So Wednesday's Microsoft event happened. "Windows 10: The Next Chapter," they called it, and if you've been anywhere near a tech site this week you've already seen forty screenshots of HoloLens and a dozen posts about Cortana moving onto the desktop. I'm not going to rehash all of that. Everyone else already has, and honestly the holographic headset demo, cool as it looked, felt like a thing that's five years from actually being a thing you'd own.
What actually made me sit up was one line buried in Terry Myerson's part of the keynote: the free upgrade to Windows 10 isn't just for people running legit, activated copies of Windows 7 or 8.1. Non-genuine installs get it too. He said it almost as an aside, like it wasn't a big deal, and then the presentation just kept rolling into the next slide.
I had to back up the stream and listen to that part twice.
For anyone who missed the headline version: Microsoft's giving Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 users a free upgrade to 10 for the first year after it launches later this year. That part's generous on its own, way more generous than the days of paying $120 for a Windows upgrade disc at Best Buy. But extending it to pirated copies is a genuinely strange move for a company that used to nag you constantly with "this copy of Windows is not genuine" watermarks in the corner of your desktop. I remember those. Everybody remembers those.
My read on it, and I'll admit this is just a guess dressed up as analysis, is that Microsoft cares a lot less about who paid for what and a lot more about getting as many machines as possible onto one Windows version before this fall. Fragmentation is the actual enemy here. If a huge percentage of the world is still on XP holdouts and cracked 7 installs, that's a mess for developers, a mess for security, and a mess for Microsoft's own support costs. Getting everyone current, even the people who never paid, might just be cheaper than continuing to fight them.
I've got a personal stake in this one that has nothing to do with journalism. My old Dell in the closet, the one I keep meaning to throw out, is running a copy of XP with a key I honestly don't know the provenance of. It came from a computer lab liquidation back in college, some guy was selling stacks of activation keys out of a backpack in the dorm lounge for ten bucks each, and I've felt vaguely guilty about that machine for eight years. If Microsoft's serious about waving that machine through to a free, current, actually-supported OS, I'm not going to complain. I'll take the amnesty.
The skeptic in me wants a footnote though, because there's always a footnote with these announcements. "Non-genuine" doesn't necessarily mean every flavor of pirated Windows out there. Microsoft's history with piracy enforcement is inconsistent enough that I wouldn't be shocked if the actual policy, once it's written down instead of said onstage, turns out narrower than it sounded Wednesday. Corporate volume-license keys floating around forums are a different animal than a legit retail key that just never got activated properly. I'd bet the details get messier before this thing ships.
Either way, it's a weirder story than "big company unveils new operating system," which is the headline every other outlet is running today. The OS itself looks fine, Start menu's back in a form that actually resembles a Start menu again, and Cortana on the desktop is either useful or a Clippy repeat depending on how cynical you're feeling. But the interesting move this week wasn't the flashy holographic demo. It was Microsoft quietly deciding that eight years of DRM lecturing wasn't worth the fragmentation it was causing.
I'll believe the pirated-copy detail when I actually see it land on that Dell, not before.