For years people sang about the many vulnerability of Windows at every turn. IOS spat out new features at a steady pace.
On the other hand, MS had to support the ever growing list of Windows versions and their incompatibilities - slowing down their rate of development.
The tech community was singing the praise of Lean and MVP.
Everyone loved to shit on IE for holding back the web. While praising Chrome for being chrome - having only one version to support.
And somewhere along the line, Google got the bright idea to remove the ability to disable Chrome's automatic update.
Add all these factors and more that I didn't mention and you'll see how MS came to the forced update decision.
Lest I forget, Nadella saw how he could fire Microsoft testers, reduce expenses and raise stock price with a forced update stroke. Irresistible.
Oh, yes of course they got bullied! They got bullied into having a totally overengineered OS that is probably a nightmare to maintain, even without the many special switches that keeps faulty big player software from crashing. They got totally bullied into a naive design philosophy for their APIs and into churning out new framework after framework. And of course they got bullied into this by Apple and the media!!1 Google and Apple and all the rest bullied them with their despicable efficiency in rolling out features! /s
Sorry, but painting Microsoft as the poor victim here is a bit rich.
Windows is probably a nightmare to maintain and test for. I can really understand why the engineers wanted telemetry to track which API calls actually are still in use. They probably dream of having just to deal with a handful of subversions of Windows 10 and not with a zoo of rotting 7s, 8s, and XPs. Hence the forced updates.
Many other platforms are lighter and more agile. This entire container thing, e.g., would have been impossible to get started in the byzantine environment of Windows. Heck, I have a hard time imagining the elastic cloud getting started on an operating system that doesn't even allow your processes to continue after logout, and has a footprint in the 10s of gigabytes. Just for the basic needs.
And all of this is not caused by the inconsiderate craziness of evil outsiders, but by how Microsoft operated and designed in the 90s and early 2000s.
If Microsoft really wants to do "the right thing" they need to burn it down and start over. Something like ChromeOS with a Linux kernel and containerized emulation for win32/64 apps.
Remember how they rebooted Windows Mobile to Windows Phone? Didn't work as well. In fact, they rebooted Windows Phone OS three times (7, 7.5), (8, 8.1) and 10,[1]. Every single reboot cost them users.
[1](Microsoft's attempting another zombie resurrection with Core OS/Andromedia. Let's see if they release it and how it fares in the marketplace.)
I wouldn't even call ChromeOS a brand new thing. They turned an existing product - Chrome, into an OS.
See how Google's dragging their feet with Fuchsia? If their internal politicking (from the android team) is strong enough, Fuchsia will never see the light of day.
Point is, unless Windows' market share evaporates, it'll be insane for them to do the "right thing."
If you don't see how an OS upgrade is different from an app upgrade within an OS, I honestly have no better way to explain.
(As for IE, don't tell a veteran what the Browser Wars were: IIRC, the rest of the browsers managed to move on without autoupgrades at first, so don't bring up that particular straw man: the issue wasn't autoupdate, it was "IE8 is the pinnacle of browsing, we're not going to update it for years, dev team dissolved.")
this is different than the side-by-side (WinSxS) support that allows parallel versions of the same dll to live on the system. that used to grow at huge rates when you had lots of system updates + lots of apps.