MicrosoftHi, Spoofy,
I googled around and found your blog. It sounds more like a press release spin from Microsoft. With all due respect, perhaps, you can pass my comment on because nobody at Microsoft seems to care or listen to customer forums or Microsoft feedback forms you fill out or prioritize individual customers that are impacted by closed door tech developer sessions and decisions.
While you do explain the thought or "why" behind some of the changes for print protocols there still seems to be a complete disconnect in being respectful to users and manufacturers you impact when you implement changes without enough research, testing and warning. Before a new drug can be released, it has to go through intense trials and testing before it gets FDA approval and is released to the larger population.
Your 24H2 update shut down "Scan to PC" functionality for dozens of manufacturer models and millions of individual and business customers. Then, some source is leaking FAKE NEWS that Microsoft has issued a fix with their latest update. In my last conversation with Brother last week, their escalated tech said they have compiled a list of thousands of customers to notify them when Microsoft does issue a fix and the latest information they have is sometime in 2025. So, people that have state of the art expensive top of line printers they use in small to medium size offices can no longer scan from the PC to the computer.
The only workaround solutions given were to un-install 24H2, but, unfortunately, for most people, after a week or two, you can't un-install the update which leaves one other solution. You have to reset the PC and wipe it clean of everything and then load Windows 10, install your scanning software and drivers and then update the computer to Windows 11. You can't just download Windows 11 because the only download offered by Microsoft is for 24H2, so, you have to use the download for Windows 10, first.
DOES MICROSOFT AND THE DEVELOPERS FEEL THE PAIN FROM THAT? I spent an entire weekend going through this process on 4 computers re-installing all my software and first finding that I could not reset the PC from the Windows 11 download or I'd have 24H2 and the same problem.
24H2 has all kinds of other bugs and issues. It causes a conflict with NVDIA Broadcast detecting the camera. Some computers were fixed with NVIDIA's own update, but, many still have the problem.
Another unrelated issue I want to share with you, as well, in the hope that you can pass it on to the Microsoft team and/or someone from Microsoft actually reads your blog is about the new Editor function in Microsoft 365. Note, nobody from Microsoft tells customers anything and nobody responds to using the Microsoft feedback about the feature that is in Office. You don't even get an automated email response acknowledging that you sent Microsoft some feedback. It's like nobody cares.
This is the kind of support you'd expect from an open source application because it is FREE, but, not from being a paid customer to Microsoft. Outside of your blog, I have not seen any awareness to customers or manufacturers provided about an impending change to protocols for printers in a Windows update. Just roll it out first and see what happens and who complains!
REGARDING THE NEW EDITOR FEATURE IN MICROSOFT 365. The feature overrides all the settings in the OPTIONS to adjust spelling and grammar checking in Word documents and in Classic Outlook and the NEW Outlook. It completely renders all the manual controls and settings useless and you CAN'T TURN IT OFF. I've heard that some people in some editions may have a toggle switch to turn the Editor OFF, but, in most Microsoft 365 subscriptions, you have no toggle switch or radio box to TURN IT OFF.
Some people who are programmers are complaining about it because they are writing code and the stupid editor can't distinguish these are not mis-spelled words, etc. Some people like myself that write business documents and emails and have an excellent command of language prefer to write our own documents without this flawed Editor thinking for us.
BASIC 101 - If you build a light, you have an ON/OFF switch. If you have a car, you have an ON/OFF switch for the engine. What are the developers thinking? Who gives them feedback? Who are they accountable to? Developers who invent new features are extremely intelligent and gifted, but, often those geniuses are the very people that lack common sense in developing features for the customers they serve.
Microsoft RECALL - I shouldn't have to open Command Prompt and learn programming commands to turn RECALL - OFF. Is it my computer anymore? Do I have any say in how my computer works or what features I want to leverage? Why does Microsoft have to decide what is best for me?
I'm on a private network with a VPN. There is risk in everything one does including crossing the street or driving your car or walking up a flight of stairs. I don't want or need all these frequent and sometimes draconian security updates that interrupt and destroy my computer experience to protect me from everything. If some people are stupid to open phishing emails or visit nasty websites, should not mean that I need the same kind of protection and decisions made for me by the software where I have to stop to approve a download of an application with a few mouse clicks instead of one mouse click or to approve an email showing the HTML portion or to have to keep checking spam because the filters are so draconian that if I don't check spam, I could miss an important email.
Obviously, there is a reason for firewalls and anti-virus, etc. I'm not making light of that, but, I want to keep control of my computer. I don't want someone at Microsoft to decide for me what is best like by not putting an ON/OFF switch on a spelling/grammar Editor or forcing me to disable some security settings that go too far to ruin my experience and waste my time checking over things it mistakenly keeps from me.
FYI - I have multiple computers. I'm so annoyed by Microsoft 365 and this spelling/grammar editor that I do most of my writing on an old laptop with Microsoft VISTA and an ancient legacy version of Microsoft Office and when I finish writing the documents, I upload/send them to my main computer with Microsoft 365. I do the same thing now with Microsoft Outlook emails a lot.
The next step is to install Libre Office and Linux. The constant updates and updates with bugs is so frustrating. I work from home and I do some light IT work for an HVAC company, in addition to other work I do, and in the middle of the day, sometimes, I will get a call from their office that Outlook has stopped working and I have to remote in and do the stupid Microsoft 365 update to fix Outlook.
An entire small office with several employees on a network completely disrupted in the middle of their day, several times a year. Every SMB does not have a full-time IT team managing their operations to monitor this all the time and don't tell me about telling Microsoft to do updates late at night or something. JUST STOP THE CONSTANT UPDATES!
I really hope somebody reads this and thinks about making some changes in the developer processes and decisions that are made including when they release a feature or something to make certain it works properly and that they create a simple ON/OFF switch for a new feature.
But, the conclusion I've drawn is that Microsoft does not care about individuals and SMB customers. They just do what they want without any accountability to customers and they also want more control over the person's computer to make decisions for the end user eventually probably moving to a lease/annual subscription computer model.
Just like people are now hanging on to their older cars which were simpler and more reliable, I find myself using a 10-year old copy of Microsoft Office on an ancient Microsoft Vista operating system on a Dell laptop that belongs in a museum, but, you know something, for word processing, it works just fine. SCREW ALL THE NEW FEATURES. The only real compromise is that the battery power has improved so much on newer models and I have to flip over to my loaded state of the art computer with 64GB Ram, etc. to do anything else except word processing.
Just horrible what Windows is evolving to.
Thank You, Microsoft.
