Windows 7: What’s still wrong? (part 1)
As we proceed through our deployment of Windows 7 at work, I want to detail some of the issues I have with “features” Microsoft graced us with in their latest attempt at making an OS not suck.
For starters, some background: We skipped Vista. Our infrastructure was heavily entrenched from many years ago, dating back into Windows 3.1 for some things. In the spring of 2008, the infrastructure was shifted to SCCM and App-V (Application Virtualization). For better or worse, those are the components we’re using. In the future I may write a post giving more detail on our upgrade path and process for the infrastructure changes we’re making, but we have to get it fully ironed out first.
I’ll also point out that I am a huge Apple geek. I’m not a fanboy, I get pissed off about OS X and Apple’s methodologies, perhaps not as much as Microsoft’s, but I’m far from thinking my chosen OS is a picture of operating system perfection. Without further ado…
User Access Control
Beefs with UAC aren’t new. However, my problem isn’t with the implementation. My problem is with the concept and the thought process behind it. Instead of Microsoft trying to fix the many things wrong in the OS, they shoved the burden of security off to the user. That’s bad enough, but compounding the issue, they did this in a very invasive and scary way. Opening a start menu item, or a shortcut, or a file, should *not* trigger a Machiavellian prompt, greying out the entire screen save for one relatively tiny ass prompt, in the corner of the screen instead of the middle (or god forbid, over top of the application or action that caused it to be called in the first place), and that at best gives a cursory reason for WHY its there.
In fucking this up so badly, Microsoft instilled a terrible behavior that is now part of many users’ psyche, of “oh there’s a pop up, I have to click OK”. Many people can’t tell the difference between a Windows dialog box and a popup Window in Internet Explorer. Many people don’t always make the connection when a UAC-like dialog box comes up, but its slightly different and the screen didn’t dim, and its got internet explorer’s icon in the corner. Many don’t realize that clicking links in a web browser shouldn’t cause UAC prompts!
What was Microsoft’s solution here? Did the simplify the system? Change how they handle the notifications? Actually make their software use the 2, 4, or more CPU cores every computer has nowadays and some intelligent design to work out what the user’s doing? More intelligently design Control Panels and applications so that THEY better integrated into UAC? Perhaps some of this was done, at some level. But thus far, the only thing I have seen is they added complexity by creating multiple levels of UAC notification. My Mother, Father, Aunt, Uncle, Sister, Brother, etc doesn’t know what UAC is, why it exists, what each of those levels means for them, and for fuck’s sake, they shouldn’t have to.
Much of my grief was put into very elegant prose by Alex St. John in the November 2009 issue of CPU magazine (http://tr.im/C3kN) Alex points out that Microsoft has 60,000 software engineers, none of which apparently, can write an algorithm to figure out if a file with a .jpg extension, is in fact a jpg image or something nefarious. He also points out that the number one question in Microsoft’s FAQ on downloading files is “What does it mean to download a file?” Holy Hell. I don’t agree with Alex’s 3-part solution that follows that, I think its still conceding defeat to the flaws that Microsoft is too bureaucratic to fix.
The point has been made many times that its not in Microsoft’s or the tech industry’s interest for the OS to be flawless. There is BIG money in supporting the Swiss Cheese Operating System, and bigger money still in claiming to provide security for it. I guarantee you the great-great-grandkids of Symantec and McAfee executives won’t have to worry about money.
Next Up…Software Distribution…its almost 2010… this is still a disparate, scary, and ridiculous process that should be standard, uniform and recognizable…WTF…