Re: Forced upgrades distort stats
If MS is force upgrading every windows pc, and it is only the quick intervention of you geniuses that can prevent it, then why is win10 only growing at the rate of 1% per month?
From what I've seen of the way GWX works, if you leave it alone it quietly installs and goes about it's business of analysing the system, creating an archive nd downloading Win10 etc. this seems to take some time and is controlled by daily polls to the MS Store.
So my expectation is that it is the daily polls and the differing responses given that largely determine the rate at which any particular system reaches the "ready for upgrade" point. There is also a user variable in that how they dismiss the Windows "limited time free upgrade" prompts that also plays a role.
The growth rate can be put down to MS finessing stuff at their end - I certainly will not be surprised if this summer MS announces that Win10 is the supported update to Win7/8 (ie. equivalent to a Service Pack), just as they did with the Win8->8.1 update. As someone else has observed, what will be critical in assessing the success of Win10 will be the change in installed base this coming year.
As for Win10 being an outright failure, well MS are doing a good job at trying - Got a Win10 system (auto updated from Win7) where the auto updater has applied an update that has caused a critical error that Win10 is unable to recover from - the MS recommended solution: re-install Win10 and applications...
This is 2016, there is no real reason why the Win10 auto updater on completion of the update can't create a full recovery image of itself, particularly given it (sort of) creates a pre-updated recovery image in the Windows.Old folder.