Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply
People don't like change, but no change is no progress.
And it's thoughtless comments like this that drive changes for their own sake. Yes, change can be a good thing if that change has visible benefits but a change for its own sake rarely benefits anyone.
If you look at the changes that happened between XP and Vista, Vista and W7, W7 and W8.x and W8.x to W10, you can see examples of where a change has occurred that actually benefitted users and you can also see changes that benefitted manufacturers. Then you see changes that benefitted nobody. XP wasn't perfect when it was first released and users of W2K and W98 were happy enough to stay where they were though WMe users couldn't wait to jump ship. Once XP was stabilised a bit, the shift happened naturally enough.
The biggest reason, however, why W10 is having such a bad time, data slurp and other such bothers aside, is that it hasn't gotten past the early XP bit and unlike XP there isn't a group that is in such a desperate hurry to shift from earlier versions. W7 is stable, familiar and operable and, like W2K years before, it has plenty of life left in it despite Microsoft's increasingly bullying attitude toward it. Actually, if anything, Microsoft's current attitude could do more harm to the industry than good with people with reasonably recent machines sticking with W7 until the hardware goes bad. Then, of course, should Microsoft continue with this attitude, alternatives to W10 may await the Redmond weary user.
The only real way of dealing with this, as far as I can see, is for Microsoft to back off, fix their product, remove the slurp, restore a reasonable update client, stop pressuring the W7 and W8.x users and lie low for a couple of years until the current bad press has died down.
Certainly continuing the nagware, sending the shills and fanboys out to publish their bull and pressuring the users to move off older systems by employing industry bullying tactics and making changes for change's sake will only further decrease their standing.