Another nail in Micro$oft's market share


Micro$oft's treatment of customers will backfire. The monopoly's days are numbered, it's going on intertia
Brad at WendyMcElroy.com tried to fix his parent's computer over the holidays.

A look at the history log told me that this update (KB923789, fixing a security vulnerability in the Flash player) had been failing for weeks. And every time my folks switched on their computer, automatic update was trying to install it again!

A visit to a Microsoft support forum revealed that I was not the only one having problems with this update. Lots of people reported this, and Microsoft hadn't fixed it. Fortunately, several people reported the solution: go to the Adobe site, download the latest Flash player, and install it manually.

Now imagine the plight of a technically-unsophisticated user, who trusts his security to Microsoft's automatic updates. 1. He would be left with a compromised Flash player that could be quickly exploited. 2. If on a dial-up connection, his limited bandwidth would be even more limited as automatic update ran repeatedly in the background. (Broadband users probably wouldn't notice the impact, at least with small updates like this one.)

One more reason for me to snort derisively when someone suggests that Windows XP is easier for newbies than Linux. It took me a good part of a day, and a fair bit of technical savvy, to get their computer working smoothly again. ("It's so fast now!")

I am not sure Windows can be fixed. It's not just that it is widespread, it's that it assumes it's users can't be trusted to run their own machines. Given my own recent experiences in XP support hell, I have only one thing to say.

Embrace the Mac side.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - December 25, 2006 at 03:48 PM  Tag


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