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Microsoft Exec Admits They 'Went Too Far' With Aggressive Windows 10 Updates (softpedia.com)
It's no secret that Microsoft has been aggressively pushing Windows 10 to users. Over the past year and a half, we have seen users complain about Windows 10 automatically getting downloaded to their computer, and in some cases, getting installed on its own as well. The automatic download irked many users who were on limited or slow data plans, or didn't want to spend gigabytes of data on Windows 10. A company executive has admitted for the first time that they may have went overboard with Windows 10 updates. From a report on Softpedia: Chris Capossela, Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, said in the latest edition of the Windows Weekly that this was the moment when the company indeed went too far, pointing out that the two weeks between the moment when users started complaining about the unexpected behavior and the one when a patch was released were "very painful." "We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective, but finding the right balance where you're not stepping over the line of being too aggressive is something we tried and for a lot of the year I think we got it right, but there was one particular moment in particular where, you know, the red X in the dialog box which typically means you cancel didn't mean cancel," he said. "And within a couple of hours of that hitting the world, with the listening systems we have we knew that we had gone too far and then, of course, it takes some time to roll out the update that changes that behavior. And those two weeks were pretty painful and clearly a lowlight for us. We learned a lot from it obviously."
Just yesterday, My gaming machine, the only windows install left in the house, came in with an ominous warning as I was playing a game: It said it had downloaded an update, and that it would restart in 20 minutes, whether I wanted it or not. No installing at night, or tomorrow, or anything. Imagine if instead of playing a game, I was giving a talk.
This is the kind of shit that makes people not use windows for work.
They are not forgiven. I've given our customers that paid to have us roll Windows 10 back, or to fix program errors caused by Windows 10 the information on how to get their money back. Just contact Microsoft and start the process. As far as I know, none did so. Most people really do put up with more shit than they should.
YES, Microsoft is still going "too far". Any "feature" that can't be turned off is not a feature, it's a bug, and forced updates and forced reboots are worse than that, because Microsoft is deliberately not allowing me to have control over my own PC. I've used every version of Windows since version 3.11, but the forced reboots in Windows 10 infuriate me so much that I have already moved several of my machines over to Linux, and plan to migrate all of them away from Windows over the next year. For me, forced reboots have were the last straw that broke the camel's back. Moving forward, I'm moving to Linux.
Organizations that need detailed configuration control can shell out for Windows 10 Enterprise.
Cool story bro..
You should submit a slashdot article about that.
> They got close to a billion users to upgrade
No they did not. Originally, Microsoft predicted a billion devices by mid-2018, but they have extended the time for that number to be reached. That number was not just PCs but also included phones and IoT. Phones have now died off completely and IoT is not going Microsoft's way.
The current number of Windows 10 active machines is claimed to be around 450 million. The number of new PCs and laptops sold with Windows 10 already installed since release accounts for around 350 million of those. So maybe 100 million may have been 'upgrades'.