Yeah people never wanted to update Windows since they had been burned in previous upgrades and their current setup just worked. Not only were upgrades difficult to do and took a long time, many times the new version was just worse or requires relearning lots of things. For what, asked the normal user?! But MSFT tied IE browser updates to OS updates just to make things so much worse for those people since now their choice was to either upgrade and have to deal with the distress of your UI changing, or be vulnerable to widely known exploits in your outdated browser.
My late dad preferred to not upgrade at any cost to the end!
That holds for major upgrades (e.g XP → Vista), but those didn’t used to just happen on their own. In the time frame my previous post was speaking of, one still had to buy major upgrades, and updates within the same version rarely brought significant UI changes. So in reality, there wasn’t much valid reason for there to be for example XP and 7 machines still running initial releases or early service packs for years on end (which was shockingly common). Most of the reason people had for avoiding minor updates is that they just found them annoying.
Now today of course things are quite different and it’s not unusual for a routine Windows update to turn things upside down. Users are more justified in update-averseness than they were 15-20 years ago, except of course now that brings much greater risk of getting pwned than it did back then.
My late dad preferred to not upgrade at any cost to the end!