Microsoft had its big Windows 10 event yesterday and everybody's already writing about the HoloLens thing, which, fine, I get it, a headset that projects holograms onto your kitchen counter is a more exciting photo than a slide with bullet points on it. I watched about forty minutes of the stream on my lunch break (leftover pasta, don't judge me) and the HoloLens demo is genuinely wild. But the part that actually made me sit up was way less flashy: Windows 10 is going to be a free upgrade for anyone running Windows 7, 8, or 8.1, at least for the first year after it launches.
Free. From Microsoft. For an OS upgrade.
I want to be excited about this and I'm mostly just squinting at it sideways.
Anyone who's been reading this blog since the Windows 8 days remembers how that went. I still have the scars from trying to use the Start screen with a mouse on a desktop that has never once been touched by a finger and never will be, because it's bolted under a desk in my spare room next to a space heater. Windows 8 wasn't free and it still cost me a weekend of my life reconfiguring things so I could pretend it was Windows 7 with a coat of paint. So when the word "free" gets attached to a Windows upgrade my first instinct isn't gratitude, it's "okay, what's the catch."
And there's obviously a catch, or at least an angle. Nothing Microsoft does is charity. My best guess, and I'll admit this is just a guess, is that this is about finally dragging the install base off Windows 7, which by every account is still what most people are running three and a half years after it went out of mainstream support territory for anyone paying attention. Fragmentation is expensive for Microsoft to support and annoying for developers to target. If giving away the upgrade gets grandma's laptop and my mom's ancient Dell off Windows 7, that's worth more to them long term than whatever they'd have charged for the license itself. Which, by the way, used to run you somewhere around a hundred bucks for a standard upgrade version, so this isn't a small thing to just hand out.
The other piece from the event that I think is more interesting than people are giving it credit for is Cortana showing up on the desktop. It's been a Windows Phone thing for a while now and phone assistants are still kind of a novelty act to me, I mostly use Siri to set timers and mishear me asking about the weather. But putting a voice assistant with search-bar-level access into the taskbar of an actual desktop OS is a different proposition than putting it on a phone you already talk into. I don't know if I'll use it. I probably won't, honestly, I still feel like a weirdo talking to a computer at my desk with other people in the room. But it's a bigger swing than the coverage is treating it as, because it's not "hey siri" on hardware built for holding up to your face, it's Microsoft betting that voice search belongs on every machine, including the one your coworkers can hear you use.
Setting that aside, I've got two machines here that would be eligible whenever this actually ships. The desktop is Windows 7 and honestly runs fine, no complaints, which is exactly the kind of situation where "free upgrade" starts to feel like a solution in search of a problem. If it isn't broken I'm historically bad at leaving it alone anyway, so I'll probably upgrade it the first weekend I get the chance and regret at least one driver decision within 48 hours. That's just how this always goes.
No release date yet, they were cagey about that on stream, just "later this year," which in Microsoft years could mean anything from June to whenever. I'll believe the free part when I actually see the update sitting in Windows Update with no credit card field attached to it.