Windows 10 has been on the market for almost seventeen months, and its share hovers at 24 percent. Some think those are good numbers for a young operating system, while others believe the exact opposite. However, the most serious problems of Windows 10 were not technical, but internal politics. Microsoft's overall strategy angered many users out there, and the one who admitted the mistake was none other than the company's CMO, Chris Capossela, whom we remember well as a defender of aggressive adoption techniques.
Comfort and ease of use versus control and choice. In an ideal world, the user should not be forced to tip the scale one way or the other, but instead have access to all four factors at the same time. Yet the vision of some companies goes in the opposite direction. Microsoft's vision for Windows 10 was misguided. We can debate the technical aspects of the operating system endlessly, both positive and negative, but the real saboteur of Windows 10 turned out to be Redmond itself. Basically, the idea was that “everyone using Windows 7 today should be using Windows 10”, and it blew up in their faces.
The peak of such madness came when the offer pop-up in Windows 7 marked the upgrade operation as “approved by the user” when clicking on the window’s X, an action associated with “I want to close this.” The user is relentless in judging, Microsoft felt the heat, and the one who spoke about it was one of its architects, CMO Chris Capossela.
The Interview
As he did last year, Capossela gave an interview to Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Mary Jo Foley in a new edition of Windows Weekly, and it was Thurrott who raised the issue by highlighting the aggressiveness with which Microsoft offered the upgrade (minute 15 of the video). Capossela indicated that they wanted to see users running Windows 10 from a “security perspective”, and that for a good part of the year they did an appropriate job… but the famous X in the window that confirmed the upgrade turned out to be the limit. It took those responsible only a couple of hours to recognize that they had gone too far, and the following two weeks (the time between the appearance of the offer and the patch that fixed it) were “very painful”.
Other Woes
Capossela also mentioned two other very bitter details for the company during this year: the sale of the mobile division to Foxconn, and the famous phrase “one billion devices.” Both are closely linked, because without a tangible mobile presence Microsoft will never be able to reach the one billion devices with Windows 10. But the downside of “mea culpas” is that they always come after the facts, with computers knocked out due to partial installations (I have seen many of those in 2016), and even lawsuits. I hope they have learned the lesson. There is much to repair.
