Free upgrades as long as you upgrade within the first year, according to Microsoft’s blog. Sounds fantastic! Almost too good to be true, since Microsoft doesn’t tend to give stuff away. Hmm… this makes me wonder what the catch is. Obviously, MS wants everybody to be running Windows 10 as soon as possible. You could say that is to make support easier, but most folks that are running it at home don’t call MS ever, so that’s not it. For businesses, MS charges for support.  Now granted, they don’t want to be supporting XP anymore, I can certainly understand that, but they’ve never pushed so hard to get people to update the operating system right NOW.

Being the suspicious cynical type that I am, the mind rambles…

MS wants this code base in place globally presumably so they can push out updates and so forth. They have said that this is in line with their new release cadence.  They say version number will no longer be important, implying continual upgrades and fixes. Why would this be important? Well, if I were MS and I wanted to switch everyone to a subscription model (which is clearly their direction on everything else they are doing), I’d give them a free upgrade (can you say “trojan horse”), and after a while, I’d push out an update which enables subscription mode and requires you to send them $$ on an annual basis to keep your machine alive. This is speculation, but certainly seems plausible (not to mention Evil).  I don’t mind if they want to go to a subscription model, I’ll simply switch to another O/S as I don’t like the idea of paying somebody to keep something I own running.  It’s Evil if they do this without being transparent about it.

Do they have stuff in this new release that benefits THEM if everybody has it installed? Maybe it reports back software installs for licensing purposes, or DRM enforcement, or other big-brother type activities. Call me paranoid, but MS is a business and they are in this to make money, not to make people happy.

So… I’d like to know why they are doing this for free, and what are the future plans.