Missing The Point

The realization that there is valuable information in users attention data is a wonderful thing – it leads to so many really useful features like Amazon’s recommendation system. I’ve seen a lot of really good uses of this kind of data where systems use fuzzy logic to improve a users experience or make recommendations of things they’d like. It appears that Microsoft has noticed this trend as well, but somehow I think they missed the point:

There’s a number of things going horribly wrong here:

1. Despite having an automatic update system, Windows doesn’t actually apply useful updates. This is stupid – get control of your quality and ship patches to everyone instead of making users put up with bugs that Microsoft has actually fixed.
2. I’m really not sure that people are that interested in other updates that Microsoft were too chicken to send to automatic update.
3. “Update for Windows Vista (KB9871987398274592759)” may mean something within Microsoft but it’s completely meaningless to users. Is it so hard to come up with a vaguely meaningful title for updates?

I think I’ll keep this as my quintessential example of try-hard Web 2.0. To commemorate I’ve added a fancy shadow to the screen shot – now this post is as Web 2.0 as Microsoft…