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Are there actually businesses who just use the normal windows updater? (Ignoring smaller businesses without IT departments for a second). I assumed the forced patching at boot/reboot was a consumer version thing? A unforeseen update from microsoft can just shut down your business?


Whilst servers are in a different category, multiple Windows Updates have changed the way updates work. Look at the Dual Scan situation[0]. People who had central management applied one update and suddenly found desktops also accepting updates from the Internet.

Then you've got the fact that "Professional Edition" was once a perfectly fine solution for businesses, but suddenly the ability to properly control updates like you suggest required Enterprise Edition. These aren't the only issues.

There's always someone who points out that if you have basically unlimited free time you can stay on top of all of it, but at the end of the day a lot of businesses still find surprise updates happening. I just got a sales call for a third party business product with the tagline "Disable Updates automatically applying (Yes, REALLY!)" as a listed feature.

Finally you can top it all off with the BYOD trend, where people often expect to run their own machines without management software.

[0] https://www.thewindowsclub.com/dual-scan-windows-update


Thanks for the insight


The same line of reasoning applies to IT departments as well, though. If you force corporate IT departments to spend all their time installing your daily updates, the cost of ownership of your product for the company goes way up and the department heads will start looking for cheaper alternatives. Exceptions could surely be made for critical vulnerabilities, especially those being exploited in the wild, but this is a low-severity DoS. As another commenter said, if you made this an off-schedule hotfix you would have to do it for basically every bug.




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