Yes, you heard it right, Microsoft finally admitted that it forced users to upgrade to Windows 10.
Windows 10 launched globally on 29 July 2015, marking the end of decades of heavy OS updates. Available as a free upgrade for a year after launch, Windows 10 came with a price from 30 July 2016.
Although the company said there, the new operating system needed the same requirements as Windows 8/8.1. Microsoft’s official claimed that you’ll only need a 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM for the 32-bit version and 2GB of memory for the 64-bit version.
Based on our experiences, you’ll need at least twice as much memory and minimum a dual-core processor. Windows 10 interface had a noticeably different and elements from 8 and several new features, some of which have clearly been inspired by Windows Phone as well as desktop rival Mac OS X.
This newly build interface was not much adaptive to old users on Windows 7 and 8. Windows 10 came with useful features and had a free upgrade but had cons like Broken Search; Some features dependent on hardware drivers; Some enterprise features were missing. There were important bugs in OS which were later resolved.
Most of us using Windows 10 now and who were on the older version of Windows must be remembering the endless pop-up upgrade option showing Windows 10 “Upgrade now” and “Start download, update later” and then on just clicking on X button to close out the prompt and delay the upgrade. This method might have successfully worked for you but for a while and later on popping up again after a few hours might have started.
Lately, users might have noticed that the upgrade invitation is becoming more insistent after the first refusal.Now, when users close the Windows 10 upgrade window, a notification appears informing users that the upgrade is scheduled for a particular date, without offering any option to cancel the update. In other words, you have no choice now: If you click X button, the system takes that action as permission to upgrade.
All these tricks were used by Microsoft themselves to force users to upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft chief marketing officer Chris Capossela admitted this during the “Windows Weekly” video podcast.
Capossela said “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 dialogue 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.”
Capossela’s admission is long due and perhaps a little too late.
Since the second half of 2015, Microsoft started pulling some sneaky tricks to get users running an older version of Windows to upgrade to Windows 10. From secretly downloading Windows 10 on Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs with automatic updates turned on to making the new OS a mandatory upgrade. Microsoft also paid $10,000 as compensation for forcefully installing the Windows 10 update on a user’s PC without her permission.
We really do not know whether this acknowledgment finally means that Microsoft will stop forcing users onto its newest operating system or not will have to be seen. As of now, it looks like the company will let the adoption of Windows 10 take place naturally and will not resort to tricking users to accept it.
