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Microsoft's Get Windows 10 App, KB 3035583, Reappears (infoworld.com)
An anonymous reader shares an InfoWorld article: Once again, Microsoft has unleashed the GWX Kraken, with no explanation and no description. The latest KB 3035583 appears as a "Recommended" optional patch for Windows 7 and 8.1. Those with Automatic Update turned on and "Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates" checked -- the default settings -- will see the patch as a checked, optional update, and it will be installed the next time Automatic Update runs. If you previously hid KB 3035583, it's now unhidden. I'm sure there are a dozen people on earth who still have Auto Updates turned on, "Recommended updates" checked, and who haven't yet accepted Microsoft's kind invitation for a free copy of Windows 10. This one's for them. In late March 2015, Microsoft released the first version of KB 3035583. Described as "Update enables additional capabilities for Windows Update notifications in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP1," the patch immediately raised eyebrows. In April of last year, a German researcher named Gerard Himmelein, writing at heise.de, figured out that Microsoft was sneaking a Windows 10 upgrader onto Win7 and 8.1 machines. Life for Win7 and 8.1 customers since then has degenerated into Win10 whack-a-mole.In some other news, Chinese news outlet Xinhua reports that plenty of users in China are unhappy about Microsoft's push to get them to mandatorily upgrade their Windows OS. "The company has abused its dominant market position and broken the market order for fair play," Xinhua quoted Zhao Zhanling, a legal adviser with the Internet Society of China, as saying.
I've been fighting off this upgrade on my network at work for months now. I deployed a GPO with a template MS provides to stop the forced upgrade of Win7 machines to Win10, but I still see that damned little icon on my user's system tray. I don't condone, but understand their strategy for pushing out Win10 to home users, they don't want another Windows XP, where a popular but mostly out of date OS keeps a small, bug significant chunk of the market long after support ends. What I don't understand is forcing this update on domain joined machines that are obviously part of a business network and the upgrade should be left up to the sysadmin (me). I know there's little love for MS on this site, but they have gotten worse and those of us working in enterprise/domaine environments shouldn't have to employ registry hacks and GPO templates to keep our client machines from forcefully being upgraded to the latest OS.
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
I don't agree with how they're doing it, but the simple fact is that Microsoft is totally done supporting Windows 7 for home users. They're desperate to avoid another Windows XP-style upgrade cycle. Even getting Win7 support for businesses is getting trickier; Microsoft has basically announced that the next revision of business PCs won't natively support Windows 7, and support is limited to a very small list of business-only PCs...so they're not killing support, but just making it really hard to get it.
I'm hoping they'll soften their stance on Windows as a Service and go back to a more traditional release timeframe, but for home users that kind of model is the right choice. Grandma isn't running crazy custom VB6 applications that can't be modernized and must work. She is, however, an inexperienced computer user who is probably happy with a remote servicing model, just like iOS.
Under the hood and without the spyware/Cortana/Store, Windows 10 is actually a good upgrade. It has decent performance on low end hardware. Now that Windows Phone is all but dead, I'm hoping they'll start loosening some of the mobile-inspired UI decisions they made and start allowing custom theming again. The second someone comes up with a Windows 7 look-alike theme for Windows 10, I'm sure a huge chunk of users will move to 10. I skipped Windows 8 because I hated the UI so much, for example, and didn't come back until 8.1's last update.