steam.

Pun not only intended, but verily provoked by this post from Wayne Williams at Betanews:

While Windows 10 still lags behind Windows 7 in terms of market share, there’s one section of user that has embraced the new operating system since day one -- gamers. That’s no surprise of course, as they like to run the latest and greatest hardware and software.

Steam’s monthly usage survey, which shows the state of things from the gamers’ perspective, has consistently reported Windows 10 as the top operating system of choice, until last month when -- to the surprise of many -- Windows 7 took over.

[...]

According the latest figures, Windows 10 fell another 5.05 percentage points. It now accounts for 23.94 share (23.64 percent for the 64-bit build, and 0.29 percent for the 32-bit edition). Windows 7’s share grew by 6.21 percentage points. It now has 71.3 percent (69.89 percent for the 64-bit OS, and 1.41 for the 32-bit build).

[...]

As was the case last month, Simplified Chinese is now by far and away the most popular language used on Steam (64.35 percent, as opposed to 17.02 percent using English), and its share grew 8.23 percentage points in November, no doubt accounting for Windows 7’s latest growth spurt.

This is fascinating; especially in a month when NetMarketShare are showing a fairly strong performance by Windows 10. The likes of NMS and StatCounter are clearly weighting heavily in favour of NA; Steam, on the other hand, is finally showing a more globalist picture by including gamers from the country with the largest population on Earth, and producing exactly the opposite result in the process.

It's enough to make one wonder to what extent any of these OS market share statistics are actually measuring the state of the market. Are they all just sampling different slices of the market, weighting it according to preconceptions that aren't documented anywhere, and then presenting results as fact that are really little better than guesswork? Is it all just "lying with statistics?" And, if so, are there any viable alternatives?

I've spent a lot of time watching the OS market share numbers in the last couple of years, along with other tech media web sites and bloggers, as we try to assess how well (or poorly) Windows 10's performance is proceeding, and the prospect of it all being wasted effort, effectively tracking phantoms through fog, is... well, somewhat depressing, to be honest. It's important to know whether Microsoft's bad GWX behaviour is being rewarded, though, so we do need some way to gauge that performance. So, what's a blogger to do?

One can try to take all of the numbers with a grain of salt, of course, but that's hard to do in practice; the natural human tendency is to focus on the numbers that align with your expectations, while giving shorter shrift to the numbers that don't seem to "fit." It doesn't help much that the various statistic reports use slightly variant, "black box" methodologies, which means that they actually are measuring slightly different things, massaging their raw numbers in slightly different ways, and keeping us basically in the dark about how and why they do all of it.

I don't think that I can stop watching the OS market share numbers; after two years of watching the story unfold, I find that I now want to know how the story ends, even though the plot of this movie has enough holes in it to drive a bus through. So, I'll keep on keeping on... I just won't be enjoying it as much as I might have.

Which hardly makes me unique; it seems like fewer tech bloggers are bothering to make note of the latest market share numbers anymore, presumably because they're blogging for money and articles on this topic get fewer clicks, thus reinforcing their natural ennui with market forces. Still, as long as Wayne Williams keeps on keeping on, I guess I can, too.

I will also be learning Chinese in my spare time, though. Because it's looking more and more like that's a smart thing to do, just generally. (Seriously, only seventeen percent? English needs to step up its fucking game...)

NMS make major changes, and finally explain themselves.

I'm quite late posting today's OS market share numbers, in part because I honestly wasn't expecting much to change from last month. Well, was I ever wrong on that, because NetMarketShare have changed just about everything... and, more importantly, they've finally explained why:

Welcome to the new NetMarketShare.com

---

We completely rearchitected the product to provide more accurate and accessible data. Here's what's new:

Elimination of botnet data

---

As bot traffic across the web has risen dramatically, it has been a challenge to detect and remove it from our dataset. This is a critical issue since bots can cause significant skewing of data. In particular, we have seen situations where traffic from certain large countries is almost completely bot traffic. In other countries, ad fraudsters generate traffic that spoofs certain technologies in order to generate high-value clicks. Or, they heavily favor a particular browser or platform.

The primary focus of this release was to build detection methods to eliminate this traffic. We rewrote the entire collection and aggregation infrastucture to address this issue.

Please note: This dataset is separate from and replaces the legacy data. Subscribers that need legacy data please contact us for access.

The "bot traffic" explanation is... plausible, actually. Bots are a huge online problem, and for a business whose business is measuring online traffic, it makes sense that large-volume bot activity would seriously mess with their data, and their analyses.

For the tracking of OS usage numbers, of course, this basically renders every previously posted result (i.e. the "legacy data") completely irrelevant. Therefore, I will let it go, and start over fresh, much as NMS have themselves. It's important to keep some sense of the history here, through, so... let's see what NMS have on tap for history.

Annoyingly, the new table which accompanies this graph doesn't break out each month's numbers in a nice grid, but rather shows only the average for the period. Each month's numbers are only available as mouse-over tooltips, which is worse for at-a-glance comparisons but probably better for NMS's business model (which is, after all, to sell the numbers to subscribers). Also, the new NMS data doesn't go all the way back to Windows 10's launch, so we can only look at the range from May of 2016 through the end of November, 2017.

Even so, the botnet-less trend lines look rather different than the botnet-filled versions. Mousing over the data points on that graph, we can learn that Windows 7 currently holds 43.12% of the market, basically unchanged from last month's 43.05%, while Windows 10 holds 31.95% of the market, an uptick from last month's 28.86%. Interestingly, Windows 10's growth has come mostly at the expense of Windows XP, which declined from 7.64% to 5.73%.

Generic "Linux" only shows up as 1.65% of the market, down slightly from last month's 1.85%, although that doesn't include Ubuntu (which is also Linux) or Chrome OS (which is also Linux), etc. That kind of fragmentation is part of the problem that Linux has in attracting new users, though, so that seems fair enough, and at least NMS is now listing Chrome OS separately as a desktop OS, which will allow us to track its progress over time - potentially very interesting. Combining all the various versions of each OS together gives a better overall picture of how Linux-based OSes compare to Windows:

Exactly why botnets would be inflating Linux' OS market share numbers, rather than Windows', is something that I'd like to see explained in more detail at some point. Linux is famously more secure than Windows, generally, so it would make far more sense for botnet traffic to be inflating Windows' market share results, instead. I'll be keeping an eye out for a better explanation there.

In the meantime, though, we have a new, and hopefully more reliable, baseline for watching the progress of the OS market from this point on. It'll be interesting to see what happens. I'm still not expecting to see much movement for the next few months, for the reasons previously stated, but I wasn't expecting NMS to revamp their entire business in a month, either, so who the fuck knows? If nothing else, it should be interesting to see what happens.

About Windows 10's superior security...

I first saw this story last week on BleepingComputer, but didn't really take the time to understand it properly until today. Honestly, BleepingComputer's coverage was a little dry, and anyone other than a security researcher or system administrator would be forgiven for thinking that it wasn't that big a deal, especially since BleepingComputers article includes a workaround for the problem.

Well, it turns out that this is a big deal. In fact, it's a really big deal, and it's been blowing up all day.

Por ejemplo, this story by ZDNet:

Key Windows 10 defense is 'worthless' and bug dates back to Windows 8

Microsoft has been telling users to upgrade to Windows 10 because of its superior in-built defenses against attacks, compared with Windows 7. That advice would be true if it properly implemented the defense known as Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR).

ASLR is used by Android, Windows, Linux, iOS and macOS to prevent attacks that rely on code executing at predictable memory locations by loading programs at random addresses.

It's been used by Microsoft since Windows Vista to counter memory-based attacks. However, Microsoft introduced an error in Windows 8 when implementing a feature known as Force ASLR or system-wide mandatory ASLR.

[...]

"Starting with Windows 8.0, system-wide mandatory ASLR (enabled via EMET) has zero entropy, essentially making it worthless. Windows Defender Exploit Guard for Windows 10 is in the same boat," [Will Dormann of Carnegie Mellon University's CERT/CC] wrote on Twitter.

[...]

Not only is the feature "worthless" in Windows 10, but Windows 7 with EMET actually does a better job of enforcing ASLR than Windows 10, according to Dormann.

"Actually, with Windows 7 and EMET System-wide ASLR, the loaded address for eqnedt32.exe is different on every reboot. But with Windows 10 with either EMET or WDEG, the base for eqnedt32.exe is 0x10000 EVERY TIME. Conclusion: Win10 cannot enforce ASLR as well as Win7," he wrote.

"Windows 8 and newer systems that have system-wide ASLR enabled via EMET or Windows Defender Exploit Guard will have non-DYNAMICBASE applications relocated to a predictable location, thus voiding any benefit of mandatory ASLR. This can make exploitation of some classes of vulnerabilities easier," wrote Dormann in a CERT/CC advisory.

Dormann notes there is no solution to this problem, but has offered a workaround in the advisory that admins can follow.

So, not only is this a major bug that Windows 7 doesn't have, but it's been an undetected part of Windows since 2009, and isn't fixed yet in Windows 8 or 10. There's no telling how much damage may already have been done by hackers exploiting this weakness in later Windows versions, even as users of those Windows versions believed themselves to be safer than Windows 7 users... something which simply wasn't true. This comes after a year in which Microsoft has been telling people that Windows 10 was impervious to ransomware, apparently unaware that this vulnerability made it easier for bad actors to target valuable data.

Yikes.

The workaround incidentally, is a registry edit...  coincidentally, also the way you can turn off Cortana to safeguard your privacy, but still something which most users are simply not comfortable doing. Or, as ExtremeTech puts it:

As always, we do not recommend mucking about in the registry unless you are certain you know what you’re doing. US-CERT has some additional details on both the problem and this fix available on its website. And yes, Windows 7 users, you get to preen a bit — this problem does not affect your operating system.

If you're thinking that US-CERT sounds very governmental, it is: specifically, it's the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team.

Microsoft are apparently aware of the issue... now... and they're working on a fix, although they're denying that this is a vulnerability according to ThreatPost:

Microsoft told Threatpost it acknowledges the issue.

“The issue described by the US-CERT is not a vulnerability. ASLR is functioning as designed and customers running default configurations of Windows are not at increased risk. The US-CERT discovered an issue with configuring non-default settings for ASLR using Windows Defender Exploit Guard and EMET, and provided workarounds. Microsoft is investigating and will address the configuration issue accordingly,” Microsoft said.

So, it's not a vulnerability... it just leaves your data more vulnerable to attack. Riiiiight.

It's at this point that I'll remind you that Windows 7 is still in its extended support period, which means that you can stay with its superior implementation of ASLR until at least 2020, if you're into that sort of thing. And while I don't expect that anyone will abandon Windows 10 for Windows 7 over this issue, I must say that this latest black eye for Microsoft, coming so soon after the scaremongering they and their apologists were doing over WannaCry and ransomware just a few months ago, is oddly satisfying. Or maybe not so oddly.

Prognostication

December is coming... and with it, what is (traditionally) a slow time for news.

In a normal year, everything that will be announced this year has been announced by now; results for this quarter won't be known until January, so there are no meaningful numbers to analyze; and everyone in the news business is only weeks away from the annual crop of year-end top story roundup articles, which normally hit just before everyone goes on holiday for a couple of weeks.

As such, I wouldn't normally be expecting to have too many new developments to blog about for the rest of the year. Of course, 2017 hasn't been a normal year, and it's always possible that the fast-evolving gacha/loot box story will continue to have legs, but I'm guessing that now's a pretty safe time to make a few predictions before taking a bit of a break myself.

So... prediction time! At least regarding the topics that this blog has mostly been about for the last couple of years.

VR:

Let's start with a nice, quick one.

Having languished all year long, VR will continue to sell poorly this XMas season. Thanks to HTC's just-announced Vive Focus, the Microsoft-backed Mixed Reality headsets have managed to be obsolete before properly hitting the market, and the original Vive, Oculus Rift, and PlayStation VR are all basically dinosaurs now...  and it's not like consumers were all that interested in them before. Sales of VR should continue at this same poor level, with no new major announcements or releases until the new year at the earliest. [UPDATE: June 17th, 2018: RIGHT!] E3 has just happened, with nothing of note being announced for VR, in either hardware or software. Oculus Go's release has had no measurable effect, either.


Prediction: No developments for at least three months, if then. VR will continue to not be a thing.

Windows 10:

November and December are a high-volume time of year for most businesses, when disruptive system-wide OS rollouts are generally considered to be a bad idea; many companies don't even allow new system launches after the end of October (my employer deployed a new order-tracking and -fulfillment system on October 30th, and are coming to rather regret that decision). Basically, this means no new Windows 10 deployments for the rest of the calendar year, and this no Enterprise-driven shift away from Windows 7/Server 2008.

New deployments won't be happening at any brisk pace to start the new year, either, as companies come to realize that keeping pace with Microsoft's overly-aggressive update schedule is simply too difficult and too costly - the Windows-as-a-Service model has some serious problems that Microsoft badly need to solve. January is also not normally a big season for major system changes; many companies have synced their fiscal calendars to the taxation year, which means that the end of the year is also the end of their fiscal year, so January is normally spent on year-end book-keeping -- again, not normally a good time for a disruptive, company-wide new OS rollout.

Individual users won't be migrating to Windows 10 en masse, either. PC sales have been declining steadily for years, so I don't expect to see a wave of XMas PC purchases this year, and users with older PCs have made it very clear that they have no intention of switching unless and until they absolutely have to.

Add one and one and one, and you get no major shifts in the OS market until next February, at the earliest... which mean no big change in NetMarketShare et al's reported statistics until the first of March. Any changes that happen will be marginal, and Windows 10 won't overtake Windows 7 until next year, no matter how badly tech media bloggers want it to happen. The real test will be the period from next March to next November; if Windows 10 is going to take off, it will have to be then, when big companies with fresh budgets can do deployments with the least amount of disruption. If it doesn't happen then, it won't happen until closer to Windows 7's end-of-life in 2020.

Prediction: No big developments for at least three months here, either. [UPDATE: June 17th, 2018: RIGHT!] Or, mostly right, anyway. Microsoft parted ways with the former head of their Windows and Devices division, and broke that division up across the company, which means that they've abandoned their Windows-focused strategy entirely. The fact that this was necessary says all that needs to be said about the strategy itself; even Microsoft finally gave up hoping that it would start producing results. That OS market is still not shifting significantly, with Microsoft themselves no longer expecting that to change, confirms my prediction.

Nintendo Switch:

There's no doubt that Nintendo's having their best year in a long time, but the Switch's first year hasn't been without its problems... chief among them, of course, being the production issues which prevented Nintendo from meeting any of their production milestones, as far as anyone can tell. In a recent presentation to shareholders, Nintendo's CEO answered questions about whether Nintendo would have enough units in stores for the upcoming XMas season by talking about the quarter after that... never a good sign.

I read that as Nintendo not having nearly enough units in stores to sell this season, which is a problem since the period from Black Friday to Boxing Day is when most retailers (in NA, anyway) post up to 50% of their year's sales (October to December can be up to 70% for some retailers). Failing to have enough units in stores at this time of year is a huge misstep, one which Nintendo will not recover from until well after the post-holiday hangover -- consumers normally don't spend much in January or February, with sales not picking up again until March.

Nintendo, of course, were bullishly predicting that they'd hit 15 million units sold by March, but there are a lot of assumptions that seem to underlie that prediction, including the pace of sales remaining more or less constant in spite of supply problems at a critical point in the year, and the traditional early-year sales slowdown. Nintendo are also assuming that every Nintendo household will be buying multiple Switches, something which seems like an unrealistic expectation.

Of course, the Nintendo Switch could become a full-blown craze, just like the original Wii did, but events like that are incredibly rare, and most companies only ever get one of them. The Wii became a craze because it appealed to people who'd never gamed before, in the same way that the PS2 became the best-selling console of all time by also being the cheapest DVD player on the market when it launched; there's no evidence yet that the Switch appeals to anyone except early adopters, longtime Nintendo fans, and core gamers who spend a lot of time travelling and who are willing to buy their favourite games a second time in order to have a version to take with them.

The Switch boasts only two games with real system-selling potential, and both of them are aimed at long-time Nintendo fans who were always going to buy the Switch, anyway; if you're not a long-time Zelda or Mario fan, the platform doesn't have much to offer except the opportunity to spend more than retail (because cartridges, for fuck's sake) buying games for a 2nd time that you either already own, or can buy more cheaply on Steam without incurring several hundred dollars of additional expense. And since Nintendo's gaming handhelds have declined in popularity every year since 2009, largely replaced by the smartphone for most users... well, suffice to say that I think a full-blown craze is unlikely.

The Switch will almost certainly outsell the WiiU, but that's a low bar to clear, frankly. If the Switch is still selling 2 million units a month after it passes the 20 million mark, I'll concede that it's remarkable launch has strong enough legs to keep running; until then, I will continue to regard Nintendo's plans to double production, and then double it again, to be just so much PR bullshit -- statements aimed more at their shareholders than anything else. The Switch is probably here to stay for a while, and will certainly avoid the ignominious fate that claimed the WiiU, but it won't be equalling, let alone surpassing, the PS4's market share anytime soon. And they won't be launching in China, either, no matter how badly analysts want it to happen.

Prediction: The Switch may move another million or so units over the holidays, but it won't hit the 10 million mark by the end of December, and will fall well short of Nintendo's 15-million-by-March target. [UPDATE: December 12th, 2017: WRONG!]

PlayStation & XBox (or, XBO-X):

Sony began 2017 with a commanding position in the console gaming market. Although Steam was still dominant on PC, and had more than twice as many installed users as PS4, Sony still had 53.4 million PS4 users worldwide, and was projecting 18 million more over the course of the year; they had the best-selling non-smartphone VR headset on the market; they had pushed their updated PS4 Pro console out a full year ahead of Microsoft's Scorpio; and they had successfully crushed Nintendo's WiiU, which had launched poorly, sold worse, and finally gone out of production. Sony were winning; all they had to do, to keep winning, was keep their collective foot on the gas.

And so, naturally, they decided to spend the year coasting, instead.

Sony coasted while Nintendo announced, and launched, the Nintendo Switch, a handheld/console hybrid that outsold all other consoles combined last month, at least in the U.S., in spite of persistent supply issues; apparently still stinging from the failure of PS Vita, Sony have no plans to contest the handheld gaming space with an updated machine of their own. Sony coasted while Microsoft announced one consumer-friendly initiative after another, from Play Anywhere to backwards compatibility to cross-play, something on which Sony are still dragging their feet; they kept coasting while Microsoft debuted the XBox One X, the "most powerful gaming console ever made," which can actually outpower and outperform the PS4 Pro -- thus giving Microsoft the hardware performance edge, for the first time this console generation.

With all this coasting, one might be forgiven for thinking that the people in charge of Sony's PlayStation division had basically stopped caring... mainly because that was pretty much what had happened. Even though I'd never heard his name before this year, I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Andrew House, the head of Sony's PlayStation department, was retiring; the whole of Sony's past year felt like the work of someone playing out the string until they could finally retire and spend the rest of their time bass fishing. Sony's gaming division lost a lot of momentum in 2017.

Whether they can regain that momentum in 2018 in anyone's guess. Sony's new PlayStation head, John Kodera, plans to take Sony's gaming efforts into the cloud, a strategy which aligns well with general trends in the videogame industry, while also being something that the Nintendo Switch's damn-it-all cartridges and tiny onboard storage seem poorly positioned to do. Whether they also decide to update the PS Vita with a new, cloud-powered version remains to be seen, but it's almost certain that the PS4 will get another hardware upgrade, the name of which will also be stupid. Sony is still the dominant player in console gaming, with the PlayStation 4 sitting at 64.9 million sold worldwide (compared to the XBox One's 31.25 million, and Nintendo Switch's 7.02 million), and will continue to occupy the #1 spot for a while, but they'll need to work harder to stay on top.

Microsoft, meanwhile, will continue trying to make XBox Live relevant to PC gamers who mostly game on Steam, while pushing 4K gaming to consumers who mostly doesn't own or want 4K televisions. The XBox One X (or XBO-X) will sell well, because it's new and in stock during the XMas shopping season, but it's really only appealing to people that already own 4K TVs and are also already invested in the XBL ecosystem, which may not be as many people as Microsoft thinks it is. With Play Anywhere equalling the end of actual exclusive XBox One games (anything released for XBox is also released for Windows by default), the only remaining move is for Microsoft to (a) ramp up in-house game development, to try to make the XBL/Microsoft Store look like a more inviting place to buy games, and (b) push the development of Mixed Reality gaming. The first will yield no results at all next year, since games take years to develop, and the second will yield no results at all, period, because VR (see above).

Predictions: Sony will try harder, now that they have a PlayStation head who isn't retiring, although exactly what a Cloud-based PS4 will look like, or how Sony chose to react to the challenge from Nintendo, if at all, remain to be seen. [UPDATE: December 8th, 2017: RIGHT!] PSN/Steam crossplay is a possibility here, especially in light of Valve's recently-announced trust-based CS:GO matchmaking system -- House was against crossplay, but Kodera might change course. For their part, Microsoft simply didn't get the XBO-X to market in time; it will sell well enough this holiday season, but not well enough for them to gain ground on Sony, and Nintendo's Switch will outsell their XBOX throughout the coming year. They'll still end 2018 as the #2 console, but not by much.

Somewhat unexpected:

Wow. If you'd told at the start of this year that I'd end it having more to say about the Nintendo Switch than about Windows 10, I'd have said you were crazy, but here we are. I guess Nintendo's comeback console is just much more interesting than anything Microsoft is doing, these days.

Which goes to show the value of prognostications: more often than not, they're wrong. They're still fun, though, and worth writing down -- after all, a prediction that you can later deny having made is kind of cowardly. I'll still check in from time to time, and blog about anything that does catch my eye, including the normal OS market share check-ins on December 1st and January 1st, but that should be about it for the year. No best-of, worst-of, or top-story roundup lists here!

Unless of course, something of interest does happen. And with a year like the one we've been having, it honestly wouldn't fucking surprise me.

Steam's perplexing software survey

With Windows 7 gradually declining, and Windows 10 slowing gaining, in the overall OS marketplace, it should come as no surprise at all that VALVe's Steam user base is moving in the opposite directions. As reported by MSPowerUser:

Gaming network Steam has released their hardware survey numbers for the month ending October 2017 and like many numbers in recent months, it does not read as good news for Microsoft’s latest operating system.

The numbers show a massive drop in the usage of Windows 10 amongst gamers, down 17.14% from last month, with Windows 7 surging 22.59% [...] this has actually been a trend for at least the last 3 months and appears to be accelerating.

Steam's gamers embraced Windows 10 much more quickly than the OS market as a whole, especially during its first year of release, so it's unclear why they seem to be moving so sharply in the other direction now, although PC Gamer attributes it to "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' popularity in China."

While the numbers above look frightening for Microsoft, especially with its renewed focus on PC gaming with Windows 10, a look at the language stats reveals what is almost certainly happening. Simplified Chinese shot up nearly 27 percent in October. It now consists of more than half of the user base, while English dropped 13.4 percent in the same month, landing at 21.24 percent.

Bluehole has sold more than 13 million copies of PUBG globally, with growing interest from Chinese gamers. China, which has reportedly considered banning PUBG, represents the game's biggest region by player population [...] It's possible that some users have also downgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 7, but the bulk of that OS shift is down to PUBG's insane growth in China.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is currently something of a phenomenon in PC gaming, but I seem to detect a whiff of the same pre-existing narrative that I've blogged about previously. Although it also bears mentioning that it's not good news for Microsoft for China, a huge market, to still be so devoted to Windows 7 that it skews Steam's software survey results when more Chinese players join up; even if PC Gamer's hypothesis is correct, it's not necessarily good news for the Redmond crew.

I suppose time will tell; with competitors like Epic Games' Fortnite also throwing their hats into the Battle Royale game genre's ring, we should eventually see PUBG start to slow some of its meteoric growth, at which point we'll know if the Steam software survey is tracking PUBG's trajectory. I can't help but think that Win10's Game Mode, which breaks games and isn't fixed yet, might also have something to do with this trend, though.

NetMarketShare finally find a level

After fiddling with their regional weighting for months in an effort to find an acceptably pro-Microsoft way of presenting their collected data, it looks like the folks at NetMarketShare have finally settled on one, and they're sticking with it. The revised version looks like this:

In a nutshell, Windows 10 continues to languish below 30%, Windows 7 continues its slow slide but still commands over 46% of the total OS market, and the "Other" category continues to increase, too, even if NetMarketShare are determined to manipulate their results to keep that number below double digits. The overall trend, though, is still really, really flat.

I have to say, I'm a little disappointed with NetMarketShare. Presented with raw data which clearly showed a shift in the OS market, they caved to outside pressure and tech journalists' expectations, and massaged that change out of their reports, with the clear result being that their results are now less credible. For nearly two years, NetMarketShare had reliably provided apples-to-apples month-to-month statistical comparisons, something which was hard to come by in a hype-filled landscape, but no longer.

I'll probably continue keeping an eye on the monthly stats, just to see how much higher the "Other" category creeps as the year progresses - even NMS's carefully re-weighted stats show five straight months of gains for the category, and I still expect it to eventually hit double digits. It's a bit of a shame, though, that the tech media will be steadfastly ignoring this change as it happens, making no effort at all to figure out what exactly is going on under the surface, and why.

Microsoft to end free Windows 10 upgrades, a year and a half after ending free Windows 10 upgrades

With the closure of the "assistive technologies" loophole, Microsoft's Get Windows 10 (GWX) campaign finally limps to a close. Does that mean we'll stop hearing about it now?

From Windows Latest:

On July 29, 2016, Microsoft ended the free Windows 10 upgrade offer for the owners of Windows 7 and 8.1 machines. The company, however, left a loophole, that allows any user to upgrade to Windows 10 for free despite the original offer is over. As we reported, the Windows 10 free upgrade offer was still available even after the release of the Fall Creators Update.

Microsoft is now finally going to end the offer later this year. Once the offer ends, the official loophole will be closed and the users won’t be able to upgrade their Windows 7 or 8.1 machines to Windows 10 operating system for free.

[...]

Microsoft never restricted the upgrade offer to specific assistive technologies and even no verifications where being made, basically offering the Windows 10 upgrade for completely free to any users.

I sometimes wonder if tech journalists will ever wake up to reality, here. People who haven't "upgraded" to Windows 10 are not still on Windows 7 or 8.1 because they're procrastinating, or because they just haven't got around to it yet. The procrastinators were all switched to Windows 10, by Microsoft, in some cases after having refused the "upgrade" repeatedly. Anyone still using an older Windows version had to take active steps to stay there; they're dug in now, and don't want to switch.

The lure of free Windows 10 has not been enough to lure Windows 7 users away from their OS for over two years now. The fear of WannaCry or other malware has failed to scare Windows 7 users into the safe, warm arms of Windows 10 for over six months. The Windows 10 deal started rotten, and has been a moving target ever since, and Windows 7 and 8.1 users simply decided to opt out; they're not going to change until the have to, and many won't change even then.

Yes, Windows 7 is the new XP; it really has already happened. Keeping this "assistive technologies" loophole open as long as they did wasn't just pointless on Microsoft's part, it was insulting. Now that it's finally ending, I say good riddance.

Boldly predicting more of the same... whatever that means.

We're just a few days away from the latest OS market share numbers's release, so let's take a minute to discuss expecations.

For the last two months, NetMarketShare's initially posted results have shown a significant shift away from Windows, and towards Linux. Both times, NetMarketShare have blinked rather than standing by their own data collection and analysis, and re-weighted those numbers to hew closer to tech reporters' expectations. In both cases, though, their carefully targeted re-weighting has failed to make the shift go away entirely; they've masked the shift, but not eliminated it.

Looking at both the first-reported numbers and the later revised numbers together shows both trends:

The truth lies somewhere between these trend lines... but where?

So, what should we expect this month? More of the same, would be my guess... as you can probably tell from the fact that I'm tracking both 1st-posted and revised numbers, and plotting them against each other. We'll have to see just how big the reported shifts are, both as first reported, and then after NetMarketShare cave to the pressure and massage as much of the shift as possible out of their reported statistics.

Windows 10 breaches Dutch data protection law

I had a feeling that Microsoft's anti-consumer data collection bullshit wasn't done getting them into trouble with European regulators, but I'll admit that I wasn't expecting the next chapter in that story to come out of the Netherlands.

As reported by ZDNet's David Meyer:

Microsoft breaches the Dutch data protection law in the way it processes the personal data of people using the Windows 10 operating system, the country's data protection agency has said.

On Friday, Dutch data protection authority (DPA) the Autoriteir Persoonsgegevens said that Microsoft doesn't tell Windows 10 Home and Pro users which personal data it collects and why. It also said the firm makes it impossible for users to give their valid consent to their personal data being processed, due to the multiple ways in which that data might subsequently be used.

The data watchdog added that Microsoft "does not clearly inform users that it continuously collects personal data about the usage of apps and web surfing behaviour through its web browser Edge, when the default settings are used".

"It turns out that Microsoft's operating system follows about every step you take on your computer. That results in an intrusive profile of yourself," said Wilbert Tomesen, the regulator's vice-chairman. "What does that mean? Do people know about this, do they want this? Microsoft needs to give users a fair opportunity to decide about this themselves."

The issue, naturally, is telemetry.

While Microsoft offers users an overview of the categories of data that it collects through basic telemetry, it only informs people in a general way, with examples, about the categories of personal data it collects through full telemetry, the regulator said.

"The way Microsoft collects data at the full telemetry level is unpredictable. Microsoft can use the collected data for the various purposes, described in a very general way. Through this combination of purposes and the lack of transparency Microsoft cannot obtain a legal ground, such as consent, for the processing of data," it said.

It's hard to say exactly what effect this will have. When France's data watchdog had issues with Windows 10, Microsoft was able to find a bare-minimum level of compliance which resulted in a closed file, and mostly cosmetic changes to Windows' telemetry, an outcome that they're clearly hoping to replicate (ZDNet's piece quotes Microsoft Windows privacy officer Marisa Rogers as prioritizing compliance with the Dutch data protection law, while sharing "specific concerns with the Dutch DPA about the accuracy of some of its findings and conclusions"), so it could be that very little will actually change this time, either.

But with Windows 10 still struggling to win converts, and signs that Windows 7 users are leaving Windows entirely, for Linux, it's hardly good news for Microsoft that Windows 10's data collection and privacy issues are once again back in the news. They'd clearly hoped that this issue would go away, but since they haven't actually fixed the problem, that may be unlikely.

Hey, Microsoft! Do you want to know what will make this problem go away, completely, and forever? Let people turn the telemetry completely off. If telemetry is opt-in, rather than can't-really-opt-out-but-there's-a-lower-level-of-intrusiveness-available-you-pussies, people will stop complaining about the telemetry system. You might even win some converts amongst dug-in Windows 7 users (no promises, though - those folks have dug in pretty deeply).

Oh, and before I forget.... If you're reading this, then you should be running Spybot's Anti-Beacon, or something similar. Don't forget that Microsoft retconned this telemetry bullshit into Windows 7 and 8/8.1, too, so you should be taking steps to protect your own privacy, regardless of which Windows version you use. Microsoft sure as shit aren't going to.

Microsoft is leaving old bugs unpatched in Windwos 7, and that's a problem

While Windows 7 isn't receiving new features anymore, it is supposed to be receiving security updates until 2020. That's the deal; it is explicitly what "extended support" means. Microsoft, however, does not appear to be living up to their end of the deal. Surprise!

As reported by Liam Tung at ZDNet:

Microsoft is essentially leaving clues for hackers when it patches Windows 10, but not Windows 7, argues [Google's Project Zero researcher Mateusz] Jurczyk.

That's because hackers can use a technique called 'binary diffing' to analyze fixes in a modern product and pinpoint weaknesses in the older product.

The technique lends itself to Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10, which are a perfect example of concurrently supported branches of a single product that share the same core code, but are patched and improved differently. 

As the researcher explains, the ability to use binary diffing is a problem in particular for the security of Windows 7 users, which account for half of all Windows users, because attackers know that Microsoft adds better security and sometimes even bug fixes only to the latest version of Windows.

[...]

One example was the bug CVE-2017-8680, which affected Windows 8.1 and Windows 7, but curiously not Windows 10. Project Zero reported it to Microsoft in May and it was fixed in Microsoft's September Patch Tuesday update.

On discovering the bug, the researcher identified the relevant patch in Windows 10 and realized that Microsoft hadn't backported it to earlier versions.

After running more comparisons between Windows 7 versus Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 versus Windows 10, he found two more vulnerabilities, CVE-2017-8684 and CVE-2017-8685, in the Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 kernels. These were also patched in September.

I know that Microsoft want users to migrate from Windows 7 to 10, but effectively breaking 7 to coerce users into migrating is not OK. We are not talking about new features, here. We are talking about bug fixes and security patches which Windows 7 users are supposed to be receiving, and aren't.

It goes without saying that any bug which was present in Windows 7, 8, and 10 is a long-standing issue which Microsoft should be addressing on all three platform. Instead, they've left this rake lying in the grass, waiting for Google to call them out on it, publicly, before doing anything. Google brought the bug to Microsoft's attention, remember; it's not as if Microsoft didn't know that Google (a competitor, let we forget) knew about this, and their Project Zero team have already proven that they'll call out companies for failing to act on security problems.

Microsoft hadn't managed to find a rake in their own grass for almost a month, but I guess that streak is now over, because they've definitely stepped on this one.

Self-inflicted injury, for the win!