Re:Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windo...
by makecheck on Monday March 14, 2016 @08:39PM
(#11286684)
A lawsuit would be very reasonable. The hard part would be deciding on suitable damages, because the reality is that we’re not just talking about the cost of restoring a computer; these days, a trashed machine is more like somebody breaking into your room and destroying all of your personal stuff.
The really sad thing is that it should have taken about 2 or 3 people at Microsoft, tops, to anticipate the first 10 things that could not only go wrong with their upgrade plan, but very, very wrong. Were those reasonable people shouted out of the room?
I'd like to think that under Satya Nadella's reign they would have stopped, but they are still doing dodgy shit like forced upgrades to Windows 10.
To say that this is an utter PR nightmare is a complete understatement. If, as some comments indicate, they have bricked hardware then I think a class action lawsuit wouldn't be out of the question!
Whoever made the decision to auto upgrade literally hundreds of millions of computers should be fired. I believe that before the auto upgrade Microsoft said there were 110 million installs of Windows 10, but that was still only roughly 10% of total computers. There were still something like 40% of computers running Windows 7. Even if only 1% of computers that get upgraded automatically get bricked due to incompatible drivers, or whatever then that's still well over a million computers Microsoft have borked due to this stupidity.
Look, I can accept automatic upgrades for an existing operating system on consumer grade workstations. But I cannot understand or accept that automatically upgrading to a new major release is a responsible business decision. Microsoft are getting this in the neck, and rightly so. This alone is a good reason for me to recommend to my friends and family that they only buy a Mac, and if they can't that I work out if it's worthwhile installing Ubuntu or Fedora and spun up a VirtualBox VM to run their legally purchased copy of Windows.