But large numbers of people not liking it does make it a poor business strategy - not immediately, but it's the sort of thing people will remember.

Large numbers of people in the tech community. Most people aren't us.

My dad isn't in the 'tech community' but he'll certainly remember the windows 10 upgrade as it broke his computer.

Did he consider going for a Mac then?

I would think that non-techies would be even more confused and annoyed by their computer suddenly drastically changing out from underneath them without their permission.

And then they'd get over it. Oddly enough, my parents upgraded this past week:

Mom: Honey, what's this thing stopping me from [shopping]?

Dad: Don't click the button!

Mom: [long lecture about how she's trying to do stuff for her grandkids].

Dad: Fine, just hit the damn button.

Me: DON'T HIT THE BUTTON! I'll walk you through it.

I proceeded to explain it to them. 5 days later they don't even remember/care. I guarantee you my grandmother doesn't give a shit either, nor do most of my siblings. So far, I'm at a 6:2 ratio of not caring (one of my brothers is a developer). My parents aren't exactly ignorant in regards to tech, but it simply doesn't effect them to the extent it bothers you/us.

Most of us get repeated phone calls asking where the buttons went. Learning new things gets harder with age.

Apple's proven that the general population get over this pretty quickly, though. Look at their iOS 7 update.

One of my family, who isn't particularly technical, bought a pre-iOS7 iPad after trying out someone else's and liking it.

Soon it was running iOS 7 after prompting to update to the new OS.

Soon after that it went back to the shop for a full refund, because the person who had liked it before found the new OS and the things that broke in the process of updating that annoying.

Forced Windows 10 upgrade became a meme on 9gag ("Went to the toilets and saw this", etc). I learnt about the story over there before it was on HN. I'm not saying 9gag is representative, but I counter the "no-one noticed the forced upgrades". Even my parents did. Everyone noticed.

Most people have not heard of 9gag.

Most adults probably don't really know what a meme is yet either (they've probably seen a few, just don't really get it yet).

His point was that even on 9GAG, which does not have a tech-focused community, this is a central talking point, so it's not just the tech-crowd which is pissed off about this.

Sure, 9GAGgers are still at least capable of operating a computer or smartphone, but if you move even further down in tech-capabilities, it also becomes quite unlikely that those people will buy something from Microsoft to begin with.

9GAG does have a tech savvy community, that's my point.

Here's the demographics of 9gag:

http://9gag.com/gag/3325624/9gag-demographics

They aren't consumers. Beyond that, Microsoft isn't a company that targets individuals. They make their money from companies. They don't need to care about 22 year olds that have $100k of student debt and will pirate most software anyway.

The hacker news/imgur/9gag/reddit demographic is relatively young. Some of us definitely suffer a confirmation bias from the misrepresentation of ages, especially given the significant population of boomers.

Actually, to many adults who have heard of the word "meme" it may mean "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture", the intellectual equivalent of a biological gene -- not the newfangled meaning that the kids have hijacked the word for, "one of those silly pictures with text on". (Funny, didn't we already have terms for that? Poster, postcard...?)

It was originally coined by Richard Dawkins (way back, before he went senile); perhaps in _The selfish gene_. HTH!

There's also negative press as well that's immortalized on the internet, such as the anti-poaching NPO in Africa where the update took all their bandwidth and crashed their machines - effectively blacking out their surveillance on the poachers for a time.

But a lot of people who make purchasing decisions for their business are.

And a lot of people who advise non-technical friends and family on technical matters are, too.

Also, Windows 10 updates have broken so many things for so many people that it seems quite a few of my less technically inclined friends and family are aware of the potential problems anyway.

I went to a store once, and their cash registers were down because a Windows update was forced on them. One was working, 2 weren't. A store manager was on the phone with some tech support guy and was not happy.

I went to a store once and that didn't happen. I work in a building of 1000 people. MAYBE 30-50 of them cared, and half those people still won't act on it. People are trying their hardest to find allies. When it comes down to it, consumers are perfectly OK with the status quo. The status quo is Microsoft doing whatever they want. "Everyone" hates Monsanto, yet they still are one of the largest companies in the world. "Everyone" hates Goldman Sachs, yet every retirement portfolio is filled with their products.

They shouldn't have been using the consumer version. I can sympathize, but that business both violated their license and ignored nine months of news and popups about the windows 10 update.

It seems we're talking about cash registers here. If their software happened to be running on Windows but the business bought them as self-contained devices, I'm not sure why the business staff would necessarily even have realised Windows was running on them, never mind been responsible for any software licence agreements or the like. The supplier of those cash registers might have made mistakes here, but the business staff are well justified in being upset at critical devices stopping working because of something like this.

By that standard, Ballmer doubling down on the shitty enterprise software that still makes gobs of money was a good strategy.

And the lobbyists have made the spurious practices, ala 'GatorWallet', OK for the "good guys" so it's no longer illegal, either.

A little late, but for the downvoters' edification, see if you can spot the conflict of interest when a fortmer Gator/Claria exec joins the DHS Data Privacy & Integrity Advisory Comittee. Feel free to check the other members' agendas:

http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?...

Or, here's the legwork done for you from 2011: http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2011/11/30/bfp-report-meet-t...