This is correct, but it's FUD of Microsoft's own doing. Microsoft has a long and storied history of being less than honest, so it's entirely understandable that people will be looking for the "gotcha" in anything they say.

But not enough to matter unless you're doing something special.

Why do people cite this as if it matters?

That's a benefit, not a drawback.

I have a number of machines in daily use that disprove this assertion.

I've been playing with Windows 10 for a while now, and it is pretty underwhelming in the sense that it is not significantly better than Windows 7. The only thing 10 really brings to the table is a handful of new "features" that don't benefit me (Cortana, etc.).

I won't be bothering to upgrade my Windows machines even for free.

Not me. If for some bizarre reason I were to buy such a watch, there's no way I could withstand the withering amount of ridicule I'd get from my friends.

Vital systems should never, ever be connected to the internet in the first place. If the people running such systems would stop being complete idiots and disconnect from the internet, there would be no need for anything like a military-style response to "cyber" attacks.

That couldn't be further from the truth. I know a lot of normal people (including my aged mother) who don't know a damned thing about operating systems but have no more problem with Linux than they have with Windows.

In terms of ease of use, they achieved parity years ago.

That solution does nothing to actually fix the problem.

Finally, a real argument for why people should be using the cloud! This is literally the first one that I've seen that might tilt the cost/benefit analysis to the "use the cloud" side.

Although Azure does seem to be doing pretty well, so I don't know how accurate the statement really is.

I haven't bought anything Sony since the rootkit.

Likewise, I have done my best to avoid giving Microsoft even a single dime -- although in practice, that's pretty much impossible to achieve, thanks to their continuing evil practices (such as demanding royalties from Android phone manufacturers).

And between the US and China, I would prefer to be spied on by China. They have less of an ability to harm me.

Everything you say is correct if what Lenovo did was just commit an innocent error. I don't think that's what they did. I think what they did was overtly malicious, and the only suitable response is to never do business with them again.

While much of what you say contains truth, I think you are too quick to discount overall company culture. If the processes in one part of the company can get so lax without management correcting it, it's more likely that the same problem exists in every other part of the company as well.

Even if the only part of Lenovo that sucked was the group that decided that the malware was acceptable, that still means the company as a whole can't be trusted -- since from the outside of the company, there's no way to know what groups suck and what groups don't.

However, the reason that I will never again purchase anything made by Lenovo is more basic than that: their official response to Superfish was either that they were outright lying or that they were seriously incompetent. Either way, they proved to be a company that you can't trust -- even if there are groups within the company that are trustworthy.

Wrong. I am very happy to pay software I use and enjoy, but most of the time I don't have that option. You can't blame this sort of thing on people being unwilling to pay when there is no option to pay at all, or paying doesn't get you a version of the software that is free of ads and tracking.