Windows 10: (Beware of Geeks bearing gifts.)

[larkin]

Windows 10: (Beware of Geeks bearing gifts.) notacut+pastepiece

Why would huge corporation run the risk of alienating it's customer base by forcing an up-grade using coercive and deceptive methods?

What could be more of a dishonest trick than changing the X and the right hand corner of the dialog box into an accept and install up-grade?

What could be behind herding millions of people into something that many do not want and no one really needs?

You've have heard it before. “We are not the customers.”

Their customers are corporate interests for marketing and increasingly, the government. Microsoft is larger and more influential than many countries around the world. It is responding competitively to the rise of Google and Facebook and the needs of other governments.

As annoying as it might be to be subjected to algorithms that determine what products I like or might buy,..I can live with that, but this trend is far deeper and darker. I read a piece where they can determine if someone is gay even before they know that they are gay.

What are Win10 objectives?

From what I can gather, Win10 is a move to establish a common platform for the myriad of devices starting with Your computer, your smart phone, your car, your house and any number of things that are not even conceived yet. Will employers keep track of all their employees? Will Cortana will tell you when to wake up and when to pay a bill and when you are overdrawn at the bank?

These are applications that are presented to us as things that will help us structure and organize our lives.

The trend in software is to stop selling their products and instead, begin renting them through the “cloud”. Adobe has developed a simple working model. They no longer sell Photoshop, they sell a subscription service at $50 or $60 per month. If you do not pay, it disappears.

I think we can count on Microsoft to follow this model. They have already announced that there will be no more up-grades. I've heard that they might charge $1 per month for the solitaire game. I am not likely to play solitaire but this tells me that Microsoft is setting up a billing regiment. We will all be paying Microsoft monthly for the privilege of turning my computer, my private property, in to a terminal for the purpose of gathering data.

As Jim Carey did at an award ceremony when he put his fore fingers up to look like devil horns and said, “IT'S PERFECT!”

What worries me more than anything is that Microsoft's primary customer is government. Even now they have established a symbiotic relationship. This is the very definition of fascism. How soon will it be before we take our orders from Cortana?

I am not against tech, I like the things that computers have brought us, but something unexpected is happening and as if in a fog it is hard to make out. I imagined that the day may come when people flee the internet.

Looking at this situation from a futurist or Sifi point of view, you might say, maybe this is the way it is supposed to go. Perhaps we are constructing a responsive nervous system for the entire human organism? A foundation for this seems to be in the works. I believe that if this is accomplished, it will result in the death of the individual.. I would prefer not to be a part of that kind of future.

[Joe]

I recently upgraded to "10" and it was horrible. In the first place, the download easily provided didn't work. So having decided to proceed, I had to go to MS & have one of their helpers install the miserable thing. Then, all of my favorites, or book marks, disappeared, so I had to go back to the helper to get my favorites recovered; then it was the mail that wouldn't work and so, for the third time I was on hold while a helper, this one an actual person that I could talk to, figured out how to make the mail work. It was a miserable experience. I'm going to explore the possibility of shifting to Apple. I like my Apple phone.

I loath MS. I was perfectly happy with XP, but then I had to upgrade that when they would no longer service or support it. I upgraded to 7 and noticed no improvement. One of the reasons that motivated me to upgrade to 10 was what they did to me with XP. And again, I detect no improvement. I do not pretend to know what might be motivating MS though Larkin does have some ideas that are certainly food for thought, but it may just be arrogance. Whatever it is, I'm going to get rid of it in the foreseeable future.