Microsoft removed Help from Windows 10. And it gets much worse…

Microsoft removed Help from Windows 10. They didn’t just do this recently — Windows 10 was stripped of Help from the very outset.

Every previous version of Windows, like any sane operating system, had copious built-in Help content. Wherever you were, you could click on the Help icon (usually a question mark), and get well-organized, context-specific Help documentation.

Let’s walk through what Microsoft has done instead of providing standard Help content…

Example 1: File Explorer, Bing, and Malware

If you click on the Help icon in Windows File Explorer (upper right), this is what happens:

1. Microsoft Edge browser opens.
2. It goes to Bing.
3. It dumps you on a search results page based on the cumbersome search phrase “get help with file explorer in windows 10” (without the quotes).
4. Almost all the search results are phantom websites that were built specifically to capture traffic from Microsoft’s weird hard-coded search string.
5. Most of the time, at least one of the results on the first page is a malware site.

Let’s take a look. Here’s the first page of search results (for today. One of the insane things about what Microsoft is doing is that the results will change from day to day, or hour to hour — instead of providing curated Help content, they’re sending users on a scavenger hunt over which they have little control.):

As you can see, only one of the results is a Microsoft website (and it’s a relatively useless question about an FTP problem). As its happens, Microsoft’s “Answers” website is a weird, unreliable dump staffed exclusively by Indian workers who often don’t know how to solve the customer’s problem — you’ll see lots of unresolved issues, robo-answers that have nothing to do with the problem, and even wrong answers.

Nine out of the ten are phantom sites that are all using the exact search phrase as titles for their articles — these people caught on to what Microsoft was doing in Windows 10 and built these sites specifically to fool Bing into ranking them at the top of the search results.

(There is some Microsoft content above the organic search results, but it’s not nearly as useful as the built-in Help they used to have baked into the OS.)

The sixth website is a broken link — that website simply doesn’t exist anymore. (I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a completely broken link / non-existent website in the first page of a search engine’s results. Bing is just incredibly bad.)

The ninth website hosts malware:

A year ago, when I first discovered that Microsoft had gone insane and was dumping users seeking built-in OS help onto a random Bing search results page, I was alerted to malware as well. BitDefender gave this warning for one of the top search results:

Reality Check

Okay, let’s take a step back and try to understand what we’re looking at here. Microsoft removed Help from their operating system and instead dumps users onto a web search, where they then have to fend for themselves and go on a scavenger hunt for help using Windows. Along the way, users are likely to encounter malware-ridden sites.

Microsoft obviously did this to increase Bing traffic. What they’ve done isn’t just user-hostile. It’s user-predatory. It’s insane. No one in their right minds would think that it’s okay to dump users onto a web search results page when they click on Help in a modern operating system, or in an app. This is the lowest, most B-league, asinine thing I have ever seen Microsoft do to its users.

Windows costs money. Microsoft’s users are customers. What Microsoft has done tells us that something is very wrong with this company. This is a company that simply does not care about its users. What’s happened here wouldn’t be possible at any normal software company. As much as I despise Apple, we all know that they’d never in a million years do this to their users. If someone in a meeting at Apple suggested removing built-in Help from macOS, and instead just dumping users on a web search to fend for themselves, the room would be stunned, confused, and horrified. They’d want to figure out how to get that person off their campus.

At Microsoft though, someone said “Hey, how about this — we’ll remove Help from Windows 10 and instead dump users onto a Bing search. It’ll increase Bing traffic by 6%. Win!” At Microsoft, the reaction was something other than horror and confusion. That speaks volumes about Microsoft’s corporate culture. People who are that confused about the expectations for how you treat the users of a paid operating system have no business working for a software company. These are some very, very confused people. They’ve turned Microsoft into a menace that is actively harming its users.

Examples 2, 3, and 4

Here’s what happens when you click on Help in WordPad:

We again have a browser opening for some reason, and in this case it takes you to a Microsoft website that has nothing to do with WordPad. No Help here.

Here’s what happens when you click on Help in Notepad:

Again, a browser opens, but we’re on a “Community” website that has nothing to do with Notepad. No Help here.

Here’s what happens when you click on Help in Network Settings:

This launched a virtual agent, a chatbot or something. I asked “How do I change wifi settings?” It didn’t understand the question, and ultimately displayed some links on how to do stuff in Windows 8. No help here.

Let me pause to note that it’s a bad idea to require internet access to view Help content. So even if Microsoft actually provided relevant, curated Help content in the above browser-opening examples (if the browser actually took you to specific Help pages for File Explorer, Notepad, WordPad, etc.), that’s not anywhere near good enough. There’s just no reason to create that dependency. Help content is mostly text, with occasional illustrations or screenshots. In an OS that takes several gigabytes of disk space, Help content will occupy less than five percent of that space, possibly much less. In fact, Microsoft has an efficient, compressed file format specifically for Help content, so space is not an issue (and available disk space has increased dramatically compared to the Windows XP era, for example, when Help was built-in).

Conclusion

Microsoft is a terrible and insane company. Every single attempt at Help throughout Windows 10 results in a wildly different outcome, none of which involves providing Help content, and some of which expose the user to malware sites.

Where has the tech media been in all this? I have no idea. Journalism seems to be collapsing as a profession across the board. In any case, there are lots of tech journalists on the Microsoft or Windows beats, and to my knowledge not a single one of them has reported that Microsoft removed Help from Windows 10 and is dumping users onto a malware-ridden Bing search results page. Removing Help from an OS is kind of a big deal. In fact, no company has ever done it before. I can’t imagine that any change or feature introduced by Windows 10 was more important than the fact that they removed Help from the OS.

People on the Microsoft beat should be ashamed of themselves. It’s been two years since Windows 10 was released. The public needs to know about stuff like this, especially the malware part. I alerted Peter Bright at Ars Technica and Joel Hruska at ExtremeTech a year ago about what Microsoft had done, and still they never reported it to their readers. I would argue that they had an ethical duty to do so. Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet should’ve been on this when Windows 10 was still in preview stage. (These three people are some of the most prominent reporters/writers covering Microsoft.) It’s like the media is in Microsoft’s pocket. That’s a damn shame.

If any Windows 10 users have been infected with malware because Microsoft dished them to malware sites when all they did was click on Help, I hope to see a vigorous class-action lawsuit. They should nail Microsoft to the wall.

This is a good reminder that we need new, clean-sheet operating systems ASAP. People wrongly assume that Microsoft and Apple can’t be dislodged, but in fact there’s never been a better time to introduce a new OS, an entirely new stack (the combination of mobile, the web, and the cloud have made people less dependent on any particular desktop platform, and it would be much easier for them to switch desktop platforms than it was in 2001 or so — and the desktop is going to be relevant for many decades to come). I’m surprised the US Department of Defense hasn’t figured out that with its petty cash it can fund the development of several different full-fledged OSes that are massively better and more secure than Windows or Mac. In any case, we obviously can’t trust Microsoft to design and sell real operating systems anymore, and I’d love to see some disruption in this space. We need someone to do to the seemingly dead OS business what James Dyson did to the seemingly dead vacuum business.