File Explorer fiasco: Window to Microsoft's mixed-up motivations Queen Elizabeth I is said to have expressed her attitude to her subjects' private beliefs by noting: "I do not seek to open windows to men's souls." Microsoft Windows 11 has few such qualms. A new feature, accidentally enabled in an Insider build, not only opened a channel between the company and the quintessential tool, File …
You are obviously a time traveller who has come back from 5 years in the future. Please tell us if the year of Linux on the desktop has arrived yet?!?
If you can't answer then I'll just assume you're being chased by him ------->
The OP didn't mention Linux at all so please get off your high horse...
What we saw is clearly Microturds vision of the future where Ads are part of the OS itself and not just a [[cough][cough] feature of an app such as a web browser.
I might be wrong but I get the feeling from previous comments on this that Ad in the file browser is well beyond the pale and is a mega step backwards.
IMHO, Operating Systems are there to facilitate the user to do stuff. Anything that gets in the way of that purpose is to be avoided at all costs. MS has been eating away at our ease of doing stuff for years. This is just the next small step.
I will not be going down that route. The IT industry as a whole needs to give a collective finger to MS. If it does not then... you see that slippery slope over there... lookout you might well be tumbling down it very soon.
If you want to go all in with MS's ambitions for subscriptions and more tracking and slurping of your every keystroke/mouse movement then please go ahead but there are a lot of us who will not be following you down that slippery slope.
Does nobody recognise humour these days unless the specific (------->) icon is selected? </sarcasm>
I was never on a high horse (cos vertigo). I was guessing that M$ are planning to go full 'commercial' version within 5 years, and was wondering how much of a boost to FOSS OS there would be. </rant>
And if you still don't like my comments ya can go file system check for yourself! ;-)
You're missing the point. Operating Systems are there to facilitate the user to do stuff and you clicking on those ads is included in that stuff.
Unfortunately we all are going down that route and a collective finger will not stop MS, no matter if it's the size of Eiffel Tower. Let's face it, a customer revolt against Microsoft is less probable than a Bolshevik revolution in the US. Microsoft knows this very well and finds it entertaining.
"An OS is there to facilitate the user doing stuff"!!!! Well said.!!! Full marks!!!
Could be that is why, for me, it has been "the year of Linux" for the last decade. And why it will continue to be so. It amuses me that the small number (about 20%) of my working colleagues / collaborators who still persist in using M$ seem to spend most of their time moaning about how awfull it is. The rest of us went Mac (Nix) or Linux years ago. And no longer have anything (IT related) to moan about.
We now moan about important stuff, like the price of beer.......
"You are obviously a time traveller who has come back from 5 years in the future."
From my PoV, just somebody who can see the way Microsoft would like to take things. The only questions for the likes of yourself seem to be how much of it will you let happen and how quickly and you seem to have answered the second already.
I think it is so that in future they can release the OS as freeware (bloatware / adware) and then you get to pay to turn the ads off.
This increases their user install base from which to hoover data and provides a google-proof stream of advertising revenue.
A high end laptop I bought came with a premium 'professional' version of Windows 10 installed and while I didn't mind the UI, it refused to let me remove the MS nagware / spyware / ads etc so I scrubbed the disk and installed POP-OS and have never looked back, especially with Steam playing all the Windows games I wanted to play.
I am not a privacy / tin hat person by nature but I do get the feeling that MS is doing its best to turn me into one!
"You are obviously a time traveller who has come back from 5 years in the future. Please tell us if the year of Linux on the desktop has arrived yet?!?"
Let's face it, probably - only because a time travel device couldn't possibly powered by Windows. Unless in this instance the time traveller was actually attempting to travel forward in time.
You are mistaken. The personal computer is not for your convenience, but is purely a strategic source of revenue for microsoft. Any "productivity" you may experience is purely accidental and will be rectified in the next update.
"Microsoft is putting revenue ahead of security, ahead of productivity, ahead of quality control. Are these the attributes of a reliable enterprise partner who's positioning themselves as the very heart of corporate computing?"
Priority 1 = Revenue
Priority 2 = Revenue
Priority 3 = Revenue
=> INVEST
You jest but I actually want this option - with a more reasonable price tag of course! Microsoft, please let me pay you per year or per release for a well-maintained, private, secure, ad-free operating system. Oh and it needs to get out my way on choice of web browser, and let me log in with a local account.
There was a not-so-subtle difference. Once revenue came from selling software - and people had to perceive a real advantage in buying new software. Now revenues come from hoarding user data, and the use that to sling them ads to make them buy stuff - inside software they get for free or almost.
That's why they need CEOs with utter contempt for users - and only keen to deep pocket advertisers.
QUOTE: Canary releases are similar to blue-green deployments. Instead of switching all traffic to the updated application, you route only a small portion of the traffic to the new deployment. If there's a problem, revert to the old deployment. If not, gradually route more traffic to the new version. If you're using Azure App Service, you can use the **Testing in production feature** to manage a canary release. END-QUOTE
-- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/framework/devops/release-engineering-cd#stage-your-workloads
Followed by "a limited number of users were affected"...
Not Microsoft's risk - the security risk is entirely a user problem. I'm stating the obvious here, but if you count even just the critical vulnerabilities reported for any single version of Windows and note how little this deluge of hazards to users has actually affected either the MS bottom line or its domination of the OS space, it'll be obvious that they just don't care about anything much except the revenue stream - all the more now a high proportion of it is subscription-based so they can turn the screw more readily.
But I'm not specifically MS-bashing here. The idea that users' needs (including security) are now a high priority for software vendors generally is merely a myth. Like all businesses with captive markets, they're primarily interested in their balance sheets.
"Like all businesses with captive markets, they're primarily interested in their balance sheets."
But is that market capture guaranteed? It consists largely of businesses that have their own bottom line to tend to. How much more intrusion into their affairs will it take for those customers to start to review the market? Anyone not firmly wedded to Windowsland knows very well that other desktop environments can be re-skinned to like more or less any version of Windows that takes your fancy. It's quite easy to envisage a PC vendor pre-installing Linux or BSD with a first run menu for a new user which offers a choice of any Windows UI from W2K to present.
In this context the spoiler of "It doesn't run my gamez" won't get far; this is a work machine. The other spoiler, the user with a massive investment in Excel macros, might end up finding themselves the corporate odd man out, just like the user who must have a Mac. There might even be a market in tools to convert those spreadsheets into one-off applications.
"But is that market capture guaranteed?"
Unfortunately, it pretty much is. Your argument is excellent and would be perfectly valid in a rational world, but we don't seem to be in one.
We only have to review the extent to which Office 365 has come to dominate almost the entire public sector and a high proportion of the private, to recognise that most tech decisions are not made by objectively considering all the alternatives. I've on more than one occasion been told I've "over complicated" when arranging review-based tendering for mission critical tech services. In one instance, the CTO and CIO didn't even want to get involved - they just wanted me to make the decision alone and present them with the result. In my absence they'd probably have chosen on the basis of apparent price alone.
Never underestimate the way things can change in the IT world and how fast irrespective of how entrenched things seem to be.
When I started in IT we were the upstarts in a DEC dominated world by using Unix and RDBMS. I think the latter was even looked on as the more radical. We were always going to be taken under the VMS wing in about six months' time.
The combination between Office 365, Exchange Online and Azure with all their tools and features is practically unbeatable. Moving away from this Holy Trinity would require so much effort that in the end there would be no benefit.
Besides, companies today are lazy and they no longer poses necessary expertise for such an endeavour.
I have recently been lumbered with this on the company laptop and it is truly an abomination; it really has reinforced my opinion of Microsoft products [1].
Meeting invitations - the meeting notice takes half the screen vertically and cannot be hidden or reduced.
'To' fields are unnecessarily large, again reducing useable screen real estate.
Slow startup (even slower than the previous versions and that is saying something) and other 'usability features' that look like they have brought in the 4 year olds and armed them with crayons male the whole thing a really good reason to not 'upgrade' anything on my personal equipment to this detritus.
Admittedly, I am now dual booting the laptop that has access to the network (and very glad I have taken that step).
[1] Which wasn't very positive even before this.
Despite what the author says, IMHO this would be a feature that won't be activated on any Azure AD joined device - when you buy Windows Enterprise subscriptions, which are sold only to business customers.
Everybody else will be on the Windows Lemon Edition which will hoard your data and use them against you in the form of adverts or whatever else they think can make a lot of money. That's what consumer IT became under the care of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
This.
And the beauty of the scheme is, that due to the existence of the EULA, you can't even expect the OS to work as intended. No software in existence guarantees that it actually works, not the gratis stuff and not the paid-for stuff.
So, every bug is a feature, I guess.
Perhaps my institution is one step ahead of the game. We have just been rolled out (over?) with something called BeyondTrust which flags up any activity it thinks should be access controlled and then requires an authorisation code from IT. I'm sure that would stop any advert malware trouble brought in with File Explorer. The unfortunate thing was that this thing's first action was to stop a browser update. You'll have guessed what the only way to get an authorisation code is - short of kicking someone in IT's door in...
Most of my PCs are used for data collection off scientific instruments. It's getting to the stage where I'm spending more time making up for Windows problems than solving science issues. Sigh.
Did the rogue programmer cook up his plan with an outlaw dev-opser to set up a server to push adverts and someone AWOL from QA to test the everything and someone freelance from Installations to package up the build and put it on the update server and a mercenary technical author doing release notes and etc... etc...?
Readers with long memories will recall that "Evangelism is War", according to James Plamondon of Microsoft in 2000.
Link: http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03096.pdf
That view actually means "war" with the customer....because Microsoft's goals have always been at variance with the needs of customers.
The customer, according to Microsoft, is there to suck up exactly what Microsoft dishes out...the customer will pay for what Microsoft dishes out....
...and of course, the customer will like it...or lump it!!
....twenty-two years later.....nothing changes..........
"It's like paying a fortune for the world's finest spanner, only to find the handle shot through with punched-out pitches to buy Satya Nadella's nuts and bolts."
If Windows is a spanner then I want to use my copy to get the jaws good & tight around his nuts & torque them right the fek off.
Now where did I put the power spanner?
Well, this is just the start of the softening-up process in order to gently let the idea of the ad festooned application become established in people's minds. All of this "oops we did this accidentally, and now everybody's talking about it" ploy looks very deliberately planned to do that.
Once they've got it up and running for real on non corporate computers, they will be able to move on to the next step of the plan : The advert API for businesses.
Companies will be able to earn money (or maybe "discounts on MS products and services") by allowing adverts into their own applications, just as long as those ads are served by MS of course. So, for instance you might be in the sales office processing sales orders on your in-house application and just before lunchtime up pops an ad for a local sandwich shop. What's the harm in that, they'll say. It's even paying for your own app development work! And there'll be no ad blocking possible if you make it a corporate policy to mandate these ads.
Why would companies object? I can remember several "exclusive discounts for specially selected business partners" promotions being flung at me at one company I worked for : this would be not much further beyond the line of acceptability than that. However much it made you despair of the new depths that had been sunk to.
Starting from NT rather than the DOS-based things...
NT 3.5(1) was sort of OK but limited.
NT 4. Usable, limited in its own ways. Stability with some drivers was a big problem. Fart in the same room and it could crash.
Win2K. Very good. Stable, responsive, didn't try to do 'too much', probably the best of the Windows family.
XP. Inflicting gaping security holes on the wider world. Usable, wide support across the board.
Vista. Skipped.
7. Stable, slower (meaning here less responsive) by a long way in comparison to Win2K.
8. Skipped.
10. Tried it for a while. Saw how slow and unresponsive it is compared with 7. Decided to stick to 7 and not upgrade. Shove it, Bill.
11. Haven't tried it.
Win2k was the last version (well, let's ignore ME) before Microsoft's "Trustworthy Computing" initiative began. That's when the complexity level for Windows went through the roof, and marks the beginning of Microsoft's long, slow, descent into the fog of their own mediocrity. Obviously, Microsoft is having massive corporate-cultural issues with the "Trustworthy" part, since the "Computing" part hasn't changed much in the past 35 years other than to get faster and be slightly more graphical. This latest ad-slinging "accident" just shows they still don't have a handle on "Trustworthy", even after 20 years of intense soul-searching and meditation. It just isn't in their culture, and never truly will be.
"Now the company has taken a utility that's been at the heart of Windows since the first version and plastered it with advertisements. "
Nope - (File) Explorer didn't exist in versions prior to Windows 95 - we had File Manager then. In Windows 95 and a few versions thereafter we had both Explorer and File Manager, and then File Manager got dropped.
Still been around a while, though...
A banner that says "you're using notepad, have you considered VS Code" might be welcome, as would "you're using Access, have you considered uninstalling it" would be welcome.
Links like the next ripoff crypto scam appearing in any app {explorer, edge, Twitter, the Facebook} are a problem.. if MS sticks to the former, surely the question is whether we get anything for tolerating it
I understand that with the death of TV the advertisements had to go somewhere, but file explorer? really? Or is this a scheme to force people to learn powershell because powershell scripts seem to be the only damn way to remove microsoft problems? Or are the advertisements there to cover NSA malware? What next, cortona robots that kick the door down, give us a sales pitch, and an involuntary 30 day free trial?
They're just mind melding with Andriod. On a mobile/tablet device everything generates a revenue stream, either directly, through advertising or indirectly through snooping. Most of the power of these devices is swallowed up by this ecosystem.
So we end up in a dystopia n universe where advertising is blaring at us 24/7. We're there already. It doesn't look quite like "Blade Runner" but its close.
No need for conspiracy theories. Microsoft has already said they were planning a clone of the Chromebook. To do that effectively, they need a version of Windows manufacturers can use cost-free. To do that, Windows needs to be ad-supported to supply revenue. It's as simple as that. They know darn well their current users would fight ads tooth-and-nail, and won't risk it. Ads will be a great incentive for users to upgrade to Windows Home, which will be ad-free.
Dream on, if they can charge users and get paid to serve advertising they will. It will be presented in the form that Windows is very expensive and that neither the adverting nor subscription fee covers MS's costs.
Ie. MS have grown fat and greedy and is unable to go back to the days when customers made a one-off upfront payment of circa £100 for a version of Windows and 10 years of updates and fixes.
Around about the time Tivos became a thing, and the big old media companies were claiming that the Tivo's shiny new ad skipping feature was a form of stealing, someone wrote in to one of the big papers pointing out:
* back in the 1950s and the dawn of commercial television, there were 10 minutes of adverts per hour during the Superbowl, but that was part of the deal to watch it for free.
* now it's $70 per month for a sports package and there are 15 minutes of adverts per hour
* who is stealing from whom?
Now Microfuck is adding a watermark to screens where W11 detects unsupported hardware.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/03/21/1523212/windows-11-gets-a-desktop-watermark-on-unsupported-hardware
There seems no end to their ability to kick users in their dangly bits.
Proudly Windows free since 2016.
I reckon that your most numerous PC user is actually quite unlikely to be using File Explorer much in the first place, logging into a Web browser the moment the machine boots.
So ads in File Explorer are just going to piss off professionals, who are going to be the most annoyed.
I am old enough to remember Direct X 1.0 that you know gave you a pront to REPLACE YOUR VIDEO DRIVER WITHOUT CHECKING IF IT WAS COMPATIBLE.
The result? You had to boot in safe mode to remove Direct X 1.0 and put the old driver back, if you were lucky.
If you weren't, you had to reboot in dos mode and delete the Direct X files manually.
I have started a push back against the ubiquitous advertising that is forced upon me day in and day out. If an advertisement bugs me, then I NEVER ever buy that product and seriously consider never buying any of that companies products. There are already several companies on my "never-buy-list" for a variety of reasons. It would be a pity to have to add Microsoft, but if they insist then so be it.
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