Who even uses Internet Explorer anymore, though?
'Explorer' is sadly, the name of the default Windows 7 (and earlier, through Win 98) shell environment. The thing that gave you a desktop, filesystem navigation (viewing folders, files, paths), icons to double-click, a start menu, and a taskbar.
Not to be confused with 'Internet Explorer' although Microsoft did their best to be as confusing as possible by naming a core OS component, after their terrible browser. This, primarily because they wanted to integrate the browser into the OS at one point, and were thankfully shot down for trying that.
I replaced the Explorer shell with something far more useful, DOpus, years ago.
This fits with their desire to have everyone operating on the same OS to make supporting issues easier. There's no risk of people constantly reporting issues that could've been resolved if they were just updating their OS. Plus, Microsoft will be adding features regularly, ala what they've done with the Xbox One. I don't see how this is a big issue.
Forced updating, is one major step toward the user fully losing control over their system. You are effectively giving Microsoft the right to do whatever they please, in the EULA. That is a gigantic loss of freedom over your operating system, all your software, and your entire investment, Microsoft could declare that all i686 software is unsupported, and at any time, remove the components that permit it to run, and you have no recourse.
You could disconnect the system from the Internet, or block the connections to the MS servers at a hardware level, but I highly suspect that the OS will have an internal clock, that if it doesn't check for updates over X-time, it refuses to start up. This is furthering what MS did with their certification checks, in the worst way possible.
At least the Enterprise edition--the only one I would ever run, if I needed an OS that new--isn't going to be entirely demolished.
I would expect the open-source community to push as much publicity of this new 'feature' as humanly possible, exposing how evil it is, down to the core. It is literally the worst thing I've seen in a EULA to date, including clauses that permit the licensor perpetual access to your datum, or routine CPU cycle usage for their own external processor-time (distributed processing). This quite literally gives them the ability to select what software you could use, at any time.
P.S. If you don't think they could, or would, ever do that; look at the 'Apple Store' and iOS. That is exactly what Apple have done: They choose what programmes you can run, on a device that you bought for hundreds of quid.
For those interested, I have one system that runs Win 7, several that run XP, one NT-based server (2003E), a host of systems running OSX, and others running Linux. You will never see me install WIn 8.x on anything, and if it comes on something, I will clear it, and install something else. Me, shifting to Win 10 now, is not likely to happen, ever, ever. The devil to these freedom-robbing OS 'improvements'.
Edited by ZoriaRPG, 18 July 2015 - 08:01 PM.