Did not want to move to Renosa, nor did I want to move to Taiwan or China a few years after that.

It's sad, the ones that did take these horrible horrible moves got let go in a few years after the smart native language speakers got up to speed on their jobs.

It's funny, back in the late 80's I was there doing Southern Ports Receiving Inspection and product audits for the very first Taiwanese Black and Decker brand named rip off products coming into America.  Yep, B&D quickly learned they could buy a competent rip off of drill press or bench grinder far far cheaper than they could make one in the USA.  Really, all they needed was education in the quality levels Americans required and what UL meant.

Now China and Taiwan build EVERYTHING and have evolved into very competent industrial nations.

I guess I am an ongoing expert on change, having seen so much of it and finding it so fascinating to watch it unfold.

http://liliputing.com/2015/12/fujitsu-is-spinning-off-pc-and-phone-divisions-...

Fujitsu is spinning off PC and phone divisions as new companies

Earlier this month we’d heard rumors that Fujitsu, Toshiba, and VAIO were planning to combine their PC businesses to create a new company.   It’s not yet clear if today’s announcement means that’s not happening… or if it’s the first step toward the creation of that new combined company.   Toshiba has just cut 6,800 people from computing and put its computer portion in a separate movable bucket as well, so they too could be making moves to combine their ailing PC portion with Fujitsu and VAIO as per this rumor.

But what is clear is that PC in Japan is "sick to dying" and that it is pulling down the big Japanese electronics Conglomerate Corporation's bottom lines and that simply isn't acceptable in Japan.   Time to amputate .....



Consolidation and layoffs, two signs of a sick industry.

I have to agree.  If it's a behemoth and still functions substantially as it should, people will use it especially if you market it like they're getting something for nothing. (free upgrade to Windows 10)

This update that broke Word probably just super-pissed-off 90% of the big corporate management in the country.  Very, very few are so isolated from the day to day that they don't have a secretary doing documents, presentations and letters for them all the time. You can believe when the secretary says it will be several hours or maybe a couple days to get a document because Microsoft's latest update just trashed all his custom letter, presentation, email, and document formats, the big guy will take notice.  You don't mess with a company's productivity and get away with it.

If Microsoft made a backup of the file and if it's relatively easy to find and restore, it might alleviate some of the pain.  But, they have just served up notice to all the BIG decision makers that we can f(*k up at any time and possibly cost you tens of thousands of man-hours to repair our damage. And, if you restore your backups to get things working again, we'll just trash it again tonight when we reapply the "patch" that broke everything since it's no longer on your systems.

You may be right.  This might be a big enough screw-up actually begin Microsoft's death throws. If a company can't count on its tools, it will get better tools. Time spent repairing/reworking unreliable tools is time lost from work, lost productivity, and directly affects the bottom line.

6; buy android / chrome powered devices and take the windows machine off the interweb completely
of course this won't work for power users, but I can totally see myself with just a tablet, especially now I live in this bitty trailer

http://betanews.com/2016/01/01/despite-microsofts-increasingly-aggressive-tac...

Despite Microsoft's increasingly aggressive tactics, Windows 10's growth continues to slow



The slowing of growth for the new OS is quite clear. In September, Windows 10 grew by 1.42 percentage points, in October it grew by 1.31 and in November it increased its share by 1.06 percentage points. As we saw, in December the new OS grew by 0.96 percent. For an operating system that’s not only free but being pushed ever more forcefully onto users, that trend has to be a worry for Microsoft.

Most other versions of Windows lost share in December. Windows 8 went from 2.88 percent to 2.76 percent for a decline of 0.12 percentage points. Windows 8.1 went from 11.15 to 10.30 for a drop of 0.85. With both flavors combined, the tiled OS now stands on 13.06 percent, down 0.97 percentage points.

Windows 7 remains by far and away the most popular operating system with 55.68 percent of the market, dropping just 0.43 percentage points in the month.


GWX Control Panel is up to rev. 1.7 now with even better counter moves for MS's attempts to cram Win 10 on to the now strongly preferred (relatively stable and well behaved) Windows 7 machines.

Microsoft's underhanded coercive tactics have backfired on them and a majority of the un-infected users are actively resisting MS's Win 10 big push now.



http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

Venturebeat makes a point that "Windows in total" is now losing market share to both Apple and Linux.   The percentages are small and ARE within the "standard sampling error" size range, but still, folks are noticing this ongoing trend and are reporting it now.

"On the whole, Windows slipped 0.07 points to 91.32 percent in December. Those losses were, of course, direct gains for Mac OS X and Linux, which were up 0.03 points and 0.04 points to 7.02 percent and 1.66 percent, respectively."


Run your slider over and see that Linux is now bigger than Windows Vista, which was another year's end surprise.    Stat counter is only listing pure 100% Linux boxes in these numbers, as any dual boot machine gets listed as a Windows box as the primary boot partition gets used as "defining the machine".    

Also please note that Chrome OS is not being reported in these displayed numbers at all, as MS pays $$$ to have statistics vendors like StatCounter to ignore ChromeOS in their published "PC information".    Remember, to MS ChromeOS is not a real OS, the pawnshop guys say so.

Listing Chromebooks off over there in mobile (or not at all) is just one of MS's dirty tricks intended to keep misleading the purchasing public into thinking MS is still the big industry monolith that they so drastically ARE NOT ANY MORE.  

Example:  iPhones by themselves dwarf this Windows pie volume, and what does that say about the Android phones pie volume?   A comparison to anything other than themselves is deadly to MS, so they pay out bribe money to avoid this happening.

Big pie!....  

It is the new year.    

You were told this was coming, right?   The proper "Threat Balance" comes into play now, with MS outright lying to you and threatening you intentionally.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2016/01/02/microsoft-windows-7-problems/

Microsoft Warns Windows 7 Has Serious Problems

“Speaking to Windows Weekly, Microsoft Marketing chief Chris Capossela explained that users who choose Windows 7 do so “at your own risk, at your own peril” and he revealed Microsoft has concerns about its future software and hardware compatibility, security and more.

We do worry when people are running an operating system that’s 10 years old that the next printer they buy isn’t going to work well, or they buy a new game, they buy Fallout 4, a very popular game, and it doesn’t work on a bunch of older machines,” Capossela stated. “And so, as we are pushing our ISV [Independent Software Vendor] and hardware partners to build great new stuff that takes advantage of Windows 10 that obviously makes the old stuff really bad and not to mention viruses and security problems.”

He also stressed it is “so incredibly important to try to end the fragmentation of the Windows install base” and to get users to a “safer place”.

There’s only one problem with Capossela’s statements: they are complete (BS) rubbish.

"And so, there’s no doubt with a base as big as ours, it is hard to move anyone to a new model without angering some people. We don’t want to anger anybody, but we do feel a responsibility to get people to a much better place, and Windows 10 is a much better place than Windows 7. We will always give you a way out, but we’re trying to find the right threat balance.”

This phrase – “threat balance” – is telling. Microsoft has been cranking up the pressure on Windows 7 and Windows 8 users to upgrade and, in my opinion, the ‘balance’ was replaced by ‘threat’ a long time ago due to mandatory Windows 10 downloads, automatic upgrade attempts and now Capossela’s claims which add up to nothing more than deliberate misinformation designed to unsettle users."


The fact is that Win 7 is the market leader in PC and it is the gold standard for software support and that is not going to change ANY AT ALL UNTIL YEAR 2020.

Microsoft has stalled in its grandiose plans for "1 billion PCs by 2017" and people are now actively resisting the endless blundergate of Windows 10's nightly "upgrade/update destruction".

Real people know that MS is lying to them all the time now, and that Win 7 is still the most stable and non-intrusive of any of the MS operating systems.

This is the factual actual, until MS starts REMOVING your Win 7 drivers and replacing them with Win 10 drivers, an act that will intentionally BREAK Windows 7 for you.    

And that my friends is coming soon.  Right now all my Win 7 update selections are turned off and protected/monitored by the 1.6 or better GWX Control Center with all my security, emergency, systems updates -- every last one of them is turned off -- MS does not get to touch my Win 7 installation at all unless it does something illegal to do so.




     


http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/12/16/why-microsoft-said-windows...

Nothing And Everything To Lose

To understand why Microsoft has embarked upon such an aggressive update strategy you need to realize the importance of Windows 10 to the company’s entire future. In short: everything depends on it.

For all intents and purposes, right now Windows 10 is Microsoft. The operating system is Microsoft’s hail Mary pass at revitalizing the struggling PC sector, its troubled mobile devices (Surface is the bright spark here) and even in gaining greater parity in the gaming sector as Windows 10 has become the heart of the Xbox One in an attempt to increase functionality and close the sales gap on the PS4.

But this is just the start because all these factors have knock-on effects. If Microsoft gets Windows 10 onto a billion PCs then it piques the interest of app developers and the operating system has ‘universal apps’ which can then be used on Windows 10 smartphones and tablets therefore increasing their appeal as well. Ditto the Xbox One. There’s potentially a whole work/play/mobile ecosystem to rival anyone – but for it to work and crucially for it to work as fast as Microsoft wants,  it has to be forcibly kickstarted."

Yup, sounds like this Win 10 machine is about as Linux unfriendly as possible on purpose, with EFI Secure Boot uglies out the buppie.

You do realize that MS can change your boot structure at will on any given nightly update once you go Win 10, right?  

What worked for you last night is ancient history, what is new today is what counts.