A podcast discussion on Microsoft's recent unpopular decisions, particularly regarding the Second Chance Out-of-Box Experience (SCOOBE) in Windows 11, and whether the company is losing its way.
When it comes to making decisions that piss off your user base, no one knows how to do it like Microsoft . , and other bad decisions have plagued the Windows maker in recent months.
CEO Satya Nadella and Windows boss Pavan Davuluri have promised to make good, but will they? This week's Kettle sees host Brandon Vigliarolo joined by US editor Avram Piltch and Microsoft reporter Richard Speed to talk about what's going wrong at Microsoft, and whether the company has lost the thread. Welcome to another episode of the Registers Kettle Podcast. I'm Reg reporter Brandon Villarrolo.
With me this week is US editor Avram Pilch and our expert on all things Microsoft, Richard Speed. And given we have the Microsoft man with us this week, you can probably guess what we're going to be talking about. And that's just what the heck is going on with Windows lately. Guys, thanks for joining me this week.
And I'm so glad we could finally get you on from the UK, Richard. Yeah, yeah, thrilled to have you both here. So jumping right in, our topic this week was actually triggered by a story you wrote, Avram, recently on your experience with quite possibly one of the worst Windows 11 features that Redmond has ever dreamed up, and that's the Second Chance Out-of-Box Experience, or the.
For those who aren't familiar with that story, or like me, who have abandoned Windows, fled for the hills years ago, give me a rundown what Scooby is and what the problems with it are. Well, you could say it's more of a Scooby-Doo than a Scooby-Doo. Yes, I'll be here all week.
What happens is, and many of our listeners have probably experienced this, they just didn't know it was called SCOOBE, ⁓ is you turn on your computer, you reboot, or you wake up the computer, and you see it say something like, you're almost done setting up your PC. Yes. So your PC has been set up.
⁓ It may have been set up a year ago or more, but you're on Windows 11 and you're getting there almost done setting up your PC. And it guides you through a process where you are invited to subscribe to different Microsoft services. At the very least, will try to get you to subscribe to Xbox Game Pass, which currently here in the US is $14.99. They will invite you to install Office if you don't have it.
Some people report, although I haven't seen this recently, trying to get you to use OneDrive, but... Whatever the case, it's trying to get you to use Microsoft services. Yes, it also has to allow it to change your browser settings, although that's for Edge browser, assuming that you use Edge browser. And change default settings too, right?
Like I think browser settings and things, yeah. It did not change the default browser on me. I had it as Chrome and it didn't change it back to Edge when I accepted that. But they use dark patterns to try and get you to do what they want. there are things like on the browser settings one where it user recommended browser settings.
There's a big button at the bottom that says user recommended browser settings. There's no button that says skip. There's no button that says don't. There's a switch that says on and off and you could sort of switch it off and then hit the button or something.
But like, they don't make it obvious how you opt out of some of these things. And you can't really opt out of SCOOBE. You can't really opt out of SCOOBE either because it will say, remind me again in three days or something, and then it'll come up in three days.
Now, there are ways in the operating system to turn off Scooby, but what I wrote about and what's really important is this is more than just an inconvenience. Yeah, yeah, that was the thing that I honed in on really quick was like, this has got to be, you know, for enterprise, in enterprise environments, this is, this is not, this is a disaster potentially. Yes, it is because they get support calls for it.
And at first, when I heard this from IT people, I said, who are the losers that are calling support because they saw this? Don't they know any better? But then I gave it some thought and I said, you know, it actually makes a lot of sense that you would think that this is a support problem because you turn your computer. And it says you're almost done setting up.
So you're like, wait a second, I set up, does this mean some other person has gone into my computer, broken into my computer and run setup while I wasn't looking? So if you know that this is to happen, you can more easily deal with it. But a lot of people don't know that that's BS. They take Microsoft at their word that it's setting up your computer.
So this leads to an increase in support tickets. It leads to lost productivity. It seems to happen at the worst possible time. I talked to people who say that they were doing presentations for clients.
Or trying to get health information, things like that, where it's mission critical that you get your stuff, and somehow they ended up in SCOOBE when they were trying to do mission critical work. So it's really unethical. Yeah, that's... Yeah, the whole thing is just kinda, yeah, yeah, super unethical, super inconvenient.
⁓ The one question I had, and I know you mentioned in the story, here's ways you can go in to turn it off yourself, and here's ways you can change it in group policy at the enterprise level to stop it. But I mean, that just left me with the question, this is actually enabled by default in enterprise environments and images? I mean, I'm kinda mind blown that this isn't just disabled.
Yes, yes, yes, it is enabled by default. I heard from a number of IT people who they've had to turn it off at the group policy level. So I can't guarantee that this works because Microsoft changes things around a lot. And I wasn't able, I don't have a fleet of PCs to test it on.
But supposedly if you go into Group Policy Editor and you go to ... Computer configuration, administrative templates, Windows components, cloud content, and enable turn off Microsoft consumer experiences. That may do it, but that's definitely not off by default. Yeah, well, I guess if you have a fleet of Windows machines, it might not be a good idea to go and update your images just to get this turn off by default when you're deploying your machines.
Yeah, exactly. Because you don't know when it's going to pop up and it definitely results in support calls as if you think about it, it makes sense. The other thing that it results in is people doing what Microsoft asked, which the IT department might not want, right? Maybe the IT department doesn't want you running Xbox Game Pass on your company PC.
Right? mean, hopefully there would be a billing issue before that would pop up, but you never know. Now, I know that SCOOBE is often the result of Windows machines restarting after an update, right? And they're retrying to get you to, hey, by the way, let's make sure we get all these things back in front of you. But that isn't the only kind of update-related source bot for Windows users recently.
And I guess, Richard, you've written several times in the past few months about bad Windows updates. Out of band patches that Microsoft promised are only going to be occasional, becoming frequent. I mean, it looks like there's just kind of a quality control issue with Windows updates recently too, right? Yeah, I mean, I would say that definitely is an issue.
And the SCOOBE is an example of an update that has probably actually worked. And it seems that seems to be almost an outlier these days. There seems to be almost every month, Microsoft will release a major update. they do major updates on a monthly cadence. You have the Patch Tuesday update, you have the preview update.
And normally that should be it. And they contain a bunch of fixes and some new enhancements and what have you. And then if there's any major problem, they'll do what they call an out of band.
Update in between these updates, which contains fixes and what we've been seeing certainly in the last few months is these out of band updates which should have been uncommon - when they're called out-of-band for reason, they are atypical - are happening an awful lot and that speaks. I think of a lot of a lot to. I mean, I can only say it's poor quality control for Microsoft.
Not quite sure why it's got as bad as it has, but it's got so bad that I'm obviously. Some leaders within Microsoft have had to come out and say yeah, we're aware of this. I'm going to fix it and but the problem is when these things happen.
I mean, I mean a recent one was for example when you try to log in with your Microsoft account, it could respond by saying I'm sorry you've got no internet, which is of course untrue. That was March, yeah, and that's just one example. And that was March, that one happened, right? Was that the March?
Yeah, and then this month, yeah, and then this month you just wrote about something in the April preview, right? ⁓With April preview they've done their release of patches and so we're keeping our fingers crossed nothing's going to go wrong. Yeah, so the preview we saw from the March preview haven't happened. They released the April preview on April 30th.
And it's actually quite an impressive list of fixes because they are addressing stability. They are addressing reliability.
There are some useful features in there, which is good, but that's only part of the story because of course what we need to see them now is demonstrate that these features and these fixes that they are rolling out are going to be reliable. not going to see within a week or so another out of band patch to fix a thing that they fixed before, which is what we don't want to see. I guess they have what, 29 days, 30 days to prove that this patch is good before they push the next one.
So yeah, we've got a window. Yeah, we've got a window here to see if this actually works. But so at least a couple of bad patches in recent months, ⁓ but it's more than two. Yeah, so a handful of bad patches in the past few months, but that's not it.
Bad patches aren't the only thing that's been ⁓ happening with, not the only patch problem, I guess Avram. You have written more than one Microsoft excoriating opinion piece in the past month. And the second one, I think it was your first one actually, was... , especially on machines that may not have a user logging in regularly, right?
So in your experience, I think it was just one you have as a spare, but I mean, anyone who's ever run an IT environment with a bunch of Windows machines sitting in a back room somewhere that runs a piece of software that rarely needs human interaction can probably speak to this problem. And that's just... Update deluge. Yeah.
So it's it's punitive. I feel that it's punitive to you as a user if you're not, if you want to update a PC and it's not a PC that you've been using on a regular basis. I'll put in this basket also brand new PCs, right? ⁓ It so happens that at the time of this recording, We just bought my mother a new PC and I need to set it up for her.
And the part that I am dreading is all of the Windows updates that we're going to have to go through because it'll probably do several rounds of updates, which is what's frustrating, right? Now, some people might not care and they might just say like, well, I don't care if my machine's updated. And it'll update in the background and eventually I'll reboot it. But I feel like this is kind of part of the setup process.
Just get me to the latest version of everything that I need ⁓ so that we're ready to go. And what I find, and I had that issue with a laptop that I kept in a drawer, I needed to use it for some benchmarking and it just seems wrong to benchmark something with not the latest version of Windows on it.
So I took it out of the drawer and it took like three hours, like three or four hours and three or four reboots to do the updates on it. And what's frustrating is you think, okay, it's downloaded these updates now, it's changed the build number even to a new build number, it's rebooted, I should be done.
But then you go into Windows settings updates and you click the button to check for updates and it finds a whole new slew of updates that it didn't find the first time you checked. So, I find that super frustrating because I feel like what Microsoft should do is it should get all of the updates that you need to be current in one batch. should get, it should need to--install a bunch to then go figure out that it needs to install another bunch.
Take you through an entire evolution of, oh, you're on this build, we'll take you to that build, then we'll take you to this build. And the advice that I've gotten from some people, and this is good advice, is that if you have an old computer that's been sitting around and you want to update it and it's not a computer, it's a computer where you physically can do this - reinstall Windows from scratch.
You would actually have a better time reinstalling Windows from scratch than you would going through the update process that you have to go through. That's not ideal, right? I mean, no, I think, like I said, I kind of abandoned Windows. I jumped ship a while ago.
I game on Linux. I have a Mac for my day-to-day experience. You guys are both still Windows users. Do you use other platforms to compare?
Because I'm like, how bad? mean, updates are a pain in the butt on my Mac sometimes. But for the most part, my machine will go, hey, you got an update. Let me know when you want to do it. And that's it, right?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I yes, I use Linux, I've got some Raspberry Pi machines here and some Linux workstations and also an M1 Mac mini, which I use as well. And I have to say, I mean, I don't know what Avram's experience is, but the Windows Update experience for me is frankly painful. Just, you know, if you don't use a machine as everyone says, it just goes away.
I mean, I'm envious of Avram's three hours because I've seen machines go away for even longer as they just update and update. I had that in a drawer for only six, for only a few months. One time, I used to work at another company and they gave me a company laptop and the company laptop was absolute garbage. ⁓ So I used to just use my own laptop every day.
And one day they kind of threatened, that like you better have your company laptop on or we're going to check. This was during the pandemic. So I took out the company laptop that hadn't been turned on in three or four years. Okay.
And I, and I want, and I tried to let it run Windows updates and it was going good like eight or nine hours to get current. SoAbsolutely. So, yeah, that's just another example of maybe not the best patch management. Maybe we should work on condensing these a bit, like you said, Avram.
But either way, Microsoft has actually heard the cries of the people who are suffering in Patch Valley. And they've come to the rescue, Richard, with a solution that is probably not the best one, right? Yeah, it's a tricky one. mean, the solution that's come out has been because you've always been able to pause updates and you've always been able to kind of specify when you want them to install.
I don't want to say always, they've made changes over the years. The latest changes, you can now pause them pretty much forever. I think it's, mean, correct me if I'm wrong, it's a 35 day pause. can say, okay, remind me again in 35 days and you can keep doing that over and over again. Now that initially sounds like quite a good thing.
However, I'd argue it's actually quite a bad thing. And that's because, I mean, we're talking about updates here and the pain they cause, but they are a good thing. mean, these updates, this is one of reasons why I find the out-of-band patches and people worrying about postponing them concerning because often they contain fixes for vulnerabilities and you don't want to postpone those. You want those fixes in place.
And so the ability that Microsoft is rolling out now to effectively indefinitely pause a patch, that actually concerns me because it's like, well, you do want these figures in place. So I think it will be interesting to see how that plays out and how that's actually deployed. if that can be overridden so highly critical patches for vulnerabilities get rolled out without a pause. Right. Yeah, that would be great, right?
And I mean, ideally that would happen in the background. I mean, it's funny, we're in an era where like, you know, I play a lot of online gaming, lot of online games, and there's games nowadays that can perform updates to persistent worlds, right, without having to shut down or kick anybody off. And it's like... Well, yes, mean, there are games that don't.
I'm thinking Microsoft Flight Simulator, for example, which last time I tried to play that, that went away for about three hours beforehand to an update. And you just want to pick up the game and play. Well, you did utter the magic word before you said the name of the game, though, and that was Microsoft. I can't imagine.
But, know, so it looks like maybe Microsoft's patching experience isn't great. Hopefully they'll make some fixes.
But ⁓ Richard, you've covered it. of fixes and improving the experience, know, ⁓ Windows Boss Pavan Dabaluri has made a lot of promises recently, and even ⁓ Satya Nadella has said this latest patch that just came out was kind of their attempt to win back frustrated users. mean, you know, is this showing signs of actual improvement here, this patch, and the promises? I would say yes and no. Yes, that what Pavan has said, I he made some statements in last November, he made some more statements in March.
And there's an acknowledgement that okay, Windows has become a bit unreliable, it's a bit unstable, they're gonna work on that. They're aware that they perhaps sprayed copilot in too many places without really thinking too hard about it. So that's good news.
I mean, I have to say, I did notice certainly in Pavan's statements, I didn't see the word sorry or apology in there at all which well exactly because -Yeah, yeah, I made a note of that too that I wanted to hit on that particularly, right? Like it was very, one of those carefully worded, you know, things, yeah.
This is case you think, well, you know, I think you owe the windows enthusiast community an apology because it has definitely got worse. And I think just this week when Microsoft announced its financials, we had its CEO, Sacha Nadella, saying, you know, they were putting foundations in place to win back the fans that they've lost. And the question there is, well, how did you lose these fans? What's, you what's happened?
I think we all know what's happened. The quality has gone down. They have stopped listening so much. But it isn't a new thing.
I the quality issues within Windows have been there for many years. It just appears to be getting particularly bad now. Yeah, yeah, because I was going to say one of the things I wanted to mention was that you said was, you know, like the note of we're going to be more purposeful with where we put Copilot, right?
And in the thought, the response that you had to that was, well, does that mean you just haven't been being purposeful up to this point? And it's one of those things that, like, you know, it's kind of shocking to hear some of the ways they won't apologize for things. But there is still the tacit admission that they did something wrong, you know.
Yeah, but I think you can compare and contrast that to say one of the companies that Microsoft owns, GitHub, which has apologized and said it's sorry for what's happened. Yeah, I was actually gonna say that. Yep, because I was gonna move into that and talk more broadly actually. We were talking about Windows specifically, but GitHub specifically made me think of more broadly outside of Windows.
Microsoft isn't just having problems in the Windows front. I think the GitHub issue recently is largely due to stability. It's the platform's not been reliable. Things have been going down to the point where people are leaving and saying that it's time to abandon GitHub and flee for the hills.
You know, Microsoft, I think, has blamed AI eating up resources for lot of that outage, I believe, in articles you've written. Is that correct, Richard? Yes, I mean they've certainly pointed the finger blame at add AI. mean, GitHub. Obviously you've got the GitHub copilot which would use AI to generate code for you.
Yeah, well, I was gonna say that it seems like, know, again, right, like Microsoft is kind of shooting themselves in the foot, right? They've been trying to... We didn't touch on Copilot too much in this conversation because there are so many other problems with Windows to talk about. But, you know, they were shoving Copilot everywhere they could to the point where people were like, why are you...
We don't need it here, you know? And it has been really integrated into GitHub. And Microsoft's pushing that AI hard. Use this GitHub CLI, use these agents, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But now they're telling us that, the platform we created that you're supposed to integrate all these agents is failing because the push that we made, what's that? exactly, right? And that's kind of like, it makes me wonder more broadly beyond Windows, like does Microsoft have, they just seem to continue to fail to meet user needs and expectations.
And now instead of, think both of you have noted this in your stories, instead of fixing their problems, they simply are jumping ahead to the next thing. You know, they've got problems in Windows, they've got problems with AI, they've got problems with GitHub, right? Has Microsoft lost the focus? Have they lost their way?
I mean, I'm just kind of curious. You know, you guys are both who know Microsoft. What do you think? They're in the way of, they're in the zeitgeist, right?
Everybody's doing AI, Microsoft has to do AI. And the idea is to show the investors and to show the press, ⁓ we are more AI than anybody else. What I would like to see Microsoft do is focus on productivity for the human, make the human more productive. Over the summer, I did a story about.
And they're never focused on how do we actually make you more productive? They're trying to focus on how do we make you offload your work to a bot? But they could do things in Windows that would actually make it better. Like give me multiple clipboards so I can copy and paste multiple things.
You know. Give me a firewall for audio so I can decide. So if something's about to play a sound, I can stop it. Give me, you know, give me an extra modifier key so that I can create more keyboard shortcuts.
Like there's all kinds of things that Microsoft could do in Windows to really help people be more productive if they were focused on. Yeah, I and I'll add to that, because I'm using the I word, which is investor. I think Microsoft has become way too focused on returning value or creating value for investors.... Microsoft has lost touch with consumers.
It's a big company. It's not so nimble now, but I do think it stopped listening. It stopped listening to the things that Avram has said just now. It stopped listening to what consumers are wanting.
So I'm hopeful that maybe we'll see it start doing that. I mean, I think it's going to have to because at the moment it's a massive company, but it depends on a pipeline of enthusiasts who are going to come through.
And I think this is why I mentioned winning back fans, because once you lose your enthusiasts and people just regard it as yet another tool for work, or just another thing that's in the office, then in a few years time, those same people who perhaps anything with Microsoft, they're going to start becoming the decisionmaker in enterprises. And that's where think Microsoft could come unstuck.
It's going to take a few years, but I think it's recognized it needs to start paying attention to these enthusiasts again, where I think it may have lost its focus in last few years as it focused purely on raising value for investors through AI buildouts. Yeah, classic enshitification and now it's kind of that moment of, wait, did we, oops, you know, and so maybe they've got to rethink, but that'd be great.
I would love it if Microsoft was actually taking a moment to pause and go,"right, it's the consumers who we're building this for. They're the ones actually spending the money, you know?
"Yeah. Well, exactly. Yeah, and what's what happens? mean, I mean, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that obviously, you know, it is building out a lot of AI stuff. AI is a great system.
Don't get me wrong. AI is a great tool. I think occasionally it's been it's been pitched as perhaps doing too many things. And I think Microsoft's focus on that means it's lost focus elsewhere.
And I think is kind of what the problem is. And we're seeing it in the drop in quality. We're seeing it. But also we're seeing -- you use the word enshittification The SCOOBE is a great example of why are they doing that awful thing?
I mean, I don't know about you, but I've had I've I meanIt's obvious why they're doing it. mean, somebody has a quota to me of subscriptions and they have a captive audience and they're going to use it. And Windows 11 is designed to push what Microsoft wants, not to give you what you want.
And what's really insidious about that is that you paid for it. is people do not pay for, you know - the average end user does not pay for Linux. The average end user Mac OS comes with your Mac. So Microsoft is charging you for an OS and then using it to sell you things. Well yeah, the key to the future is recurring revenue, right Avram?
You gotta get that from somewhere. yeah, that's a very good point too. Either make it free or make it cost once, right? Yeah, I agree. Well, you know, we'll see what comes.
I Microsoft's got some rebuilding to do. Maybe they're in that rebuilding year, rebuilding phase here where they're trying to get back to a good starting lineup. We'll see what comes of it, right? And you know, no matter what way it shakes down, we are going to probably be right here on the kettle to talk about it.
And we would love to see you back when we do. Thanks for coming out this week, guys.
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