However - if they, asy, upgraded from Windows XP to Vista then they would not be. They might even be looking forward to a UI overhaul in the name of 'progress'.
Aren't we talking about the latter case here?
They bought a phone, they _may_ know that it's an Android phone, or they may just know they bought a Samsung phone. They probably don't even think about it having an operating system as such - it's a phone, not a computer, as far as most people are concerned.
She knows enough that an upgrade in operating system will change enough that she'll be confused all over again and be frustrated trying to learn how to use her own computer, something she paid thousands of dollars for.
I believe she is still on vista, and won't upgrade because she knows how to use vista, and that was painful enough.
She is, however, the most computer unsavvy person I've ever met that actually uses a computer.
He runs XP. He uses IE, Hotmail, Messenger and even figured out how to sign up for Facebook on his own. Way back when, he learned some Word and Excel to track his DVDs and write his memories. Sometimes I believe he is reasonably savy for an old, non-tech person.
Then I remember the time I moved his "internet" icon to a different spot on the desktop, and he freaked out because the computer didn't work anymore.
I used to work for a big computer manufacturer from China working on their website. I worked hand in hand with designers making intranet apps, product description pages, landing pages, e-commerce, etc. We used to think like that, that users don't know anything about computers, so we focused on values, aesthetics, obvious features and price when designing product and landing pages. But one day a VP of e-commerce dropped by and said that A/B testing was showing that landing pages with technical data like processor power, RAM, disk size were working better than bare shiny pages. It turns out users are becoming more tech savvy every day.
So from that day on, whenever I think "yeah but a common user wouldn't do that" I try to get some evidence to back it up. People adapt and always surprise us.
It would have been interesting to do further testing to determine whether a page with nonsense words that looked technical did as well as tech specs. There is indeed evidence that consumers _like_ tech specs, and especially they like _larger_ tech specs; hence the race to increase megapixel counts, even at the cost of quality, and AMD's "Pentium equivalent" numbers (at a time when the Athlon 64 did more work per cycle than the P4, AMD would give a number intended to compare to the P4, rather than the chip's actual frequency).
There is, however, very little evidence that the user has the first clue about what the numbers _mean_.
Microsoft and Apple spend a lot of money and generate a lot of hype for their new OS changes. Google isn't really doing that expect in the tech community. Also, Microsoft (PC, trying on mobile) and Apple (PC and mobile) are the voice for the devices. Google is still in the OEM supplier stage and doesn't have the reach to the consumer level.
The upgrade to ICS can be done by casual users, who may not even know that they are upgrading to ICS, whereas the XP user is clearly making the decision to upgrade to a new OS.
It'd be easy for Samsung to deploy a website and make a tour of ICS, and tout it as a fully fledged upgrade.
From a technical point of view probably, but from a user point-of-view, if the update can be delivered OTA? That's more questionable.
Furthermore the difference between Ginger/TouchWiz and ICS is arguably far larger than that between XP and Vista (ignoring Vista being half-baked and half-broken on release).
No. When someone upgrades to Vista, they go out and buy a Vista CD. When they upgrade to ICS, they just press 'yes' in the dialog asking if they want to upgrade (or in extreme cases, do nothing; a few Android vendors have at least occasionally pushed out upgrades which happen without user intervention).