Microsoft has announced that Windows10 is now running on more than 270 million devices, something that Microsoft is calling this its fastest adoption rate ever. Like all great statistical lies, this one has just enough truth to be believable, while still managing to be completely, and I think deliberately, misleading.
Windows 10 is being given away for free [1], will be downloaded by your current version of Windows as a "recommended" update, i.e. automatically for most folks, at which point Windows will nag you to upgrade, and can even be pushed onto your system whether you agree to upgrade or not [2]. None of these things has ever been true of any previous version of Windows, all of which required that users either (a) buy at least an upgrade copy of the new OS at their own expense, or (b) buy a new PC which comes with the latest OS installed.
Microsoft is conflating two wildly different scenarios, basically claiming that they are the same thing, and that the "adoption rates" of Windows 10 can be compared to previous versions of the OS. This is entirely false, and Microsoft have to know that it's entirely false. And yet, they persist.
Microsoft are not alone in this fast and loose approach to facts in their public announcements, of course (I've come to regard corporate PR utterances, in general, as a source of truthiness, rather than as sources of truth), but I have to say that this particular bit of truthiness struck me as particularly ballsy. Considering how much coverage Microsoft has been getting for their aggressive (some would say overly so) push to switch the entire planet over to their current, walled-garden, UWP-controlled vision of personal computing's future, and how uncomfortable that's making some folks, me included, the fact that they would even pretend that 270 million customers have voluntarily just switched to Windows 10 seems, at the very least, disingenuous.
- It's "free" in the sense that Microsoft won't charge you any cash up front for it. It's not at all free, though, in the sense that Windows 10 comes with built-in "telemetry" features which harvest your valuable metadata and email it to various locations that Microsoft have selected; they have yet, to my knowledge, come clean about (a) what data they're collecting, (b) where they're sending it, or (c) what they're doing with it, including potentially (d) who they're sharing it with. And they don't tell you any of this up front. And you can only turn telemetry off by installing a 3rd party application which will do the job for you. At this point, I basically consider Windows 10 to be malware, and have decided never to install it, unless and until Microsoft rectify these deficiencies. Seriously, I'll go Linux first, and I say that as someone who's very first PC (bought with my own money, anyway) was a Windows machine, and who's owned only Windows PCs since.
- Microsoft explained, of course, that the feature which made this possible was enabled "by mistake," but they didn't (e) explain why it's part of Windows 10 in the first place, (f) promise to remove it completely, or (g) promise never to include a similar feature in any future build of the OS. Windows 10 can be installed on your system remotely, by Microsoft's fiat, at any time that they decide that they're sick of you dragging your heels on the upgrade, and their entire response to the existence of this capability in their code is essentially to say that we should just trust them. Well... no. Sorry, but no.