Dear Bill Gates,
I’ve been following you on social media and admiring your efforts, through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to spend billions of dollars to make the world a much better place!
Let me offer a simple suggestion that could make a world of difference for many people. You are listening?
Consider telling your friends at Microsoft to switch Windows to FULLY UPDATE WINDOWS WITH A SINGLE MOUSE CLICK by the owner of the computer!
Do not wait an indeterminate amount of time and confirm that you do want to reboot now, just wait another indeterminate amount of time for the update to install or fail.
There are no repeated entries of the root login password during the upgrade.
There are no incomplete updates when additional updates are available.
No cryptic error codes from google.
Without manual invocation of Windows Update Repair, automatically invoke Repair when needed.
There is no going back to discovering that you need to manually disable an antivirus.
Add a fail timeout. No waiting days to find out that the update is stuck and the device needs a manual reboot.
No messages “Waiting for updates. 21% Do not turn off your PC. This will take a while.” Instead tell your user when to come back IN MINUTESnot as a percentage of an incomplete intermediate stage.
By all means, keep the current update process available to anyone who wants it.
Consider wrapping an automatic retry loop and a fail timeout around the current process, with an escape ([ESC]?) to abort and return to the manual process.
Test it thoroughly before you release it, keep track of every result failure mode in your lab that didn’t end in a full upgrade. Allow users to anonymously fax an update failure log to Microsoft to report failed update outcome modes so they can be tracked, prioritized, and fixed.
Let’s put an annual economic measure to this suggestion. Assume there are 1 billion Windows computers in use, and each computer is updated for 4 hours each quarter, and assume a global average wage of $10 per hour for computer users, then the automation proposed here could save $160 USD billion per year.
By comparison, it has been estimated that more efficient utilization of older workers in the US would increase US GDP by more than $800 billion a year.
But then again, maybe automating Windows Update is a much easier change?
Thank you so much for listening, and for all you have done and continue to do.
