Windows 10: Cortana: The spy in Windows 10

*sarcTo be able to use W10 one must accept that use and conditions are as set by Microsoft.
If you find Cortana intrusive, don't use it....its as simple as that....there is always Google...hah hah hah.

 

We need like or upvote buttons. This is spot on. Took me a moment though to stop laughing at the last sentence in the first paragraph to grasp the second paragraph. Short and right on target.

 

Here's the issue, Microsoft doesn't want to do this because of the perceived support cost. In their model it's cheaper to have the same teams support both desktop and tablet, heck even program for them. Believe me, thousands of us were screaming long before Windows 8.x ever made it to production. Microsoft chose not to listen. Then, when they fired everyone involved over it, including the CEO, they maintained status quo by claiming, "Look, we brought back the start button." You know, because that was the whole problem all along.*Rolleyes

I was working at Microsoft from the DOS days through the release of Win 95. I was on the Win NT beta support team. I can tell you that even starting back then the company was trying to figure out a way to combine consumer and professional platforms for cost benefit. They, in this case they being the accountants and business heads that sit on the board, don't seem capable of grasping the age old concept of the right tool for the right job.

Your ideas are spot on, and if you look at the competition, they are basically following this concept. Heck, even Google has both ChromeOS and Android, even though they are trying to combine some aspects for a desktop OS they understand there is a need for different platforms.

Microsoft as a company reminds me of Novell when we released Windows for Workgroups, and later NT. Novell had its fanbase both internally and externally. Internally you were not allowed to criticize the company strategy for fear of ruining your career. Thus they didn't listen when people told them they should work with Microsoft in the NOS area rather than ignore us and/or work to be incompatible. Look at Novell today vs. Microsoft in this space.

During that same time period we were encouraged in the company to speak up. If we thought something sucked we were allowed to vocalize it all the way up the food chain if our arguments had value. Value being pointing out why something sucked and how to fix it. As a result we beat out companies like IBM whose OS/2 was arguably much more advanced but had major issues, like a setup process that absolutely sucked wind.

I pray Microsoft will get back to its roots and stop trying to nickle and dime its core business in addition to trying to copy everyone else. It's one thing to take software ideas and tweak them and sale it. It's another to try and copy another companies business model. Especially when you are the company that has the greatest market share and the company you are trying to copy is behind you. Or at least it was before this fiasco.

 

No we do not, we removed the option of rep on the News and Chillout forums as it was abused by idiots swapping rep to try and look more skilled than they were

 

I have it easy I guess. I just switched to the Education version. No Cortana, just the old search function. I didn't originally do it to ditch Cortana. Just wanted to try it out. I kind of like it this way though. Search just searches my PC. If I want to look something up on the Internet I use Google. Same way I did things in the past. Just getting Cortana to work in Canada was until recently a PITA. I had no search until I got her working, or fumbled around to turn her off.

 

*Thumbs*Thumbs*Thumbs*Thumbs

 

These days people want their phone or PC to do more n more.
To do that its needs data, to know what you like etc, then people moan that its recording all this data

 

Yeah, even Apple has separate OS's, iOS for mobile and OS X for desktop (although they tried to do something similar to Windows 8 in one release, I forget which, and got blasted for it)

Pretty cool you were a beta tester, I have NT 4.0 and various other old OS's in virtual machines to play with once in a while. NT 4.0 supports multi-GBs of RAM while 9x has trouble with anything over 512mb XD.

How Microsoft was then is a place I'd like to work (Working on my B.S. in Software Engineering), internal criticism and peer reviewing seems to be the best way to release quality software products.

Hopefully they see sooner than later that an operating system that tries to do too many things will end up doing none of those things well.

 

As the old saying goes. Jack of all trades, Master of none.

 

Give them an inch and they take a mile is how that usually turns out! *Rolleyes At least you can say it was tried back when TF was new but ended up simply being abused which subsequently ended with it being discarded. When you try anything derived from social media as far as options unfortunately you end up with social media mentality it seems.

As for MrBill's statement about MS trying to follow someone else's business model rather structuring something unique it reminds of how DEC was hard headed in flexing to meet the consumer market by being too stuffed shirt to want only upper end business market only type sales and not flexing into the general consumer/home user type markets. And that was what cost them Big Time where they ended up being bought out by Ashton.

Others like Packard Bell couldn't cut the overhead well enough to stay afloat as Dell, Gateway for a time, HP, and a few others ran circles around them. What MS has been focused on after Vista was starting to be noticed with 7 and Netbooks as well as the Windows Phone as MS peered into the hand held and other small portable device marketing concepts and rushed 8 out before fully working out the dual platform structure that would be needed. 8.1 was then the "quick fix" slapped out fast while still not remembering the desktop perspectives and now we see MS rethinking things quite a bit with 10 and it's new version of Start menu as well as structuring the usual items to work on both platforms as the items previously in the Control Panel have been pulled to become more touchscreen friendly.

The if to fact to with 10 also being seen is the no longer large service pack every so many months but a total upgrade in one lump sum to be able to update hand helds, tablets as well as laptops and desktops in much the same manner. As for Cortana that was to be expected as MS had previously launched Bing to compete with not only Google but along with Yahoo a lengthy list of other search providers! They wanted a large foot print in that environment as well.

 

So you can disable it by checking or unchecking a box?

 

It was very easy to enable or disable Cortana on the fly in my Windows 10 Home with the "Search online and include web results" toggle switch in Cortana > Settings, so Microsoft disabled it *Mad in the automatic update to Version 1067 OS build 14393.82 I got today to force Cortana on the average users I guess:





I tried Sign out as per https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4...dows-10-a.html
and it did not work but Option #2 using the .reg file worked for Home in editions."

 

Cortana just switches back on that switch "Search online and include web results". How do you force it to stay off?

 

Correct, it's broken with the current update and switches back on once Cortana Settings is closed but it stays off when applying the Tutorial I linked to in my post above yours.

I wonder why they did not simply remove the switch after disabling it in Win 10 Home, what a waste of time trying to toggle it to no avail!

I have an other laptop with Windows 10 Pro also Version 1067 OS build 14393.82 and there is no "Search online and include web results" toggle switch.