Microsoft has received a lot of flak for the way it pushed Windows 10 on customers so agressively, and now one executive is owning up to the software giant's bad behavior.
During a recent Windows Weekly broadcast, Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela admitted that the company was a tad too pushy about Windows 10. When asked by host Paul Thurrott if he has any professional regrets for the year, especially with respect to the Windows 10 rollout, Capossela said that Redmond has indeed made mistakes, including "getting too aggressive in pushing out the Windows 10 free upgrade."
"We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective, etcetera, but finding that 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," he said.
But at one point, Microsoft did go too far, Capossela said. That came when the company tweaked its "Get Windows 10" notification window to download the new OS if someone attempted to close the window by clicking the "x" icon in the upper-right corner.
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"There was one particular moment … where the red X in the dialog box, which typically means … cancel, didn't mean cancel," Capossela said. "Within a couple of hours of that hitting the world, with the listening systems we have, we knew that we had gone too far." He went on to say that it took some time to roll out an update to reverse the action.
"Those two weeks … were pretty painful, and clearly a low light for us," Capossela said. Check out his full comments in the video below.
Microsoft gave one California woman $10,000 over the issue after she claimed the unwanted upgrade caused her work computer to crash and be unavailable for days at a time. Microsoft reportedly denied wrongdoing in that case, but settled to avoid more expensive litigation.