There are thousands of ways to destroy the image of your product. Sexist advertising, racism or just bad timing. As a Linux user I am freed from a forced update on my operating system and can set it 100% by myself. With Windows 10 it doesn’t seem to work quite so well, because even if you make all the settings that should prevent an involuntary update, complications always occur. For example last night in the live stream of the most famous German game streamers and lets players Gronkh. He just wanted to play the really good game Planet Zoo, but unfortunately Windows 10 forced an update and so the whole evening was over. This problem had already existed a few weeks before and it was a complete desktop PC, which is actually necessary for the work of a self-running streamer. Also at the end of the stream the other PC couldn’t start anymore and stopped at the Planet Gamers screen.
If I’m playing Skyrim at home as a normal Windows 10 user and I’m interrupted by an update, it’s annoying but I just go to the kitchen, put on a tea and take a good book to read the rest of the night. But Gronkh earns his living with streams and gaming and for that the PCs and the hardware are indispensable. You can’t tell a SpaceX astronaut to visit the Andromeda Galaxy on foot. How is that supposed to work? Hitchhiking through the galaxy?
So who pays for the lost working time and the money this streamer can’t make that evening?
Approximately 13,452 spectators that evening may be modest for American behavior if you look at other streamers from America, but in Germany you can (in rare cases) exist without eating onions. Has Microsoft ever thought that negative advertising can completely destroy a product? Even if Gronkh took that with humor for the most part, there are at least 13K (potential and current) customers who are shown how badly the Windows 10 product is implemented. This would bother me as CEO of a big company, because such a thing gets around incredibly fast. In 2017 I bought a Win 10 gaming laptop as a Linux user, but uninstalled it after the third update. I had the same problem. For two days I had set everything up so that Cortana wouldn’t listen to me or all telemetry data would be sent to America. One update later everything was changed again and I had to start all over again.
At some point, I couldn’t stand it any longer. How bad can a product get? I like to play computer games myself, but Skyrim, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and Fallout: New Vegas is only available for Windows. I can understand that, because triple A studios want to earn money and Linux users are not the right target group. Nevertheless I only play on Linux because it’s not worth the stress to have to deal with a broken optimized OS. I can’t play so many AAA games with it anymore, but with my collection of 392 (and some pre Linux AAA games) games you can see that there are still enough other titles. However, the question still remains in the back of my mind.
If I should make myself independent with Games and Twitch Streaming, but I can’t play because of an forced Windows 10 update. Should I then really buy an operating system which doesn’t get it regulated to let the users set the times for the updates themselves?