Microsoft criticized for changing the pop-up box encouraging users to upgrade

Why is windows 7 a good product?

Your response is either disingenuous or naive.

Changing how software behaves as established by previous UI conventions with the differences restricted to changes in text labels is a known dark pattern. Furthermore, it is well known that an increasing percentage of users will not read to the end of a notification as they attempt to return to their initial task. [0]

> As we all know, people tend to start reading at the beginning of a piece of text and as they advance, an increasing percentage of people give up and do not read to the end.

Unquestionably, the effect of dismissing the notice is different and, also unquestionably, the people responsible for this behavioral change are well aware of how such a change would affect users who have no intention of upgrading.

What such a change achieves, in addition to tricking unwitting users into upgrading, is plausible deniability.

[0] http://alistapart.com/article/dark-patterns-deception-vs.-ho...

EDIT: Supply missing object. Rhetorical emphasis in last sentence.

Now your response would be that anyone who lacks the sophistication to do that should be forced to auto-update anyway.

And I would agree, except the updates also force a reboot, which can be catastrophic to non-saved work, running processes, etc. And stopping the forced reboot after updating Win10 is VERY much non-trivial-- it's step 2 in the link below.

https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wak...

That's some serious mojo.

"User friendly"

Security updates, if that's really what they are, are a good idea by default for people who don't know enough to handle it themselves.

General automatic updates, including completely reorganising how the entire system works and moving lots of UI around unexpectedly and literally overnight, are a bad idea for just about everyone.

It's strange how in the web world, everything is always up-to-date and full of telemetry in every sense, but nobody really complains about that.

Plenty of people complain about both of those things. They are the two most damaging trends to hit our industry in a generation, and that remains true whether we're talking about the OS, native applications, web apps, online X-as-a-Service offerings, or anything else.

The average home user might be set to automatically install recommended updates, but I doubt many businesses or power users do that. The important thing in this case is that they do have the option not to.

As for telemetry "accidentally" getting in, this is why as mentioned elsewhere our policy is now not to install any Windows updates by default, even security ones. We install selected security updates manually, if and when we've confirmed they are relevant to our needs and not getting reported for anything sneaky.

Several of our machines can't even install those updates at the moment, because Microsoft appear to have horribly broken Windows Update in the past few weeks anyway, so until that's fixed it's a moot point anyway.

But Windows 7 isn't deprecated. Microsoft have committed to supporting it until 2020, and their customers will expect them to honour that commitment.

That is four years away. In a fast-paced industry like IT, the entire landscape could be different by then.

Why would Nadella get the boot? Look at their stock price since he's taken over: the company is doing great, much better than under Ballmer.

You and I seem to be looking at very different stock charts. In the one I'm looking at[1], MSFT had pretty respectable growth through 2013-2014 when they were doing a lot of talking about Windows 10 and the new vision, but their stock price looks much less happy since around the start of 2015 as the reality became known.

In a few months, if Windows 10 is still far less established than Windows 7 and it becomes undeniable that the campaign to get everyone onto Windows 10 didn't succeed even with literally giving it away and underhand tricks like the one we're talking about, executives like Nadella and Myerson are going to be under a lot of pressure to present a more realistic vision of what happens next and to turn the stock price back to a steady pattern of growth or their positions are going to be under threat.

[1] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=MSFT#symbol=MSFT

Why should MS care about what its customers want? It's not like they're going to abandon MS and Windows any time soon

Perhaps not. I suspect they've probably got until about 14 January 2020 before things get really bad.

But by that time, anything could have happened. Apple could have started competing more aggressively for desktop/laptop/server markets. Less and less business software could be locally hosted, making a range of different devices that can access web apps more attractive. In more than three years, even a major new player entering the market or a shift in strategy from some other tech giant isn't out of the question.

Screwing your customers for profit looks good at the next quarterly earnings call, but not so much two years or five years down the line when your customers and competitors have had time to react.

Also, it's not one computer I'm worried about so much as the cost per day of downtime for everyone in my company if a Windows update were to break all our general use PCs.

That would surely result in lawsuits on such a scale that even Microsoft would be lucky to survive the results.

or maybe they could be like Apple and start pushing Win7 updates which massively slow down the OS, in effect forcing people to upgrade.

They already do seem to be crippling Windows 7 updates; there have been numerous reports of problems since earlier this year where Windows Update will sit there taking literally hours to do the most simple tasks, apparently including several controlled experiments using new machines to prove that it really is Windows Update at fault.

This doesn't bode well for anyone remaining on Windows 7, but of course it bodes even less well for anyone committed to whatever update mechanism Microsoft wants on Windows 10.

What are people going to do, stop getting security updates?

Probably.

Or switch to a different OS?

Possibly.

Face it, people and businesses are locked into Windows, and aren't going to stop using it no matter what.

There is rarely true lock-in within this industry. Usually there is only the relative cost of migrating to new systems vs. staying put.

The thing is, migrating to a new OS is already an extremely expensive, time-consuming and risky proposition for large organisations. Entire teams of IT staff spend months planning the switch, testing hardware and software on the new platform, and so on. That is going to be true even if organisations decide to upgrade to Windows 10 from whatever they're on already.

That is the inertia Microsoft really has to overcome if it wants to establish Windows 10, and it's the same inertia that meant some organisations were willing to pay millions for support beyond the official cut-off date with Windows XP because that was still better for them than risking a migration even to Windows 7, which had relatively few areas of risk in that scenario.

If they fail to do that, either by not making 10 an attractive proposition or by trying to degrade 7 until people give up, then those big corporate migration exercises do have alternatives they could consider, and sooner or later some big names will actually make the jump. And if a few of them do that and it becomes clear that they've done well out of it, that's very, very bad for Microsoft. That's why I don't think they'll let it come to that.