The guy's ranting about nothing that those of us in the industry weren't ranting about in 2015. At the time, most of the focus was candy crush saga. If you know what boxes to tick, you can turn a fair amount of it off on 10 Pro, all of it off in 10 Enterprise and substantially less of it off in 10 Home.
The author has seen his Windows 10 Home updated to 2004, which has reloaded the start menu XML file with new apps. More worryingly, it now actually installs things in the Programs and Features list
(Add/Remove Programs
) too, so it is doing slightly more than shovelling modern app excrement onto your PC now... but at least it's better than candy crush saga.
With Microsoft they also have a ruse in play. All these forced installs of candy crush rubbish, twitter and other low quality, buggy modern app nonsense is the only thing that gives the Microsoft Store any install count. Once Microsoft gets one of the binaries onto the machine, the second the PC sees a Microsoft Account, the app gets licensed into your Microsoft Account, indelibly. You cant remove it. So are far as King are concerned, virtually every Windows user prior to 2019 whose IT didn't come from a corporate IT department is a licensed user of candy crush. Along with any other crap that Microsoft has peddled onto you since Windows 8.0.
I don't have these problems because I have all the registry keys set to stop it from happening and Microsoft can't forcibly restart my machines; again because I know what registry values to set. For those that don't, welcome to the future, today! Software as a service is here to stay and Windows is likely headed to becoming free, at least in the consumer space. At that time it is no different to iOS or Android where forced app installs are normal. Google has been trying to force Google Duo onto my phone since Covid started and Zoom/Teams started getting so much free publicity that they decided they needed to try and muscle in too. I don't allow automatic updates, so they've failed to so far and unless Samsung ROM burns it, they're going to remain disappointed too.
They're all the same CE Geek, they want telemetry and tracking data and they want to service-lock you on their platform. They all feed from the same tough, so they all use the same practices. It is going to start to become increasingly difficult for me to exist on Windows because everything is becoming de-latched from on premises and moved to the cloud: either Azure or Microsoft Account. In order to keep the telemetry free, effluent free experience, you'll need to be on Volume Licensing to use Azure and that isn't an affordable position.
So like most people, we probably have to choose which monster to sell our soul
(and data
) to in the next 5 years. Apple, Google or Microsoft, or do we move to Linux and see which distro can hold out the longest against Google and Microsoft's insidious yet inexorable take-over of Linux.
Either way: "all your data
(and unwarranted subscription only licensing models
) belong to us"
As for Edge: It probably needed to be done, I don't want anything to do with Bing. It is utterly useless. If it were easier to strip Bing out of it, I'd be happier. That said, they should have sent it out and deinstalled IE from everything on 7 Home editions at the same time. I deinstalled IE from everything I manage
(client and server
) earlier in the year and used the business version of Edge to replace it. You can get rid of most of the Bing stuff using the Business version, but a lot of features are administratively locked if you do it otherwise you can't change them. For example, if you want to change the search providers to Duck Duck Go and Google, removing Bing, the end-user then can't add their own search providers.
The version that comes down from Windows Update, is the consumer version with the grotesquely annoying, time consuming, full screen 'Welcome to Edge' animation and intro screen. Have fun with that when you log into 50 different PCs a day and have to wait, watch it, answer through the damn sign-in OOBE wizard just to land on Bing, have to change to a real search engine to type some senseless search keyword in.
The new version of Windows 10, 20H2 will come pre-burned with the new Edge too, so everyone is going to get to share in the love.