{"id":8933,"date":"2016-05-31T15:06:39","date_gmt":"2016-05-31T19:06:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.nccomputertech.com\/?p=8933"},"modified":"2016-05-31T15:06:39","modified_gmt":"2016-05-31T19:06:39","slug":"chinese-users-blast-microsofts-draconian-windows-10-upgrade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nccomputertech.com\/techtalk\/2016\/05\/31\/chinese-users-blast-microsofts-draconian-windows-10-upgrade\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese users blast Microsoft’s draconian Windows 10 upgrade"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Gregg Keizer<\/a> | PCWorld<\/a><\/p>\n

Chinese users have complained about Microsoft’s latest aggressive move to get them to adopt Windows 10, according to the news service backed by the country’s Communist government.<\/p>\n

“IT giant Microsoft is under fire in China as the company pushes users to upgrade their operating systems to Windows 10,” said China Daily<\/i><\/a>, an English-language newspaper in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in a story reprinted from Xinhua, the government’s official news agency.<\/p>\n

Xinhua’s account resembled those in Western media, describing users whose PCs were upgraded to Windows 10 without their approval or because they overlooked an on-screen notification.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Microsoft began another push to boost adoption<\/a> by pre-scheduling the free Windows 10 upgrade. On-screen notices warned users of the impending upgrade, but limited the cancel option to an easily-overlooked, one-word link in the notification’s text. And clicking the red “X” in the upper-right corner of the dialog box — by convention a last resort for users wanting to cancel an operation — instead authorized the upgrade<\/a> to begin at the allotted time.<\/p>\n

“Just because I didn’t see the pop-up reminder does not mean I agreed,” Yang Shuo, an employee of a Beijing-based public relations firm, told Xinhua.<\/p>\n

Microsoft remains on shaky ground in China as a two-year-old antitrust investigation continues<\/a>. But the Redmond, Wash. company has also scored victories, including partnering with one of the country’s largest defense conglomerates to promote and sell Windows 10<\/a> to PRC government agencies.<\/p>\n

Microsoft has also joined forces with Baidu<\/a> to distribute the Windows 10 upgrade in China in exchange for making the search provider the default within Edge, the operating system’s newest browser.<\/p>\n

The Chinese government often uses Xinhua to express its views on Western technology firms, which makes another quote in the story stand out. “The company has abused its dominant market position and broken the market order for fair play,” Zhao Zhanling, a legal advisor with the Internet Society of China (ISC), told the news service.<\/p>\n