Microsoft paid $ 10,000 for the problematic upgrade of the user's PC to Windows 10
Microsoft has been pursuing an aggressive policy of updating Windows users' computers to the latest version of the operating system, Windows 10, for several months already. The company has repeatedly been accused of being too active in persuading users to upgrade. In some cases, these attempts were more like coercion than normal notification.
The fact is that not all users want to switch from previous versions of the OS to a new product, but sometimes there is simply no choice. The situation is aggravated by the fact that sometimes there are technical problems when updating, which an inexperienced user cannot solve on his own. It happenedwith Teri Goldstein, owner of a travel agency in California, USA. A few days after the release of Windows 10, her computer attempted to upgrade to the latest version of the operating system. Something went wrong, and the PC went down (or rather, the software stopped working). As a result, all the data that was stored on the desktop PC was inaccessible, and Goldstein began to lose money because of the idleness of her business.
“I never heard of Windows 10. No one ever asked me if I wanted to upgrade,” she comments on the situation. After contacting Microsoft's support team did not help (they simply could not solve the problem of a non-working PC that turned into a "brick"), Teri sued the corporation. In her lawsuit, she requested damages and payment for the purchase of a new computer.
The case was considered for several months, and in May of this year, Teri Goldstein won the trial. Microsoft refused to take part in further consideration of the case in order to reduce legal costs. Instead, the company chose to pay $ 10,000 to the plaintiff. However, Microsoft denies having deliberately damaged a woman’s PC. A company spokesman said that users who had problems with the upgrade have the opportunity to receive free support from the company. In addition, if within 31 days the user changes his mind to work with the new OS, he can return to the previous version of the operating system.
"We continue to carefully study user feedback and improve the update process in accordance with these reviews," Microsoft said in an official statement.
Whatever it was, but the corporation was repeatedly accused of almost forcibly updating users' computers to the new OS version. There are cases when the update went immediately after the close of the corresponding window . Users complained that the company put the update on the Windows Task Scheduler list , plus Windows 7 users with the deactivated package KB3035583 activated it quietly again . Last month, a number of users reported a new“Offer that cannot be refused”: Windows 10 update cannot be canceled because there is no Cancel button on the update window. The only options for the user are to change the upgrade time or start it immediately. Pressing the X button in the upper right corner does not change anything simply because there is no such button.
How much is left to endure?
The problem should soon be solved by itself. Microsoft reports that after July 29th, Get Windows 10 will be removed from users' PCs around the world. Accordingly, the notification will disappear. It may take some time for the application to be removed from the computers of all Windows users: from July 30, Microsoft will gradually remove its application from the PC to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.
Why all this company?
Analysts say the corporation is in a hurry to upgrade to create a centralized ecosystem of its operating system. The fact is that decentralization, the use of several versions of Windows OS complicates the life of a company. The support of outdated versions of the operating system is spent engineers and precious time. If the OS is one, then all the efforts of employees will be directed to support Windows 10.
Centralization will allow the company to offer software developers a huge audience of users. Now, many developers prefer to work with software under Google or Apple, since there are a lot of users of such applications. A large audience will also help the company get more money from advertisers, plus increase the user base for its search service Bing and the Windows store application catalog.
The corporation hopes that by the middle of 2018, Windows 10 will be used on 1 billion devices. The latest data shows that these calculations are more or less real: about 300 million devices are currently running this operating system.