Upgrade errors, Edge-by-default, other problems and gripes sour social media buzz on new OS
Windows 10’s vibe on social media has soured since Microsoft launched the operating system last week, Adobe today said as it cited new data from its metrics platform.
Adobe’s Social, analytics that collect and categorize mentions from blogs, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter and elsewhere, has seen a turn toward skepticism since July 29, when Microsoft began distributing Windows 10 upgrades.
Adobe drops social media impressions into a bunch of buckets labeled “admiration,” “anger,” “anticipation,” “disgust,” “joy,” “sadness” and “surprise.”
On July 29, Windows 10 garnered 49% from admiration and joy, the two most positive categories. After launch day, however, the collective admiration + joy percentage dipped to 40%.
Also notable was the increase in the slice tagged as sadness after Wednesday: On launch day, that negative metric stood at 29%, but post-launch it climbed to 35%.
(The launch-day numbers provided today at Computerworld’s request were slightly different than Adobe published last week; the latter were based on about half a day’s data on July 29, the company clarified today.)
Adobe credited the changes in Windows 10 buzz factor to several sources, including publicized bugs, upgrade problems, some Microsoft practices, and even to a “ransomware” campaign now circulating that leverages the widespread news about the OS’s launch.
Mentions of Windows 10 bugs — a generic term that could include everything from quirks in the OS and its apps, to error messages encountered when trying to upgrade — soared 10-fold in the post-launch period, Adobe said.
In the last two days, Windows 10 bug mentions on social media jumped to a daily average of more than 11,000 from a pre-launch average of just 1,150. Although the 11,000 represented a small fraction — just 0.4% of the 3 million or so Adobe captured — the 10-fold increase signaled that, if nothing else, a bad vibe was brewing.
Contributing to the overall sadness metric — again, Adobe pegged that at 35% post-launch, compared to 29% on July 29 and 27% leading up to the debut — were some surprising factors. While some were expected, including the 13% of the sadness quotient derived from generic error messages some have seen when trying to upgrade (among the least helpful, one that simply read “Something happened”), others were not.
A fifth of the sadness score came from Microsoft’s decision to make the new Edge browser the default in Windows 10 unless users interrupted the “Express Settings” part of the upgrade process, or later manually switched back to a rival browser, like Google’s Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox. Last week, Mozilla’s CEO Chris Beard demanded that his rival, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, step in to eliminate Windows 10’s browser switcheroo.
And slightly more than a fifth was attributed to a new malware campaign that is slinging the free Windows 10 upgrade as bait for ransomware, attack code that encrypts the victim’s files and demands payment for unlocking them. Cisco’s security team first reported the campaign on Friday.
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