What the Hell Is Microsoft Doing with My Computer?
Opinion: Microsoft is sneaking "updates" into my PCs. What the heck! — Listen carefully. They're my computers. They're not your computers. I choose to put Windows on some of them. I choose what applications go on them.
Context & Ripple Effects
This eWEEK column is a reaction to the report the day before that Microsoft patched Windows XP and Vista files without users' knowledge — including on machines where automatic updates were turned off. It lands amid a stretch of bad Windows press for Redmond: boxed retail sales of Vista were reported trailing early XP sales by nearly 60 percent, and Microsoft had just rolled out its 'black screen of darkness' measure against pirated Vista copies.
The piece extends an older argument — Slate had already framed the tension between Microsoft's security mission and user control back in January 2006 — into an ownership claim: the columnist insists the PC belongs to whoever bought it, not to the vendor shipping code onto it.
First-order effects
- Users who disabled automatic updates learn they have no enforceable off switch — Microsoft can modify system files regardless, so the setting's meaning collapses.
- The disclosure hands ammunition to critics already souring on Vista, compounding weak retail numbers and the piracy 'black screen' backlash with a consent scandal.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise IT departments, who treat update channels as audited change management, face pressure to firewall or scrutinize Windows Update traffic rather than trust it.
- Security vendors and rival OS makers gain a talking point: if the update pipe doubles as an unrequested file-modification channel, every mechanism built on trusting the vendor — antivirus signatures, driver pushes, anti-piracy checks — inherits the same legitimacy question.
Third-order effects
- If silent patching becomes standard practice, the industry drifts toward the OS-as-a-service model where the vendor, not the owner, controls what runs on the machine — with consumer consent norms, and eventually regulators, lagging behind the technical capability.
- Trust becomes the scarce resource in platform economics: vendors that treat the update channel as unilateral leverage trade short-term control for long-term erosion of the assumption that their code ships with permission.
The trend: Operating systems are becoming continuously updated services under vendor control, forcing a reckoning over whether PC owners still decide what gets installed on their own machines.