Microsoft admits it pushed Windows 10 update too aggressively

Microsoft admits it pushed Windows 10 update too aggressively
Microsoft's unofficial podcast Windows Weekly had a surprise guest in Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela. In the podcast he reviewed the year for the Redmond giant.

Even though the year was very successful to the company – and in some fronts not, *ahem* smartphones *ahem* – there definitely were things that could've been done better. One of the things was how Windows 10 was marketed and pushed to customers. Mr. Capossela admitted that Windows 10 update procedure went too far in terms of pushing the update, Softpedia reports.



According to Capossela the exact moment when Microsoft crossed the line was when the red X in the dialog box no longer cancelled the update but instead ran it in the background. He said it was clear fairly soon that they went too far but backpedaling and releasing another update took some time.

Some people said that the update was pushed on to their systems even when they didn't want this. This was painful to hear, said Capossela.

Even though there was a lot of criticism towards the pushy updates, Microsoft knew all along that being aggressive and pushing the envelope is going to be needed in order to get update numbers they were aiming for. Windows 10 was adopted far faster than its recent predecessors.



Written by: Matti Robinson @ 23 Dec 2016 11:40
Tags
Microsoft Windows Update Software Update Windows 10
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  • 15 comments
  • KillerBug

    Quote: According to Capossela the exact moment when Microsoft crossed the line was when the red X in the dialog box no longer cancelled the update but instead ran it in the background Quote: Some people said that the update was pushed on to their systems even when they didn't want this. This was painful to hear, said Capossela. Quote: Even though there was a lot of criticism towards the pushy updates, Microsoft knew all along that being aggressive and pushing the envelope is going to be needed in order to get update numbers they were aiming for. LoL...it was painful to hear that when people tried to close your update you had coded it to keep going??? And that's only "pushy"? That's the kind of thing you expect from malware. But hey, at least they managed to infect...er um..."update" lots of systems!

    23.12.2016 11:47 #1

  • Mysttic

    Quote: LoL...it was painful to hear that when people tried to close your update you had coded it to keep going??? And that's only "pushy"? That's the kind of thing you expect from malware. But hey, at least they managed to infect...er um..."update" lots of systems! Man was I ever pissed they did this on one of my old Win 8 HP laptops. Then when to roll back, we lost the back up of the legit Win 8 OS, and would MS replace it, nope. HP wouldn't laptop long passed warranty date. AND HP locked this laptop model from installing your own OS or changing out the HDD. Thanks MS. (That said, I also got what I paid for, onus on me and I can live with that).

    23.12.2016 11:55 #2

  • dp70

    Finally someone speaks the truth. He forgot about the poorly coded forced updates to the installed W10 o/s - I have had 2 updates brick my laptop- requiring a reinstall of the alleged o/s.

    The latest managed to kill the start menu and right click troubleshooter and DISM conflicted each results. The repair tool did not. I miss Win 7.

    24.12.2016 06:40 #3

  • scorpNZ

    Switching to enterprise version should allow disabling of feature updates except for security types,it's the reason i installed it as i had checked the others for ability to stop forced updates & it appeared they couldn't

    As for bricking an OS that should never be an issue as the data obviously isn't important & you can afford to lose it,well if you don't have backup images or data redundency whats going to happen if a drive fails

    http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/
    http://www.realmodscene.com/

    24.12.2016 14:48 #4

  • KillerBug

    Originally posted by scorpNZ: Switching to enterprise version should allow disabling of feature updates except for security types,it's the reason i installed it as i had checked the others for ability to stop forced updates & it appeared they couldn't

    As for bricking an OS that should never be an issue as the data obviously isn't important & you can afford to lose it,well if you don't have backup images or data redundency whats going to happen if a drive fails
    Even if you have a current backup (and let's be honest here, most people don't have any backups, let alone complete current ones...even enterprise users with RAID5 or better and offsite backup tend to be behind by anywhere from hours to weeks) you are still talking about a machine that may very well be the backbone of your income being unusable for days or longer.

    Saying that people should switch to a version that isn't even sold to consumers is hardly a valid solution either...especially when the the machine almost always includes a copy of a lower version that should work perfectly well for 99.9% of users in the price. Windows 10 is the first version of Windows that forces updates on users, and it is also the first version of Windows that gives users legitimate reason to disable updates on older versions of Windows.

    At one point there were about 30 updates trying to force/trick Windows 10 onto Windows 7/8 machines, some of them labeled as security updates, some as updates for Internet Explorer, there were two designed to make fonts fuzzy on Windows 7, one that made certain games fail to launch, and one that was required to make Windows Update keep working at all but which also added the Windows 10 update prep! For a while I felt like as if I was downloading all my security updates from a Chinese warez server. I hardly consider paying Microsoft for an enterprise version of an OS I don't even want to be a good solution to all of this. It's nice to see they are admitting some fault; should make the class action go smoother.

    http://forums.pixeltailgames.com/t/wind...-telemetry/9977

    25.12.2016 08:38 #5

  • scorpNZ

    lol..your last paragraph about ms being sneaky did mean every update required using the info column on the right to find out what it actually was & would do when installed especially on win 7.Needless to say it was a right royal pain in the rear,checking every blasted update & whether it was really required & a number of them weren't,as updates were rolled out.

    http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/
    http://www.realmodscene.com/

    25.12.2016 13:23 #6

  • hearme0

    Ya Think????


    Eh...water under the bridge.

    27.12.2016 11:18 #7

  • KillerBug

    Originally posted by scorpNZ: lol..your last paragraph about ms being sneaky did mean every update required using the info column on the right to find out what it actually was & would do when installed especially on win 7.Needless to say it was a right royal pain in the rear,checking every blasted update & whether it was really required & a number of them weren't,as updates were rolled out. Actually, it meant going to third party websites...several of the updates were falsely labeled as critical security updates and they didn't mention windows 10 at all. One of the ones that broke fonts was labeled as a platform update.

    28.12.2016 23:05 #8

  • dp70

    A short comment about back-ups.

    I have 7 computers on my home network. I have always backed up my data to USB hard drives. The updates that were problematic in one instance MS had a bad track record with fast track- but sent it out anyway.

    From Windows 2 until 7 - I have never had to resort to using a back-up---Win 10 changed that.

    Some b/u will restore by cloning, some require a functioning o/s.

    It is poorly coded work, lacking troubleshooting documentation.
    I just wonder when people are going to realize the bandwidth this o/s consumes. I only wish the $ wasted on "windows phone" was spent on code and masturbating testing

    1.1.2017 06:44 #9

  • TekPete

    I was lucky; I accepted the offer of a free "upgrade" but it failed to install. Perhaps Comodo Internet Security prevented the installation of harmful software - I don't know.

    When Windows 7 was released I was reluctant to upgrade but when I bought a laptop years ago, it came already installed and in spite of being told otherwise: most of my software including Pinnacle Studio 9.3 works quite well with Windows 7; from what I understand this is not the case with Windows 8 & 10.

    I can't afford to pay hundreds of pounds for the newest versions of software that I already have.

    - TekPete -

    3.1.2017 08:14 #10

  • hearme0

    Originally posted by TekPete: I was lucky; I accepted the offer of a free "upgrade" but it failed to install. Perhaps Comodo Internet Security prevented the installation of harmful software - I don't know.

    When Windows 7 was released I was reluctant to upgrade but when I bought a laptop years ago, it came already installed and in spite of being told otherwise: most of my software including Pinnacle Studio 9.3 works quite well with Windows 7; from what I understand this is not the case with Windows 8 & 10.

    I can't afford to pay hundreds of pounds for the newest versions of software that I already have.


    Pinnacle Studio.............WOW............that takes me wayyyyyyyy back.

    Can't believe you're still using that :)

    4.1.2017 10:19 #11

  • KillerBug

    Originally posted by hearme0: Originally posted by TekPete: I was lucky; I accepted the offer of a free "upgrade" but it failed to install. Perhaps Comodo Internet Security prevented the installation of harmful software - I don't know.

    When Windows 7 was released I was reluctant to upgrade but when I bought a laptop years ago, it came already installed and in spite of being told otherwise: most of my software including Pinnacle Studio 9.3 works quite well with Windows 7; from what I understand this is not the case with Windows 8 & 10.

    I can't afford to pay hundreds of pounds for the newest versions of software that I already have.


    Pinnacle Studio.............WOW............that takes me wayyyyyyyy back.

    Can't believe you're still using that :)
    I know a guy that uses it to "master" blu-rays. He learned it when DVD burning was still pretty new and apparently it hasn't changed much so he still uses it. He has thousands of home movies that will probably never be watched...but it's a hobby I guess. He upgraded for Blu-Ray the first chance he got...but really he might as well have kept using the old version since he doesn't ever watch them. And yeah...it is insanely expensive to upgrade it, cheaper than anything from Adobe but still pretty darn high for something that you wouldn't even do a YouTube video with.

    6.1.2017 20:05 #12

  • TekPete

    Quote: Pinnacle Studio.............WOW............that takes me wayyyyyyyy back.

    Can't believe you're still using that :)

    I'm open to suggestions of an alternative.

    Yes version 9.3 is about 12 years old and back in those days there was a Help link where you could send questions and ask for solutions; ie: why do the menu links keep moving from the place I set? And you'd get an answer of sorts where some numpty had simply cut and pasted from the instructions on how to do this. But I already knew how to do it, I wanted a solution to make the links stay where I placed them.

    Nowadays it's different; if you have problem they ignore you and if you post it on their FaceBook page they simply delete it straight away.

    I won't be upgrading any time soon.

    I videoed a friends wedding and used Pinnacle Studio to edit and burn a DVD - they were very impressed with it.

    The main big problem with Pinnacle Studio is backing up the project -there is an option to do this in one of the pull-down menus but it doesn't do much; all you get is a useless file. It all has to be done manually; the project file can be saved and then all the video files, jpgs, wavs etc have to be copied but when all that is done you still get messages "Cannot find ...avi file, cannot find ...jpg etc". But I know most of the issues, f*ckups, quirks so I can work round them. I'm not convinced that the latest version will be much better.

    In the past I wasted hours trying to edit a video with Studio 8 only to have to abandon it (I won't bore you with the details).

    - TekPete -

    7.1.2017 07:55 #13

  • KillerBug

    Originally posted by TekPete: Quote: Pinnacle Studio.............WOW............that takes me wayyyyyyyy back.

    Can't believe you're still using that :)

    I'm open to suggestions of an alternative.

    Yes version 9.3 is about 12 years old and back in those days there was a Help link where you could send questions and ask for solutions; ie: why do the menu links keep moving from the place I set? And you'd get an answer of sorts where some numpty had simply cut and pasted from the instructions on how to do this. But I already knew how to do it, I wanted a solution to make the links stay where I placed them.

    Nowadays it's different; if you have problem they ignore you and if you post it on their FaceBook page they simply delete it straight away.

    I won't be upgrading any time soon.

    I videoed a friends wedding and used Pinnacle Studio to edit and burn a DVD - they were very impressed with it.

    The main big problem with Pinnacle Studio is backing up the project -there is an option to do this in one of the pull-down menus but it doesn't do much; all you get is a useless file. It all has to be done manually; the project file can be saved and then all the video files, jpgs, wavs etc have to be copied but when all that is done you still get messages "Cannot find ...avi file, cannot find ...jpg etc". But I know most of the issues, f*ckups, quirks so I can work round them. I'm not convinced that the latest version will be much better.

    In the past I wasted hours trying to edit a video with Studio 8 only to have to abandon it (I won't bore you with the details).
    Check out Blender. There is also a free version of Lightworks now.

    7.1.2017 12:09 #14

  • phobet

    Now if only I can get the Microsoft Edge icon on the task bar from announcing that it is a better browser when I use Chrome. It's weird, but a cartoon "bubble" shows up above the icon, almost as if it is raising its little digital hands, jumping up and down, and yelling "Pick me! Pick me!".

    Connection reset by phear...

    4.2.2017 08:56 #15

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