It has been a while, since Microsoft tried to push Windows 10 as a upgrade to older Windows machines. Now Microsoft's management confirms, that it has gone to far with it's "malware style" Windows 10 10 upgrade campaign.
From July 2015 till July 2016 Microsoft has offered a free upgrade for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 machines to Windows 10. During that period, Microsoft shipped its Get Windows 10 app to existing Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 machine. And in May 2016 Microsoft used nasty tricks to force people to upgrade to Windows 10.
(Source: extremetech.com)
They changed the behavior of the x button – formerly know to close a windows and abort an operation. In the Get Windows 10 app dialog box shown above, the x button in the upper right corner closed the window – but the update wasn't terminated. So many users are ending with machines upgraded to Windows 10 and wasn't happy with that. Some users was in need to spend extra money for computer technicians to reset their machines back to Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.1, because Microsoft's rollback feature, implemented in Windows 10, was just a pain in the ass – and won't work in many cases.
Well, Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley had Chris Capossela, Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer, in their Windows Weekly podcast (here is the video). And here is the transcript, what Capossela has to say about that upgrade process:
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.
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 have a look back: People has refused full 10 months to upgrade to Windows 10 – and then Capossela "think they went to far"? Sorry, it was a decision at Microsoft to use malware like approaches to trick people into upgrading to Windows 10 – it's not a "went to far" – it's an absolutely no go. Further details may be read at extremetech.com.
