MS says to many people didn't update their systems causing massive security issues. No clue if that is true, but they have more data than I do.
They also claimed that no-one was using the Start menu any more in Win7. Uh-huh....
Of course, the fact that in my daily work I see a multitude of customers' systems is not a definitive measure, but I'd say I encounter one customer per year who had Windows Update not set to automatic. On the other hand, barely a week goes by that I'm not removing some sort of malware from customers' computers.
Admittedly my customer base is far more likely to be comprised of people who aren't that comfortable or au fait using computers, so again another reason not to think of it as definitive, but I don't think I've ever heard of it as a topic in mainstream or IT pro/semi-pro press. Furthermore, how many times does someone on this forum say they don't install Windows updates? In the time I've been here I may have read such a thing maybe five times?
I don't think MS is necessarily wrong about enforcing mandatory updates, especially if it keeps security and stability updates flowing. In my opinion the problem was that it wasn't ready for prime time at Windows 10 release and created an avoidable technical crisis that became a PR nightmare. The core of Windows 10 was ready to go, but the supporting infrastructure wasn't fully in place. Drivers were stepping on each other, updates were failing to install, and Microsoft had obviously not bothered to actually poll users as to how much control they were willing to cede to MS. As icing on the cake, MS took on a holier than though attitude which operated under the premise that users couldn't be trusted to make important decisions and that MS could only make decisions if they had unrestricted access to system telemetry and user activity.
IMO this is an argument that MS is necessarily wrong about enforcing mandatory updates: If their decision-making process is so broken that they came to the conclusion that the way they went about it was a good idea, then the stage for screw-ups was already set. Furthermore I think they've been *extremely* fortunate that this hasn't blown up in their faces in an extreme fashion. Given the PR nightmares that were Vista and Win8x, I'm surprised they didn't step more carefully, but IMO it simply boils down to arrogance.
Everyone knows that a new OS is likely to have "teething issues", there's enough historical evidence for that to be a given. MS still thought such a plan was a good idea.
If I was responsible for considering such a decision, I would want to get a few years of Windows 10 updates running properly (and by properly I mean that if some people have problems with updates, the root cause is found to be something that wasn't really avoidable, e.g. malware, or a very illogical OS configuration like the ones OEMs came up with that caused XP SP3 to blow up), behind it before saying "this may be a good idea".