The Massive Windows 10 Update Failure

The recent Microsoft Windows 10 Anniversary Update ruffled more than a few feathers as many users are experiencing a reboot cycle.

These things are bound to happen when a company takes a cavalier attitude and constantly slipstreams updates. This is unlike the previous era of the neverending patch Tuesday. The difference: these Windows 10 updates are not optional.

This auto-update approach harkens back to the America Online era of the 1980s and 1990s when the service dominated the pre-Internet era. I remember Microsoft, then promoting the MSN online service designed to compete with AOL, was in awe of the AOL update system.

You would boot the AOL system and it would update the complete program whether you wanted to or not. You would often end up with a whole new version and a completely different graphical user interface. The company was not shy about changing everything.

Microsoft always held this as an ideal method for updates so it would not have to deal with the outrageous complexity of a world of half-patched versions of its OS in the wild. To make things even more complex, this hodge-podge was running on an ecosystem of computers that were also all different.

That is probably why my recent Windows 10 update worked fine on one computer, but did not "take" properly on my wife's machine, which went into endlessly rebooting. It finally stopped after a while, but now she is afraid to turn off the machine.

What annoyed me was a not-so-subtle change of the Start menu. On two of the machines, the "File explorer/settings/power/all apps" buttons are now gone, replaced by small icons with "all apps" pre-clicked and "all apps" showing in the start menu. Exactly why this change did not occur on a third machine I do not know.

If Microsoft is going to constantly toy with the UI, then I am fearful. The company was completely stubborn about the idiotic start screen with Windows 8, forcing me and others to revert to products like Classic Shell so we could get an efficient experience. Windows 10 was a compromise I thought was perfect. But now Microsoft—or factions within the company—want to slowly revert back to Windows 8, and the Anniversary Update was step one.

Of course, this is only a suspicion, but the way the company defended the huge page of massive square icons and idiotic full-screen apps obviously reflected a corporate opinion. The company refused to admit that the layout was crap, especially on a system with multiple monitors. Someone high up liked the UI and feels hurt by the Windows 10 compromise.

But Microsoft has barely dodged a bullet with this cavalier upgrade process. I do not see the corporate culture shifting enough to change the methodologies employed for these upgrades. This includes ignoring the beta reports.

So here is what we can expect, something that could easily happen in the next few years: Instead of a simple reboot issue, a patch goes out that fries the machine dead. There is no reboot problem because the machine will not boot at all and you cannot get far enough to even revert to the previous install. We are getting a glimpse into the future if Microsoft persists with forced upgrades; the company needs to rethink its strategy immediately.