"You are making it sound like they are forcing, or even automatically upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 8, or Windows 8 to Windows 10. They aren't."

That's not true. They're automatically upgrading computers. Read some of the thousands of below comments to hear the stories. My Windows 8.1 laptop automatically scheduled itself to upgrade, and I was fortunate enough to be paying close attention to cancel it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4a0asv/warning_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/4a5edx/psa_window...

That was a mistake. I find it beyond belief that they would intentionally upgrade people without confirmation or notification. As much as they would like people to upgrade, they know this would be PR suicide. At a minimum they would have had notifications that it was going to happen, and made it opt out. To my mind, that it was automatically checked but in the optional updates section points towards it being a weird bug in which an unforeseen interaction of attributes caused the problem. For example, it's possible that selecting that you did want to upgrade to Windows 10 through the popups they showed was supposed to put it in that weird state, where it was optional but checked by default, which would be a non-normal situation for an update. Weird exceptions like that are very prone to bugs.

Really wishing you were correct. :/

MS have been pushing Win10 onto Win7/8(.1) end users for what seems like a few months now, continually escalating how forceful they're being.

eg recent IT media about it:

  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/17/microsoft_windows_10_upgrade_gwx_vs_humanity/

As you mention, it seems like straight out PR suicide.

Personally, it would be useful to know what their end game is justifying all of this bad karma. It'd have to be fantastic. Either that, or someone inside MS is seriously out of control. :(

While that's a wild situation, and MS is not behaving well, it's not quite forcing a Windows 10 upgrade. It's forcing people to be nagged about it, and causing problems in corporate IT departments where they do not want to upgrade and it keeps subverting their control.

It's not good, but it's not forcing upgrades either (which is liable to get them sued).

Hmmm, I really get the impression it's doing a lot more than just nagging. Direct examples mentioned here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11285488

Whoa, I missed that. I was thinking of the prior case where it "accidentally" became recommended, but this casts that prior episode in new light. I can't imagine what they are thinking.

Unless... There's some fundamental core security problem in earlier Windows versions that isn't in Windows 10 and they don't want to tip off anyone to what it is, because it's so large and egregious it opens them up to a lot of liability and lawsuits. Okay, I'll take my tinfoil hat off now...