Too little too late?

Wonder if they'd have backed off if it wasn't for that lawsuit.

More likely it's seen one person has won, and now a bunch of businesses with more money might jump on the bandwagon and sue all at once... And they want to stop it before it gets to that.

I never really trusted Microsoft personally for a couple of decades now, but I tolerated them to a degree. After the shady practices they have both within Windows 10 and with respect to their extremely aggressive anti-consumer forced upgrades and harassment (that systray nag app) and a number of other factors, they've pretty much permanently eroded what little trust that I had for the company. They've done bad things to their customers in the past, and only once getting slammed by a court of law or massive public backlash and negative publicity have they ever bothered to try to correct such situations. Rarely do they apologize for their anti-consumer practices, but if and when they do - they're not genuinely sorry that they did it, they're sorry that they got caught and/or punished for it.

There is a positive side to all of this though, which is that every time Microsoft or some other company engages in anti-consumer practices of this or similar nature they do alienate some percentage of their user base, many of whom are likely to seek alternative solutions that take Microsoft out of the equation. Sure, many people do not have that option or at least do not think they have that option, but some people do have that option and occurrences like this are often just what it takes to get some fraction of users to seek other alternatives such as Linux or other solutions. That in turn boosts the popularity of other options and makes them that much more viable. It may or may not harm Microsoft to a large degree in terms of numbers in the short term, but it does erode people's trust in them and their platforms and solutions and increasing the visibility and usage of alternatives and that's not a bad thing.

Most of the Windows user base is cornered by vendor lockin, sheep herd mentality, business or career requirements or other factors either beyond their control, perceived to be beyond their control, or not realizing there are other options out there that may be viable, so they end up with a lot of momentum as a result. But even Microsoft is not infalliable. They've released some OS products that did not ever get widespread adoption in the past, such as ME and Vista, and had they not done something about it to appeal to the customer response then they'd have taken a much more massive hit in the marketplace.

I'm one of the people that might be in the minority, who wont be caving in and upgrading to Windows 10 though, not by choice and not by force. Not now, not next year, not in 2020. Other options exist for me and my needs which I'll be taking as I wave goodbye to the Microsoft platform legacy with a smile on my face on my way out the door. :)

But would that stop it... ? Even if they return to less aggressive business strategies, for many private users and companies the damage has already been done during the past few months, so why shouldn't they sue MS anyway, now that someone has already successfully done so?

Because if they are actively making amends then that might be used as a defense for the lawsuit to get thrown out. Logically suing shouldn't be the first step you take, but one of the last, however with as much time that has gone by...

If Windows 10 was force-updated on my computer, I'd sue $1,000 for every day I couldn't roll back and return my computer to it's previous state. After 3 months that's $90k, and going up every day... If they delay the court meeting I just add on the thousands of dollars needed, plus the court costs.

As for a buisness, they might multiply that against every computer that stopped working as each computer could represent a tech/personnel that they couldn't do anything with for a day. 100 employees could add up to millions of dollars in potentially lost revenue.


I really wish someone would make a video of NASA going up into space, the engines start, and then the entire system forces a windows 10 update and the entire thing crashes and everyone dies...

You're right about the enterprise edition, at least if you run your own update server you've got some more control.
WIth Windows 8 they introduced automatic updating where, when it was ready to install updates it'd notify you to reboot both on desktop and on the lock screen, if you ignored it for something along the lines of 48 hours it would reboot for you.

WIndows 10 tries to be clever about this, when updates are ready to install it will notify you that updates are ready and it's scheduled a reboot, which you can alter a bit. It tries to schedule it a time when you don't use the computer, at which point it'll wake up your computer if you leave it in sleep mode, install updates, reboot and eventually go back to sleep.

Problem is, just as with WIndows 8, people might easily ignore the messages in 10. Apart from the "time to upgrade to windows 10" reboots we did have one guy on 10 whose machine was nice enough to pop up a message in the middle of the screen saying "You've got updates scheduled at 11:00, the system will reboot in 15 minutes"
Trying to kill windows update processes were to no avail. Checking for scheduled tasks was fruitless. As far as I can tell the official "solution" is to manually schedule an update at another time, but being this close to the schedule the options had been greyed out.

So yeah, you're right about Pro/Enterprise being less trouble, but again if you're running pro/enterprise you're not as likely to be blindsided when updates do turn up.

edit: Oh and as to Windows 10 being the last number Windows. Am I the only one finding it funny that Microsoft is intending to call WIndows "10" for a long time, and now Apple announces they're tired of calling their OS "10" (roman numeral X) after 15 years? Maybe Apple is merely renaming to get away from sharing a number with MS

About fucking time after they BORKED the update from windows 7 causing me to LOSE YEARS OF PROGRESS in my games, after they forced me to use a THIRD PARTY program to find out the activation code and then a fresh install, after they forced me to get the iso and then the NEXT ISO for the updates causing me to lose more games saves that were on steam CLOUD yeah the saves were on steam cloud so there is NO way i can get them back I'm just about SICK of microsoft and then bethsoft started the same type of shit with fallout 4 causing my save games to Corrupt and not load considering I was level 57 and then the game SHIT itself! but hey I have a whole terrabyte library to play again IF i ever finish any of it before I'm 90 and or dead!

Somehow I'm fairly sure they don't use Windows. XD

Or at least not the kind of Windows version home users and smaller companies would use. They probably have some sort of custom OS, either built from scratch or based on Linux... ?

Last i heard, it was quite the opposite. System critical machines may not run windows, but it was said they reboot the computers on the space stations daily for stability purposes.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/155392-international-space-station-switches-from-windows-to-linux-for-improved-reliability

seems they switched over in 2013, before that they were running XP. I know i had another article to reference but i have issues finding it.

Has anyone been able to get updates on fresh installs of windows 7 anymore? me and a good chunk of people around the net and some friends that have oem copies of 7 just hang on finding updates ever since 10 came out.. very odd

has this been fixed or same problem?

It's a problem that happens since early 2015 (april). Just before the launch of Win10....You need to jump through hoops to make the updates work again decently. Took me a day to finally make them work, but on a fresh system you will have to repeat.....Seems that MS had a backup solution plan, so they can push Win10 further....Lovely, what can i say...

You can find the solutions, but thing is: they will work for some, not so much for others. But, you will manage if you have an infinite patience and good google-fu.

Good for you!

I miss the days of win98. The internet today is garbage compared to what it was back then.

Well said.

They're not making amends, only creating the appearance that they are. What they've done is criminal, and on a scale that is massive.

No, only means that you cannot use the account sync features, for the apps, including the store, you can use in-app logging, with the exception of Edge, the browser use the OS sync features instead of in-app logging (a big step back when compared with other browsers).

Use this and you don't have to repeat it ...

Yes, that's what I meant - that lawsuit opened a window for more to follow, and this move looks like MS trying to close it while it's still ajar.