Microsoft has admitted and apologized about ‘crossing the line’ with changing the behavior of the ‘Red X’ on the Windows 10 upgrade screen. However, they were well aware of what they were doing and the repercussions it could cause. Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela:
“We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective etc, but finding that 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 know, 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 changed that behavior. And those two weeks were pretty painful and clearly a lowlight for us.”
As Gordon Kelly points out on his blog post, it shouldn’t have taken Microsoft two weeks to ‘fix’ this ‘error’, this a company that can push out a security patch in less than 24-hours from when a threat has been identified. It could have been fixed a lot sooner, but they were hoping people would finally given-in and install the update (not that users had much choice at this point). Yet, Microsoft is only apologising about this particular upgrade tatic. How about the Get Windows 10 (GWX) Malware, making the Windows 10 upgrade a ‘recommended’ (from optional) update, or for that matter secretly downloading the Windows 10 update on to the users Windows 7 or 8 computer? How about compensation to the people who were hit with data overages because of this ‘secret download’? Nope, Microsoft shows no remorse for any of the other dirty Windows 10 upgrade tactics, just changing the behavior of the red X.
