Is Microsoft making Windows worse to make it better?

Windows 10 is being presented as an operating system in continuous development. We’re used to cloud services being a work in progress, but how well does that transfer to an operating system

Windows 10 isn’t just a new operating system; it’s also a new way of delivering an operating system. In theory, Windows as a Service (as Microsoft calls it) promises a continuous stream of new features alongside the familiar security updates, instead of saving up new features for three years and then trying to persuade users those features are worth the cost of an upgrade. (And no, Windows as a Service is not a paid subscription service, unless you’re a business paying for upgrade rights with Software Assurance.)

“This is increasingly the way the industry is heading,” says Gabriel Aul (pictured right), corporate vice president for the Engineering Systems team in the Windows and Devices group at Microsoft. “It’s by no means isolated to technology companies. For example, you even see automotive companies like Tesla using a services model to provide new benefits to customers. We saw it as a natural evolution for Windows

Microsoft has been using the services model for years with its regular security updates, Aul says, and Windows 10 lets the company take it to a new level. “We really do believe Windows 10 is the best Windows ever, and embracing a services model lets us keep making the experience even better with additional productivity, safety and entertainment value offered over time

That’s the theory. But even before Windows 10 shipped, there was considerable pushback against the new Windows as a Service model – and especially against using different branches to deliver updates at different speeds, such as Current Branch (CB) for consumers, who will get update downloads as soon as they occur without the option to postpone them, and Current Branch for Business (CBB) for businesses that want to delay updates (but still without the option to postpone them indefinitely

However, while a great deal of attention has been given to concerns that Microsoft’s new service policy gives you “updates whether you want them or not,” there’s been much less discussion of other implications of this approach. What this means when it comes to features that have been delayed or even downgraded (sometimes temporarily sometimes not) before they get updated.

In the process of Microsoft redesigning the operating system, some features have gone away (sometimes temporarily). For example, the new Edge web browser has fewer capabilities than Internet Explorer users have known for years. And new features in Windows 10 weren’t all ready on day one; instead, they’ll keep arriving over the coming months. For most users, the November ‘autumn update’ was the first instalment.

This is a new approach for operating systems, but it’s something that’s been ‘business as usual’ for years from cloud services such as Gmail, as well as for mobile apps. Until it sought to appeal to businesses with Google Apps, Google services were notorious for staying in beta as the company continued to develop them, and Microsoft Office 365 has added features regularly. “Doing this at the operating system level is definitely harder than for a cloud-based service,” Aul admits, “but we think the model makes sense and we’re committed to making it a smooth and low-friction process for customers.” Even so, it’s not clear how willing business users are to make that transition.

Stepping back or starting small?

In some cases, making the Windows experience ‘even better’ has first meant taking a step back and even removing features. Or, as Aul phrases it, “We believe this approach will allow us to deliver better features on a sustained cadence, but some things will start small and grow as we add capability to them.”

With both Windows Mobile and the Edge browser, that step back was inevitable, because Microsoft started from scratch.

It meant previews of the mobile version of Windows 10 began by being far behind what Microsoft was already shipping with Windows Phone 8.1. Early previews lacked features such as the ability to open Office documents, and even now the new Mail and Calendar apps don’t offer significantly more functionality than the Windows Phone equivalents. In addition, the Windows Store no longer allows users to send apps to their phone from their PC; they have to load the apps directly from the Store on their phone.

That ‘step back to move forward’ process may not always be comfortable, but the belief at Microsoft seems to be that the sacrifices will be worthwhile once the operating system reaches the ‘moving forward’ stage. For example, shifting to a common operating system has allowed Windows phones to get the Edge browser and the same universal apps as Windows 10.

In particular, Microsoft seems to be hoping it will reach the single, unified messaging system it’s been working toward for both PCs and phones. Over the past few years, Microsoft dropped Windows Messenger; it also integrated and then removed Facebook messaging (after Facebook removed the APIs to support that). With Windows 10, Microsoft can integrate Skype messages with SMS and Skype calling with the Phone dialler; and with Cortana on both phones and PCs, users will see missed calls and be able to send text messages from their PCs. The first rudimentary pieces of this arrived in the autumn update.

Aul paints the development of Edge as a shift to implementing more web standards. “Consumers want a browser that takes full advantage of the modern web and new features in Windows 10, but Internet Explorer still plays an important role for some enterprise customers who require a legacy browser. With Windows 10, we’re delivering experiences for the modern web and new apps, while still helping existing customers who may need more time to transition.”

However, although Edge supports the latest HTML standards, it has fewer features as a browser than Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox. It’s only in the fall update that Edge added the abilities to synch Favorites, to upload files by dragging them into a browser window, to download files to a specific folder and to stream video from the browser to other devices – features IE has had since Windows 7. The update added a thumbnail preview for tabs, but that only works inside the browser; the taskbar preview still works only for the active tab, so you can’t close individual tabs from the taskbar thumbnail as you can in IE. You can’t pin specific sites to the taskbar either, and you can only re-open the most recently closed tab without digging into your history.

The promised extension support (which replaces the IE model of plugins for everything except Flash) that was expected in 2015 is delayed until some time in 2016; according to Microsoft, it’s still “actively working to develop a secure extension model.” And even though Windows Mobile will bring the Edge browser to phones, they won’t get extensions as quickly as the Windows 10 browser (something that would have put Windows phones ahead of Android).

Troubles for OneDrive

Another area where Windows 10 has taken a step forward and a step back is OneDrive. The OneDrive for Business client has finally advanced from the clunky SharePoint and Groove technology, and it synchs as reliably as the popular OneDrive consumer service.

But the consumer version of OneDrive in Windows 10 lost the sophisticated placeholder feature from Windows 8.1, which let users work with files through Explorer, whether or not they were locally synced – because according to Microsoft that feature confused some users and caused storage problems on small Windows tablets. Users can still pick which folders they want to sync, but doing so requires they use a separate dialog rather than choose directly from Explorer.

Sharing OneDrive files directly from Explorer has also taken a step forward (the Explorer option no longer takes you to the OneDrive site to get the link) and backwards (the feature moves from the Ribbon to the context menu and shares a link that allows editing by default, not just viewing).

It hasn’t helped that Microsoft recently announced that Office 365 users will no longer have unlimited OneDrive cloud storage and fees for OneDrive would be revamped. Is Microsoft listening to user views on functionality when it makes these changes? As you’d expect, Aul says yes.

Our metric for success is delivering a product that people use and love.” he argues. “We have a team of data scientists who rigorously pore over data and feedback from Insiders, and customers to understand the features or changes they want to see in the product, and to help the engineering team build out road maps for product development.”

It’s a little harder to see from the outside what the feedback looks like, because the Windows Feedback app is now the only official way to report bugs and request features. Although Microsoft is keeping its more public UserVoice sites for developer features, including the rendering engine in Edge, it’s closing down the UserVoice sites for Windows 10.

And users may not always feel that Microsoft is listening. For example, when Microsoft announced in January 2015 that it was removing the ‘placeholders’ that allowed OneDrive users to access all their files using a minimum of local drive space, Chris Jones, who was then corporate vice present for OneDrive and SharePoint, stated that “other [important capabilities] will come in updates that follow later in the calendar year – most notably the core capabilities of placeholders that are both reliable and comprehensible.” But there has been no follow-up. More recently, reductions in OneDrive storage allowances precipitated a petition drive.

Building differently to build faster

Delivering major features more quickly – which is the core of turning Windows into a service – means Microsoft must build it differently, Aul explains.

“Moving at this pace requires we build and test in smaller incremental steps than in the past, and test and evaluate the results quickly as we go,” he reveals. “This represents a huge effort and we use stateof- the-art test automation, as well as good old-fashioned dogfooding to find issues quickly and create a tight feedback loop back to developers making changes.”

Aul suggests that building Windows differently will also result in better applications for the latest version, “because third-party developers will be able to focus their energy on one up-todate operating system target rather than a fragmented installed base.”

Depending on Insiders

The testing goes beyond what Microsoft can do alone. “The key advance for us has been adding the millions of Windows Insiders who are contributing to the testing and feedback process,” he says, “which allows us to ensure coverage of new updates for quality and compatibility before they ship broadly.”

According to Aul, testing on so many PCs helps Microsoft to balance the delivery of new features with stability and usability. With the Windows Insiders’ help, since the release of Windows 10 in July, he says Microsoft has found and fixed “tens of thousands of issues” in preview builds. Aul also credits the Insider program

Aul also credits the Insider program with allowing Microsoft to “test and make improvements at a much faster pace” and claims Microsoft is responding to feedback more quickly. “In contrast with how Windows has been released in the past, getting new features out quickly to customers to start using and giving us early feedback allows us to respond quickly and tune the experiences as needed.” That includes the company’s recent promise to give more details about what changes are included in specific updates (although that came after a Windows MVP started a petition on Change.org rather than sticking with Microsoft’s own UserVoice forums).

The autumn 2015 update (codenamed Threshold 2) rolled up the improvements Microsoft had been making since July, continued the subtle interface changes to make the design more consistent and added a host of small extras and options, such as automatically switching time zones when you travel. It also brought back some Windows 8 touch features, such as being able to resize two applications at the same time, and offered the first steps for integrated messaging, with previews of the apps for messages, video and voice calls

Adapting to Windows as a Service

Continuous delivery is likely to become the norm for Microsoft software. In addition to Windows 10 and Microsoft’s Configuration Manager, Office 2016 has the same service model. It even uses the terminology of Current Branch and Current Branch for Business. It also has the same requirement: users must take regular updates to stay supported.

All this doesn’t seem to be holding back Windows 10 adoption – for the most part. Just one month after release Microsoft claimed on its blog that the new OS was already installed on more than 75 million PCs. And in a survey conducted in May 2015 by Spiceworks, 96 percent of 500 IT professionals said they were interested in Windows 10, and 60 percent said their IT department was already evaluating it.

The two biggest reasons those IT professionals gave were the Start button and the free upgrade, followed by security improvements. The faster update cycle and the new Edge browser only made sixth and seventh place on the list.

Iain Chidgey, vice president at Delphix, which creates Data as a Service software, says that Windows as a Service is part of a sea change going on in technology – one that businesses need to take advantage of. “The likes of Apple and Android OS are already steaming ahead with a continuous delivery model; organisations need to accept Microsoft’s latest change and jump in with both feet to avoid missing the boa

Security vulnerabilities found in major laptops

Security flaws pile up in support applications installed by PC manufacturers

The number of vulnerabilities discovered in technical support applications installed on PCs by manufacturers keeps piling up. New exploits have been published for flaws in Lenovo Solution Centre, Toshiba Service Station and Dell System Detect.

The flaws were discovered by a hacker who uses the online aliases slipstream and RoL, and who released a proof-of-concept exploit for them. This prompted the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University to publish a security advisory.

One of the issues is caused by the LSCTaskService, which is created by the Lenovo Solution Centre and runs with SYSTEM privileges. This service opens an HTTP daemon on port 55555 that can receive commands. One of those commands is called RunInstaller and executes files placed in the %APPDATA%\ LSC\Local Store folder.

Any local user can write to this directory, regardless of their privilege, but the files are executed as the SYSTEM account. This means that a restricted user can exploit the logic flaw to gain full system access

Furthermore, there is a directory traversal flaw that can be exploited to trick the Lenovo Solution Centre to execute code from arbitrary locations, so an attacker doesn’t even need to place files in the aforementioned Local Store folder.

Finally, the LSCTaskService is vulnerable to cross-site request forgery (CSRF), an attack method through which a malicious website can relay rogue requests through the user’s browser. This means that, in order to exploit the previous two flaws, an attacker doesn’t even need to have local access to the system where the Lenovo Solution Centre is installed and can simply trick the user to visit a specially crafted web page.

In a security advisory on its website, Lenovo said it is currently investigating the vulnerability report and will provide a fix as soon as possible. Until then, concerned users can uninstall the Lenovo Solution Centre in order to mitigate the risk, the company said

Slipstream also published proof-ofconcept exploits for two other, lower-impact, vulnerabilities – one in the Toshiba Service Station (TST) and another in Dell System Detect (DSD), a tool that users are prompted to install when they click the Detect Product button on Dell’s support website.

The TST app creates a service called TMachInfo that runs as SYSTEM and receives commands via UDP port 1233 on the local host. One of those commands is called Reg. Read and can be used to read most of the Windows Registry with system privileges.

The flaw in DSD stems from the way Dell attempted to fix a previous vulnerability. According to slipstream, Dell implemented RSA-1024 signatures to authenticate commands, but put them in a place on its website where attackers can obtain them. These can be used as a crude bypass method for Windows’ User Account Control (UAC).

This is not the first time vulnerabilities have been found in support tools installed on Lenovo or Dell computers

Windows 10’s ‘Redstone’ update promises a smarter, Office-savvy Cortana

Cortana update will allow it to dive into individual apps and provide more context

Windows 10’s next major update, codenamed ‘Redstone’, promises a smarter Cortana that can work within Office applications. According to a report from The Verge, the personal assistant will become a contextual tool that appears within documents. It will facilitate transitioning tasks across the various smartphone platforms. Microsoft will also beef up the Notifications centre, according to the site.

If the Verge is correct, the continued enhancements to Cortana appear to be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. For example, it provides contextual information when you highlight a word or phrase in Microsoft Edge. It’s not clear how far its developer plans to go, but Cortana’s improvements could be as minimal as supplying that same sort of context in a Word or PowerPoint document. So far, that context is lacking from Microsoft Office

The digital assistant is one of Windows 10’s signature achievements, along with Universal Apps. Richness is a critical aspect of how Microsoft competes with Google Now and Apple’s Siri – the more sophisticated the digital assistant, the more useful it is. It seems likely that Microsoft will continue to embed Cortana deeply into its core apps – Mail, Calendar, Maps, Edge, and others – with a gap on third-party apps that it doesn’t directly control, such as Facebook

Windows 10 Mobiles on a PC-like software update path

More frequent updates may mean more frequent restarts, however

Microsoft ended 2015 with a cosmic aligning of sorts: all Windows 10 PCs and phones were aligned around a single build. It released a preview build of version 10586.29 on 4 December to Windows 10 Mobile Insiders, and now all eligible Windows 10 PCs and phones can upgrade to this build directly from Microsoft. Although Microsoft has not pushed Windows 10 Mobile to existing Windows 8.1 phones yet, virtually all of its new Lumia 950 (reviewed on page 30) and Lumia 950XL phones (pictured) have been upgraded to Windows 10

In announcing the new build, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of engineering systems Gabriel Aul said that more frequent updates were in the works. “As our partners and Microsoft ship new Windows 10 mobile devices and existing devices are upgraded to Windows 10, all of our users will start to see more updates coming through Windows Update,” he says. “These will be addressing feedback we receive from our Windows Insiders and Windows 10 users.”

If Microsoft increases the tempo of its rollouts, Windows Phone owners will receive new features and bug fixes more frequently than before. That’s a feature Android users have long prized in the Nexus line. Windows 10 Mobile phones purchased from carriers will still ship with carrier apps installed, but at least they’ll otherwise be pure Windows

Toshiba, Vaio and Fujitsu said to be considering laptop and PC merger

Japanese giants considering combining their laptop and PC businesses, according to a media report

It’s been reported that Toshiba, Fujitsu and Vaio are considering a merger of their laptop PC businesses. According to a report in The Nikkei financial newspaper, the three companies have begun specific discussions on the merger later, with the aim of launching the company on 1 April, when the next Japanese financial year begins.

Vaio was spun off from Sony in mid-2014 and will likely be the surviving entity, with Toshiba and Fujitsu merging their laptop businesses into the unit. Ownership will be roughly equal, says The Nikkei.

roughly equal, says The Nikkei. It wasn’t possible to immediately contact the three companies for comment. As we report opposite, global demand for PCs is decreasing. In the third quarter of 2015, shipments dropped to 71 million units, according to IDC. Laptops made up the majority of these sales at 42 million units, but they were also down on the previous year. “We’re entering a phase in the PC industry where we are expecting some consolidation to happen,” says Linn Huang, an analyst at IDC.

He explains that price competition is hurting PC makers, while the prevalence of smartphones and tablet PCs in homes is reducing the need to continually refresh machines as they get older.

The market is led by Lenovo, Dell, HP and Apple, all of which do well in enterprise laptop sales. Other brands are more focused on the consumer market, which is experiencing softer demand than the enterprise sector, Huang adds. Weakness in the domestic Japanese market is also hitting the three companies in question, he says.

NEC, which was a market leader in the Japanese laptop market, merged its portable PC business with Lenovo in 2011.

2015 saw massive decline in PC shipments

IDC says PC sales are expected to be down 10 percent this year, with the tough times continuing in 2016

The PC business can’t climb out of the four-year hole it’s dug for itself, according to researcher IDC. Shipments of new personal computers dropped 10 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015, which means shipments declined 10.3 percent from 2014. The firm now expects all OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to ship 276.7 million PCs this year, compared to 308.2 million in 2014

This represents the largest one-year contraction since the research firm began tracking shipments in 1996, beating the 9.1 percent record decline of 2013. IDC blamed the latest reduction in shipments on a variety of factors, ranging from larger-than-expected OEMs’ and sellers’ inventories to the ongoing problem of getting systems off factory floors.

The macro reason, however, remained the same as before: consumers have not bought new PCs to replace their increasingly-aging machines. They have instead opted to spend their money on new smartphones and, to a lesser extent, tablets

That doesn’t mean the PC is dead. “Despite the substantial shift in spending and usage models from PCs toward tablets and phones in recent years, very few people are giving up on their PC – they are just making it last longer,” writes IDC analyst Loren Loverde in a statement.

It’s thought that Microsoft’s free Windows 10 upgrade – available to the hundreds of millions of PC owners worldwide now running Windows 7 or 8.1 – hasn’t helped. “The free upgrade... enables some users to postpone an upgrade a little,” says Loverde, though, not indefinitely, he contends.

IDC is sticking to its guns, and predicts that at least some consumers would eventually upgrade their PC hardware because of Windows 10. “Some consumers will use a free operating system upgrade to delay a new PC purchase and test the transition to Windows 10,” Loverde explains. “However, the experience of those customers may serve to highlight what they are missing by stretching the life of an older PC, and we expect they will ultimately purchase a new device.”

Research firms such as IDC and its rival, Gartner, have maintained that consumers will refresh their home PCs at some point, but their regular predictions of that have worn thin. The buy-a-PC time frame has been repeatedly pushed out to a later date.

The silver lining in PC shipments, if there is one, exists because businesses have not – and for the foreseeable future, cannot – relinquish their workforce machines in anywhere near the numbers, or even percentages, of consumers. Businesses still regularly upgrade their systems, albeit often on a lengthier schedule than previously, as they migrate to a new operating system.

“Once commercial adoption of Windows 10 accelerates, and in combination with upgrades to steadily-aging consumer PCs, we expect demand for new PCs to improve for several years as replacements will also be boosted by the end of support for Window 7, just as the end of support for Windows XP boosted shipments in 2014,” Loverde maintains. Microsoft has set Windows 7’s retirement date as 14 January, 2020.

Other analysts have opined that enterprises, having learned their lesson from the scramble to dump Windows XP in 2013 to 2014, will be more likely to replace Windows 7 with 10 before the due date arrives. At the same time, Microsoft has been promoting its new operating system as ready for corporate adoption

IDC forecasts that shipments will stabilise by the end of 2016, and grow through 2019. Even that prediction, however, means that the bottom of the trough won’t come until next year, and the growth from that will be so minor that 2019’s shipments will remain below those of 2015’

ASRock overclocks non K Skylake CPUs

Skylake overclocking on a budget has just been enabled, thanks to ASRock introducing a way to overclock non-K series Skylake chips using the base clock. Overclocking Intel’s latest chips usually requires use of a CPU with an unlocked multiplier, such as the Core i7-6700K, but in December 2015, ASRock officially announced its Sky OC system, which is available via a BIOS update and effectively enables you to overclock the base clock on much cheaper Skylake CPUs.

According to ASRock, the only catch is that the system disables the on-board GPU, but that won’t be a worry for anyone wanting to build a budget gaming system with a discrete graphics card. The system also disables dynamic frequency adjustment using Intel’s Turbo Boost tech. Using an ASRock Z170 Pro4, ASRock says it’s been able to overclock an Intel Core i5-6400 from its stock clock speed of 2.7GHz to 4.3GHz, by overclocking the base clock from 100MHz to 160MHz. The company says it’s also overclocked a Core i3-6100 to 4.4GHz using Sky OC. We’ll be taking a closer look at overclocking non-K series CPUs in the next issue of Custom PC, so watch this space.