Microsoft CMO Admits To Going Too Far With Forcing People To Update To Windows 10
Microsoft just did something that I thought they would never do. They admitted that they might have gone too far in terms of forcing people to update to Windows 10:
Chris Capossela, Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, said in the latest edition of the Windows Weekly that this was the moment when the company indeed went too far, pointing out that the two weeks between the moment when users started complaining about the unexpected behavior and the one when a patch was released were “very painful.” “We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective, but finding the right balance where you’re not stepping over the line of being too aggressive is something we tried and for a lot of the year I think we got it right, but there was one particular moment in particular where, you know, the red X in the dialog box which typically means you cancel didn’t mean cancel,” he said. “And within a couple of hours of that hitting the world, with the listening systems we have we knew that we had gone too far and then, of course, it takes some time to roll out the update that changes that behavior. And those two weeks were pretty painful and clearly a lowlight for us. We learned a lot from it obviously.”
I’m guessing that too many people were running to the Apple Store to buy Macs.
But here’s the core problem. Capossela said this:
“We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective…”
To be successful a company should NEVER let ‘what they want’ get in the way of ‘what the customer wants’. It is a pretty simple concept. But when a company gets way too powerful in their position this sort of crap happens. This is a textbook case of that. Hopefully they do learn from this and make the required improvements.
Now, how about applying this logic to force feeding updates to your users? Such as the one from a few days ago that took people off the Internet?
December 31, 2016 at 5:54 pm
[…] 10 Continues To Be A Source Of Pain: While Microsoft finally admitted to the fact that they were far too aggressive in trying to get people to update to …, that admission came after one of their forced updates took computers off the Internet, and […]