The thing that raised my eyebrows was that my work laptop had this issue. And this is a serious work laptop, managed by a large & conservative IT org. I'm so locked down with GPOs/McAfee/Zscaler/Cylance/always-on-VPN that I have trouble opening my normal applications that I need for my job. And then Microsoft comes along and breaks stuff locally on my machine by changing something on their servers. So all the firewalls/VPN/proxy/cylance smart rogue program detection failed to do their job...
And to top things of the issue did not fix itself, as of Friday afternoon my start menu search still did not work.
"Allow"? I am not sure there is much of a choice with Windows 10. Microsoft seems to have done an end-run around the WSUS-managed networks I set up, as well... :(
Disclaimer - I have not had the time to go back in and see if it is something simple that has undone/overridden my group policies...
The article is a bit sensationalist, but judging by early comments I'm really disappointed how many tech people here are ambivalent to these sort of major UX fails.
Very few people actually work with simply writing stuff in Word or using Excel, most office jobs actually require some other tools like accounting and media creation. Further, you can not even watch higer resolution than 720p Netflix on Chrome
There are a number of business apps coughQuickBookscough where there is not a whole lot of choice about the OS, if one is using the Desktop version of said app...
please stop spreading the myth that ChromeOS is somehow immune to malware. nothing stops a dev from uploading malware to the Chrome web store, and there are many such cases that happened. the only meaningful metric of how safe a piece of software is, is the size and investment in the team responsible for the security of the product. And MS is leading in this aspect.
No one questions that there are bugs in software. The issue raised here is that users were unable to perform searches - even for local files - and the cause (apparently) inexplicably involves a network. In other words what could Microsoft possibly be doing that would prevent a local search from working due to a network or server failure.
If I ran the *nix 'find' command on a local filesystem and it segfaulted, I'd be annoyed (I'd also know how to debug and possibly fix) but (like you said) sometimes stuff breaks and that's life. If I ran the same command and got an error message about a network or server failure, my next steps would likely involve a yanked power cord, some forensics of my disks and a format and reinstall of everything on my computer.
My first thought would be somebody threw an unhandled exception in the telemetry code, and since there isn't anybody doing QA anymore, other than you and me and a billion other users. Probably a "worked on my machine..."
And to top things of the issue did not fix itself, as of Friday afternoon my start menu search still did not work.