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Comment by Esau | Hacker News Reader

What the hell is wrong with Microsoft? It's like they have lost their mind with Windows 10.

Microsoft are determined to reduce fragmentation of the Windows install base and to get Windows 10 widely adopted, and will do whatever it takes to get there.

Their customers have few alternatives, and there's no future Windows versions, so Microsoft don't have to play fair.

There IS a simple solution, and it's not like they can stop providing updates for the old version anyway: just wait a few years !

I think there is a large and closing window of opportunity for new open-source advocacy in light of Windows 10. A very large number of people have been exposed to this: Windows 10 upgrades illustrate all the risks of leaving your infrastructure dependent on a single corporation. Messages could be broadcast pointing out how open-source systems might avoid or reduce these concerns.

The sheer aggression and fervor suggests ulterior motivations.

More so if you view them as a company that is normally less hostile (these days). Though I suspect these decisions are being made by a separate silo from the developer-friendly "new Microsoft" groups.

Why do they need an ulterior motive? They want a single, non-fragmented userbase running the latest software, so there's a simple platform for third-party developers and for Microsoft themselves. That's more than reason enough.

They can wish all they want for a unicorn; that doesn't mean they will get it. There will always be different versions of Windows in use (the same is true for browsers).

Anybody that thinks that fragmentation will ever go away needs to spend some time in the real world, which doesn't conform to a nice and simple abstraction.

That was the case, but it won't be now. Microsoft are not making a Windows 11. Slowly, but surely, Windows 10 will win, and it is an evergreen operating system.

Businesses get a special deal, they get to use the “current build for business”. But the future of Windows is like the versioning of Firefox and Chrome, not Internet Explorer.

Well at least they now give a "Do not notify me again" option, which they previously didn't even include in popups according to earlier reports.

Which probably turns the notifications off and schedules the update in the background anyway.

Surely they're aware of how much they're pissing people off with stuff like this, it blows my mind that they're still doing it

And we know they read Hacker News...

They don't respect their customers, they're thinking only of the money that can be made by having hundreds of of millions of people on Windows 10.

This is not unprecedented with big companies. Remember when Google set to convert every YouTube user to G+?

My theory is there's some internal incentive system set up, and the users suffer the ugly consequence of it. Am sure some people bonuses over there depend on quarterly user conversion rates.

It's not exactly unprecedented from them.

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