Microsoft and its perhaps over-zealous efforts to sway consumers to upgrade to Windows 10 has done a fair bit damage on American soil so far. The tech giant has come under fire lately for a number of reasons relating to the big push to Windows 10, which has included automatic upgrades, incorrigible advertising and worst of all making its famous Windows X (close window) an okay to upgrade.

This has resulted in one of the world’s better known Microsoft journalists, Paul Thurrott, to call the actions of the company “indefensible” and an almost indiscernible “violation of trust.” All this has led to Microsoft losing a few fans in the western world, but recently it was reported by China’s Xinhua news that the upgrade push has bugged millions of people in China.

The official news agency stated that so far posts on Chinese microblogging website Weibo criticizing Microsoft’s upgrade push have reached a staggering 1.2 million. Weibo has in the region of half a billion signed users.

Quoted in Xinhua was a legal adviser, Zhao Zhanling, working with the Internet Society of China, who said, “The company has abused its dominant market position and broken the market order for fair play.”

In some ways the criticism seems slightly harsh given that last year Microsoft said it would turn a blind eye to the many counterfeit Windows users in China and offer a free upgrade even if customers were using a pirated copy of Windows. In China, as well as other parts of Asia including India and Thailand, finding a genuine copy of Windows in stores can be hard. Microsoft perhaps did the noble thing and made the concession, although now it seems its free copy – pushed as it is – is not welcome.

According to the same report in Xinhua, the (unwanted) update has also proved costly for some.  One man, Yang Shuo, working at a Beijing public relations firm, told the news agency that the update had cost him almost half a million dollars when it interrupted the drafting of a business plan. He told Xinhua, “Just because I didn’t see the pop-up reminder does not mean I agreed.”

The deadline for the free upgrade is July 29.

Photo credit: La Priz via Flickr