Microsoft is facing criticism from Chinese users about the way it is trying to persuade people to upgrade to its Windows 10 operating system.
Chinese microblog site Weibo said users had now made more than 1.2 million posts complaining about Windows 10.
The complaints in China follow criticism from IT experts who said Microsoft was using a "nasty trick" to make people upgrade.
Microsoft has not yet responded to the reports about Chinese complaints.
[...]
"The company has abused its dominant market position and broken the market order for fair play," Zhao Zhanling, a legal adviser for the Internet Society of China told the official Xinhua news agency.
He said by forcing the upgrade, Microsoft had not respected the users' right to choose what they install on their computers. This was important, he said, because eventually Microsoft might profit from the "unwanted" upgrades.
[...]
The outcry on Weibo has led Microsoft to post information on the site to help people revert to older versions of Windows.More and more, Microsoft seems to be losing control of the narrative. Stories about Windows 10 used to be mostly about its latest, feature-laden patch, or Microsoft's latest press release about the pace at which people are switching, but now they're all about how people are being tricked or just plain forced into switching their OS, even when they don't want to.
We're not talking about a few, Luddite hold-outs, here, either; millions of customers are now complaining, very publicly, about Microsoft's tactics, and the mainstream new media are starting to pay attention... in the UK, at least. And that's not a trivial thing; if public opinion in Europe turns against MS in a big enough way, EU regulatory action could well be the result, and the EU's actions can be costly to those on the receiving end of them... as Microsoft should well know, having been on the receiving end of at least one such judgment.
Could the tide be starting to turn? Could this be just the beginning of a backlash of sufficient intensity to convince Microsoft to change course? Or is it too little, too late? Windows 10's "free" upgrade period only has another two months to run; Microsoft could well decide to just tough it out, managing a worsening backlash rather than abandoning a corporate strategy on which they've staked so much of the company's future.