[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/27/12046738/microsoft-pays-10...
Rather the Washington Times article states that: "The company denies wrongdoing, and a spokeswoman said Microsoft halted its appeal to avoid the expense of further litigation."
And: "Microsoft says it offers users a choice to update, not a requirement. People have to acknowledge a dialogue box before the installation, and agree to a license agreement afterward, to receive Windows 10, the company says."
I've experienced the process on multiple PCs starting from day 1 when Microsoft started the campaign at it never _forced_ me to install. Specifically, the Close button never started the installation. There _always_ was a specific button to accept the start of the installation.
I've generally assumed that people either don't actually read what's in front of their faces (probably pretty common among the non-computerate), or don't understand what they read (ditto), or they panic and do something stupid. Of course, I have no evidence for any of these assumptions in Windows 10's case, but I've seen them in other situations.
I know people who apparently can't tell the difference between an operating system, a web browser and an email service -- or else they just don't have the vocabulary to express such distinctions. It takes some time to find out what they've actually done, and why. The idea that they know which party is at fault is generally not one that fits reality.
Note: this is not a defense of "dark patterns" or whatever. I'd assume Microsoft has a good idea of the technical level of much of its audience, and that it should therefore have been extra extra careful to communicate the Windows 10 upgrade in a far clearer manner than it did.
I entirely believe there's a lot of people that just click on everything that comes up.
Was it bright enough to reliably detect metered connections (did it even try at all?). If not then just this could have cost people money.
And consuming a couple of Gb of space could be a noticeable inconvenience on a small system (say one of the many tables and laptops with nothing more than a 64 or 32gb solid state drive).
I don't recall windows 7 having any way to explicitly mark your connection as metered.
As for Windows 8 (I believe it's the same as Windows 10), you can't mark a wired connection (ethernet) as metered if I recall correctly, even though you might be on a satellite internet connection for instance which most definitely is heavily metered.
Edit: I take it back, I was wrong. No ethernet metering. You can do it via regedit, but no way to do it from the UI.
My 4Gb per month download limit doesn't like secret 10Gb downloads, that's what
So what? I clicked that X multiple times and it didn't _install_. It may have _downloaded_, I'm not sure, but did not install.