Go straight to sell! Windows second-chance setup hawks Microsoft services at IT's expense You’ve had your laptop for months, and you’ve always made sure it installed Microsoft updates. Then one day you boot up, and Windows 11 greets you with a confusing message: “You’re almost done setting up your PC.” Almost done? What could that possibly mean? You set up your computer on Windows 11 a long time ago, but here it is …
“Enterprises tolerate $NEXT_TRICK because switching operating systems is expensive and inconvenient, but smaller organizations are affected more severely since each minute counts,”
The very definition of frog-boiling. There's never a really convenient time to make the break but the overall experience just gets worse.
They know they've got you and can do whatever they want.
Just for the record, the "boiling frog" story is a myth:
During the 19th century, several experiments were performed to observe the reaction of frogs to slowly heated water. In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C1.So, it would appear, frogs are smarter than people when it comes to creeping enshittification.[...]
Modern scientific sources report that the alleged phenomenon is not real. In 1995, Douglas Melton, a biologist at Harvard University, said, "If you put a frog in boiling water, it won't jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot—they don't sit still for you." George R. Zug, curator of reptiles and amphibians at the National Museum of Natural History, also rejected the suggestion, saying that "If a frog had a means of getting out, it certainly would get out."2
(Emphasis added)
Unless their brain has been removed, of course.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a pot of frog's legs on the stove and I think it's about to boil over.
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1 A tepid 77 °F for those living in Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States
My wife had to get another laptop and I needed to install the software for our Brother printer/scanner (She was used to their scanning program). While installing the software for the printer (for which we already have an ink subscription) I was up sold for 4 different products while waiting to install the some Windows utilities.
I guess once a software vendor has your attention they don't want to let you go.
These shittiy tactics are a real pain. I have a lot of users that belong to very small orgs, they usually don't even have a domain controller. They just have 3 to 5 PCs. Windows 11 professional now does its best to make them ruin their setup by forcing a MS account on them, enabling bitlocker without telling the users, adding AI, etc. My users should be shielded from this, but even setting up policies is not really working. MS is always changing things so that the policies that worked before do not work anymore.
There should really be some hero that has the patience to dig into MS's deceptions and to keep a web site where we can find a reg file (updated over time) to disable all of this.
«Now do that 10,000+ times.»
If you are managing 10.000+ seats, you probably have some sort of automation system helping you to do it, does not matter if that fleet is Windows only, Mac Only, linux only, or a mixture....
Sort of like a (Mobile) Device Management solution.
In those sorts of solutions is trivialy easy to disable (and keep diabled in spite of MS changing things) the SCOOBE on Windows...
In you are administering a 10.000+ sized fleet without an (M)DM solution, or in you do not know how to disable SCOOBE using your (M)DM, then PEBCAK
I read previous post by ecofeco as saying that there could be many thousands of small organisations in a similar position to the one describedby Kurgan in the post above that. Not one org with 10K endpoints.
The small public sector organisation I do a bit of (non IT) work in has a few hundred screens, and yes, people log into a domain and there are policies. Not fully sorted but most of the gunge is hidden. The browser setup shenanigans gets students every time though.
I'm reading PEBCAK as problem exists (south of) British Columbia and Alaska, because it's clearly in Redmond, Washington.
Exploiting monopoly market dominance to squeeze another billion or two out of unsuspecting customers who have already paid you in a myriad different ways is unconscionable. Time for an antitrust lawsuit.
There is a hero. O&O Shutup10 and O&O AppBuster. I use both regularly and I never once had that screen appear. For Shutup10, I check almost all recommended settings. Except for the ones with Edge, because when you do, many settings in Edge are locked out. There are few other recommended ones I skip and a few limited ones I check. (Why does a printer need my location!) AppBuster lets you remove Microsoft apps quickly -- why can't we uninstall the unwanted Microsoft Bing app?
You also need to boot into the recovery command prompt after every update to delete the compatelrunner.exe file. It is amazing how persistent this telemetry file is.
I suppose of you told them they could spend $1000.00 on a computer to install Windows Server and configure a domain controller they would say "no, that's too expensive", but they are more than happy to pay your cost for a support visit! When I supported SMBs I saw this so often! It's easier to pay 100 small invoices than to get a moderately large purchase approved!
Sometimes the bean counters are the worst virus!
It's like being forced to watch this advert again and again only with Satya Nadella screaming at you until you buy everything he's selling, but he doesn't even throw in a basket of beans.
I remember a time when Micros~1 advice included...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/zero-trust/ten-laws-of-security
Now, it would appear their 'acting' is of a similar standard to their QA and that they can run whatever they want, whenever they want, simply by the installation of a forced update.
I stopped using Windows at home as my daily driver years ago and fortunately for me, I have managed to avoid the shit-show that is W11.
My sympathies to those who have to use it and are unable or unwilling to find a new path.
I saw this pop up on a customer's machine a few weeks ago. They are a small company who lease their PCs on a 4 yearly cycle. They recently *embraced* W11 and Office 365 when their new machines arrived. I should say that they are not a computer savvy company but use PCs to run vital functions such as sales, purchasing, advertising, accounts etc.
So far I've not heard a single good comment about W11 from them and the overall feeling is that it has cost them both time and money to get their PCs back to a point at which they are *properly usable*. I have suggested that they move to Linux as there's nothing that they need that Linux can't do but they have decided to ditch W11 and go Mac. Whether that is good or bad I have no particular opinion as somone who runs Linux Mint most of the time but W10 when I need to and have an ipad for travelling. What I do know is that persistent issues with the W11 user interface and constant nags to buy things like Xbox passes and the inability to get rid of uinrequired crap like gamebar have pushed them over the edge.
What I can see is that Micro$oft is trying to shoot their own feet off for corporate users. I personally refuse to have W11 on any of my machines. I have tried it for a month and then re-installed W10 on my laptop.
Because there is no excuse for Enterprise organizations who don't already have 'tips' and 'setup' disabled. Small business I can understand: if you are small enough to not have real computer support people who understand what they are doing, you are stuck with default settings. But at "enterprise" level, failure to correctly configure your standard image is your own fault.
Excuse? Fault?!
Bloody Stockholm syndrome, that is. How about let's direct the blamey words at the shitehawks who trouser the premium for "professional" software then turn around and panhandle obnoxiously to stiff the buyer for further (most entirely inappropriate) addons.
Not seen this at my place of work, because it's not forced on you if you're using a proper business grade edition of the OS and have competent people managing your systems.
I admit it'd be nice if it was off by default for Enterprise Edition, but it's literally one group policy setting. Which we set and forgot years ago.
Come on Reg, this is the kind of nonsense article I keep getting fed from XDA developers...What's next?
"I bought this TV but it only shows BBC 1"
RTFM FFS.
The problem's not limited to consumer features and this cruft does not magically turn itself off. Too often you will find that the gear managing a 10k+ estate is being run by a tiny band of very "competent people" who have many other things to do and are expected to manage that estate at minimal cost. See the upstream comment about how many extra hours a year now have to be spent combatting these unwanted features. That is a rising cost that your organisation has to meet, not Microsoft.
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So glad I'm a Linux user.
Switched in 1993 to Slackware, used Gentoo for a long time and I've used Ubuntu since ~2010 or so?
Here's the COMPLETE list of upsells I've gotten from it:
1) During the graphical installer, when it shows those pictures telling you about how great Libreoffice etc. are, I'm pretty sure one of those screens mentioned extended security updates being available and so on. There is no clicking through extra screens to say "no", though, it's unobtrusive enough that I *think* there's one there but I'm not even 100% sure.
2) Ubuntu has a notification reminding to enable some kind of backups, and years back this 'set up some kind of backups' reminder mentioned they had a "Ubuntu One" cloud backup service, so it'd suggest you could use that. This was a one-time notification (and not full-screen, it popped up in the corner like a "your downloads are completed" or anything else.)
3) The update manager, and apt, show what updates you have available, but also shows what extra updates you'd get with Ubuntu Pro. (This has additional updates for packages outside 'main', and extends security updates for like 15 years instead of 5. In case one wanted to just keep running the same version of Ubuntu but still receive security fixes.)
4) npm (Node Package Manager) will ask for donations for some packages. That's true on any platform though, and npm didn't come out of the box on any of the distros I used.
That's literally it, and as you can see I'm even counting a 3rd party install in my list since there's just so few of them. Even the backup notification and apt/update manager one were HIGHLY controversial when they were put in, as was the change to npm. Linux users will truly not put up with this kind of thing unless it's minimally invasive (the reminder to backup -- which is still there, just not with a mention of Ubuntu One since I think the cloud backup service is gone -- you close the one time notification. And the rest, you can ignore the additional text and it doesn't affect the workflow of the app at all.) And even then it probably did drive SOME users away to Debian or Mint etc.
"Perhaps worst of all, SCOOBE breaks user trust by using a UI to try to trick users into doing something that Microsoft wants but businesses do not."
If I ever see this on my workbox I'm going full buffet mode, then I'm calling IT to complain about it. Let IT suffer for it. And if they complain, what am I supposed to know about it? I use Linux at home and never had this happen before.
