Microsoft Finally Admits Its Malware-Style Windows 10 Upgrade Sales Pitch Went Too Far
Furnished content.
We've talked a lot about how Microsoft managed to shoot Windows 10 (and consumer goodwill) squarely in the foot by refusing to seriously address OS privacy concerns, and by using malware-style tactics to try and force users on older versions of Windows to upgrade. While Microsoft's decision to offer Windows 10 as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 made sense on its surface, the company repeatedly bungled the promotion by making the multi-gigabyte upgrade impossible to avoid, which was a huge problem for those on capped and metered broadband connections.
But at times Microsoft made things even worse by engaging in behavior that would make even the lowest scumware peddlers proud. Like that time the Redmond-giant began pushing Windows 10 upgrade popups that pretended to let users close the popup dialogue by pressing X, only to have that begin the upgrade anyway against the user's wishes.
"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.Except Microsoft didn't really "get it right," and users made that abundantly obvious. And whether Microsoft actually "learned a lot from it" really isn't clear, since a refusal to let users truly control how the OS works (whether it's preventing the OS from being quite so chatty or letting users dictate upgrade schedules on their own terms) has been somewhat of a recurring theme since launch. That "we know what's best for you" mentality has been bone-grafted to the company's DNA for some time, and we'll likely have to wait until Windows 11 to see if any lessons were actually learned.
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."
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