On Friday, I get a call from a friend — Microsoft has invalidated his server license without warning. He bought it from Dell, Dell installed the software, he has the paperwork, the receipt, and the hologram on the side of the machine.
Sunday, Tamara turns on her XP box and it blue screens at boot. She’s furious, and I know first hand she also has a legal copy from Dell. She has been nothing but diligent with anti-virus and spyware.
Monday, as we were repairing it, I got a call from my sister. Apparently her system rebooted and blue screened. As it’s a 2000 machine, and Microsoft isn’t supporting that anymore, this raises new problems. XP Home, of course, ends support at the end of this year. And Vista requires far more computing power than she can afford. We’re not sure what she’s going to do.
As that phone call was ending, I got a call from someone I used to do support for. Her system just locked up and won’t boot now.
While that was happening, and I swear I’m not making this up, my friend’s sister (she does IT for the government) called his cell phone — her XP system at home just crashed.
This is all on the heels of my dad’s machine blowing up so that he got a Macbook Pro.
…so five machines in 48 hours… something’s up. Has anyone else had a problem?
UPDATE 27-Jun-2006 6:36pm: So just as I’m talking myself out of tin-foil hat conspirancy, this hit the news wire: A Windows Kill Switch. Ok, now you’re forced into submission. But if Microsoft can pull the trigger, can a malicious hacker? I’d love to see MS’s response to someone else shutting off machines all over the world. :shudder:
UPDATE 28-Jun-2006 11:05am: Came into work, unprompted, my co-worker reported that his Windows box at home was blue screening at the login screen. It started doing it this weekend.
UPDATE 30-JUN-2006 2:18pm: TechDirt reports users are having problems, and Microsoft is being sued over WGA. GrokLaw explains.
UPDATE 26-JUL-2006 10:07am: Seems the WGA and Activation issues are real, and it’s getting out of hand. Microsoft’s response falls flat, assuming people are indeed pirates (or will put up with it), which is sending the technically savvy users off to switch desktops to Mac OS X or Linux.
UPDATE 28-JUL-2006 2:54am: More public outcry; there are now two lawsuits against Microsoft.
At the risk of being the pro Microsoft guy, Walt, you’re mixing issues. Let me try and help clarify a few things.
First paragraph — server licensing. Server licensing comes in several varieties, one of which is OEM. OEM licensing, for those who didn’t know, is bound to the hardware. It’s in the EULA — which everyone reads, right? 🙂 I’m curious what you mean by invalidated the license — that information would be helpful, as well as the kind of license.
Now, the rest of your issues are crashes, which aren’t licensing issues ones. Crashes do happen, so let’s focus on the availability of support.
Microsoft Support.
You have your dates wrong for Microsoft support. Looking here…. http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeselect
Windows 2000 Professional has Extended Support retired in 2010.
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3071
Windoes XP Home actually hasn’t even had a date announced — Microsoft has indicated that Mainstream support will end two years after the next version of this product is released. See http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3221, and Extended support is expected to go much further than that.
You get security updates all the way through Extended Support — meaning Windows 2000 Pro updates till 2010, and XP will likely be further out than that by a considerable amount.
Sounds like a rough couple of days around your friends. Let’s not put on the tin-foil hats, however. If you need information / access to it, I’m happy to help.
Dave
Working backward, the information I snagged for the XP Home support ending came form this website: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3221, which I got from a news story. And I remember, as do others, that it did say Dec 2006. CNet has a story about the “false alarm“. I agree, that page no longer says that. Very interesting. I also think there’s an implied implication that there’s a strong desire on Microsoft’s part that people will move to Vista. Problem is, if I have a working system, and there’s no compelling reason to move, should I have to. The mortal users I deal with are still running Windows 98 and Windows 2000, and when those crash, they can’t afford to move to the next version, much less upgrade hardware, and they know they can’t go back. They’re trapped.
I was over at a friend’s house, whom you remember from our days or working together in QA, and his highest end PC doesn’t meet the lowest end hardware requirements for Vista. It’s unlikely they’ll be able to move their four home machines to Vista, much less one.
You and I tend to have things a little bit better. We’re in a technology industry with IT salaraies, we don’t have kids draining disposable income, and we’ve worked with these technologies for a long, long, time. It one thing for me to have a problem with XP. It’s another when my mom or neighbor does. GeekSquad usually can’t provide the level of service we do, and even a plain rebuild can be expensive on those budgets. For the most part, you and I are dealing with corporate customers. We have deep pocketed corporations buying tax-deductible copies of enterprise versions of Windows and applications. My fight is for the little guy.
Admittedly, much of my frustration comes from OEM license bindings to hardware. The point being that when things go wrong, and they -do- go wrong, what should be a simple recovery is hindered by policy, not technology. At work, we had two identical machines from the same vendor, one went bad, so we simply swapped hard drives between the two. This was more than enough for Windows to decide this was malicious behavior. All we wanted was data recovery. This kind of frustrating insanity just doesn’t happen with any other popular operating system that I know of.
Even when things go right, and you’ve got firewalls, antivirus checkers, spyware checkers, recent updates, registry scrubbers, and disk optimizers, the system still seems to degrade in performance over time and the official stance appears to be rebuild it. No one can tell me why. No one knows how to fix it. We learned in computer science there is no such thing as bit-rot, only resource management problems. Anyone who’s got a start button that takes several seconds to draw a rectangle when clicked or who finds they can out-type their word processor has first hand experience with this problem. Smart IT guys like ourselves tend to manage our machines better, but the first 30 minutes of my work day is often dealing with making the machine stable for the next 8 hours. That adds up.
I think the term support is misleading. Anyone who’s tried calling Microsoft and getting support for a real problem knows the frustration. First of all, Microsoft is not going to help mom and dad resolve their computer freezing problem — it’s either reboot or reinstall. Any kind of actual support is so far beyond what the typical person can readily afford, and I’d almost challenge that the solution isn’t permanent.
I classify support as being in a different bucket than Training, where they tell you how to make your application do something.
As an IT guy, however, to me support means that Microsoft will continue to send out security patches and operating system updates. Free. To the best of my knowledge Windows 98, NT, and 2000 are no longer supported in this manner, meanwhile people are still using the software, and malicious hackers are still writing exploits.
Extended support, and admittedly, this may be where I get this totally wrong, is paid support. While totally acceptable for the corporate customer, and maybe even for the well compensated IT worker, paid service plans like this are well out of reach for home consumers.
As an anaology, it’s like the person who keeps their car in working condition, but then something breaks due to age, you go to the dealer and they inform you that no one makes the $15 part anymore so you need to buy a new car.
So, while I can go get the part I need specially made for far more than $15, it still leaves me with an old car.
Of course it is fun to wear the tinfoil hat because a pile of machines went down in a short period of time, but the crux of the matter is that this has become a real crisis. Picking on Microsoft gives a sense of satisfaction, but I agree it doesn’t solve any problem. Switching from Microsoft does, and I admit that choice doesn’t come without it’s own flavor of pain. Corporately, I recommend Microsoft — someone else’s problem will always provide a stream of income.
But for the home user, this is one problem I don’t feel obligated to resolve, now that alternate solutions exist, especially because it’d actually be cheaper for me to buy these people new machines than to exert the effort to recover, repair, retrain, and then have to do it again in six months.
And I would be one to agree with you about home users.
I’m not convinced that Windows is the right solution in the single user environment. (That being said, I will say that, while it is far less likely to happen, a sick Mac is even harder to fix. That sick mac icon when a machine won’t start doesn’t give you many options than going to the Apple store.)
I think “the little guy” should be looking at alternatives — Macs, mostly. I think Linux is even more of a mess for a non-technical user to support, so I won’t go there. 🙂
You’re right — Microsoft does want everyone to go to Vista. That’s how they make money. 🙂 I don’t think everyone will, or should.
Vista is getting some odd press, and it’s interesting to note what is really happening here. Microsoft wants to use some new technology — features in new chipsets, graphics cards, etc. Thus, the new hardware requirements are steep. It’s also been nearly 5 years since their last OS, so in my mind they get a bit of a pass on the fact that they are jumping a bit. If you don’t want Vista, don’t buy it — and I think many users will be in his category.
It’s also important to note that the new hardware requirements are to use everything in Vista, including the pretty new graphical interface. It will work on lesser machines, you just won’t get the graphics interface. It’s debatable whether the upgrade is worth it without that, but that is for individual users to address.
On patches, 2000 is still being patched, and will be until 2010. NT is not — but it’s also 15 years old. I ask a very serious question — how long is a company obligated to offer patches to old stuff? I tend to think that 10 years is pretty reasonable, and that is what they do on the corporate side. It’s more like 8 on the consumer side. It’s certainly not ‘forever’.
Apple, mind you, is FAR LESS generous with patching. They only patch their current OS and one revision back. There is the argument about more secure/less secure — but both OS’s have holes. All it takes is one unpatched hole. Apple isn’t the silver bullet. I will agree it’s a nice, clean, working bullet that generally doesn’t have problems.. but they stopped patching 10.1 in 2002. 10.2 in 2004. Those aren’t as old as Windows 2000, which MS has committed to patching until 2010.
I agree with you, wholeheatedly, that MS has some work to do. I also think that Vista will not see large adoption, and this might be a turning point for them. I’m also just realistic that you do trade one set of problems for another.
Dave writes:
> I ask a very serious question — how long is a company obligated to offer patches to old stuff?
My personal opinion is that Microsoft has gone above and beyond in this cateogry. To the point of their own detriment. But I’ve got some mixed feelings on the point. And in some sense, I feel that perhaps Apple’s done the right thing, maybe even for the wrong reason.
Maintaining an old operating system is hard. Darn hard. In fact, I think it’s a losing battle. You’ve got to support old hardware. You’ve got to support new hardware. And the problem is, doing it results in bloat and complexity.
Apple’s approach seems to be a little different. They start off by insisting you use higher end hardware to start with, which means they don’t have to cater to a lower common denominator. Users instantly see this in terms of speed, features, and increased capability. When there’s a problem with an OS API, they don’t really patch around it, they fix it, and then insist the application vendor resolve down stream problems from that action (thought they are kind enough to give advanced notice). This means the problem is taken care of for then and in the future. Apple is willing to break existing applications wihtout appology in order to move forward, with the benefit of knowing that doing so will, for most of the time, produce new applications that work on older versions anyhow. (e.g., don’t tolerate an app that abuses memory, but no longer function unless it behaves according to spec — thus a now well behaving app will work in a previously overly tolerant environment). Microsoft has been writing broken behavior hacks into later versions of their OS so that older games will still play.
The problem, of course, is that once people have a solution it should continue to work. If I got a perfectly good and working system, I shouldn’t be forced to by an upgrade just because Microsoft decides it wants more cash. And with that, I shouldn’t expect new applications to be obligated to work. I ought to be able to ride a steady-state, and upgrade when I need more functionality.
The problem, of course, is with the underlying design of [existing] Windows. These are the patches we’re seeing. I think the code complexity has grown beyond what Microsoft can realistically manage.
Previous versions of Windows were fairly crippled unless you ran with Administrative privileges. Microsoft insisted on releasing raw sockets in a commercial OS. And the lack of an outgoing firewall in those versions poses more problems. As such, the environment is ripe for exploitation. If they had abandoned this history, making a new, “mostly compatable” product line, that was more secure and more stable, I think they’d remain dominate. As it is, they’re trying to license themselves into a solution, rather than making an unchallengable technical path that ensures it.
Unfortunately, no administration – no security is how they’ve trained end users to think. And I suspect when and if they throw the big security switch to on, that the intrusion is going to be more than most existing home users are willing to suffer. It won’t matter to the rest of us IT folks, because we’re already doing this kind of thing with 3rd party software.
Ignoring Apple’s past (OS 9 and back), which I think was a huge mess, OS X gets it right. It’s easy to manage and it makes an environment where it’s difficult, programatically, to do evil things without the user inviting the vampire over the threshold. Will it happen? Sure. But it won’t happen as covertly as it did in Windows.
You and I tend to upgrade our machines every few years and stay on top of trends. It’s surprising just how far back people in the real world are still operating, especially when their computer is already doing they want. To me, it’s like being in the dark ages.
Case in point, I assist a widow who’s got a Win98 box running an old version of AOL because all she does is check her email for the animal shelter she runs. She’s not a power user, she has to look up on a hand written cheat sheet how to start her email, and telling her that she has to buy a new machine and a new operatiing system and a new internet software in order to retain the capabilities she already has isn’t going to fly. Training her to do something new is impossible. Someone sends her a virus, she willingly opens it, her machine dies, and she thinks I just need to wave my hands over it to fix it — instead it’s a full rebuild. And when that’s done, there’s no protection that it won’t happen again. If I can get her to part with enough money, I can swap in a new solution, but she doesn’t see value in it. So, all that’s left is to be mad at MS that it ever was allowed to happen in the first place, especially when they’re surrounded by products that don’t do this. Computer crashes should never be the norm, no user action or bad/malicious data should ever compromise a system. MS has the resources to hire experts, and they did, experts that designed stable enterprise mainframe systems, so I expect more of them.
Very recently the quality of free software has hit that knee of the curve where commerial crossed a while back, only their pace is much faster. I’d like to think that “disposable desktops” are a bad product of the 80’s. With all the wonderful equipment, knowledge, and processes we have these days, shouldn’t it be possible to engineer something that lasts?
So, I don’t think that a company should have to perpetually provide a lifetime of updates. But I also don’t think that they should put themselves in a position where they should have to. More importantly, if you’ve saturated your users with your product and you want them to make a life altering change, then you need to make that transition as painless as possible. Offer me the ability to switch to Vista for $20. Once. I’d do it. So would others. It would be stupid not to. Then guess what, everyone’s on the same page and you can take things in a totally new direction. It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it’s a lot easier to hold out to big barriers than small ones.
Ah, what I call the “toaster” argument.
We sell the technology that is “so easy to use it’s like your toaster”.
But it’s not. Computers don’t just plug in and work, but we sell them like they do.
Your example is classic…. and one, I would argue, that is screaming out for the email/internet only solution. WebTV was close to this — an appliance that does what she needs.
We’re failing a large market segment… and forcing the wrong solution to fit.
You’re right. What we need are appliances that are as simple and maintenance free as a gaming console. Most people don’t want a computer that offers all the complexity.
Whoever makes a turn key browser / email / wordprocessor for people who don’t want anything more could make a mint.
I wonder, now that computers have come out, if the market has recarved itself, and we’re dealing with the wrong granularity. You got gamers, computer phobes who want basic services, benelovent hackers that just want to learn computer science, and some slices of business segments that range from just wanting a website or search engine to being able to sell services.
Clearly one size doesn’t fit all. And clearly seven flavors of Windows is too confusing for the average Joe Blow.
Apple seems to grab the outliers. Like my mother, someone who could never make a Windows machine work even after hours of instructions, but could instantly make a Mac do what she wanted and feel quite good about herself, and the other end, all the high profile hackers and coders that are doing software development, replacing their PCs. Windows still has the majority of the middle of the bell curve — users advanced enough to get over basic hurdles, but not so bleeding edge they want to move to other multiuser systems.