So there's a new icon living in my system tray. It showed up sometime last week, this little white Windows flag sitting next to the volume control and the battery meter, and at first I genuinely thought it was malware. I right-clicked it, hovered over it, ignored it for two days. Turns out its the "Get Windows 10" app that Microsoft pushed out through Windows Update (it rides in on KB3035583 if you want to go look for it), and as of June 1st we finally know why it's there: Microsoft announced Windows 10 ships July 29th, and if you're running a licensed copy of Windows 7 or 8.1, the upgrade is free for the first year.
Free is a good word. I like free. But I've been doing this long enough to be a little suspicious of software that installs itself onto my taskbar without asking first, then asks me to "reserve" an upgrade to an OS that doesn't exist yet. Reserve it like its a table at a restaurant. Click the icon and you get a little wizard that checks your hardware, has you sign in with a Microsoft account, and puts your name on a list somewhere in Redmond so your PC gets nudged to upgrade automatically once July rolls around. It's clever, honestly. Most people never dig into their Windows Update settings, so this is Microsoft meeting people where they already are, in the tray, next to the clock.
I reserved mine. Then immediately felt weird about it and went looking for how to undo it, which you can, its just buried under a hidden folder and a right click you wouldn't stumble on by accident. That tells you something about who this feature is really for. It's not for me, its for my mom, whose Dell has been running 8.1 since she got it and who has never once opened Control Panel on purpose.
What I keep coming back to is how different this feels from past upgrade cycles. When Windows 7 came out I bought a boxed copy at Fry's, an actual box with a DVD in it, and it cost me something like $120 for the upgrade edition. Vista to 7 on my old desktop ate my printer drivers and I spent an entire Saturday afternoon on that instead of doing literally anything else with my life. This time it's a free download that installs itself while you sleep, more or less. Thats a genuinely different relationship between a company and an operating system, and I don't think we've fully reckoned with what that means yet, especially once people start asking what Microsoft gets out of giving away an OS for nothing. My guess is it's the same thing Google's been doing with Chrome and Android for years: you're not the customer, you're the install base, and the install base is worth more long term than the license fee ever was.
Small tangent, not really related except that it happened in the same stretch of days: Bethesda dropped a teaser on the 3rd, a countdown site that led to a very short trailer confirming Fallout 4 is real. No release date, no gameplay, just a shot of Boston in ruins and that unmistakable music sting. I've been half-expecting this announcement for at least two years and I still yelled out loud in my apartment when the timer hit zero. My roommate thought something was wrong. I have a save file from Fallout 3 that I have refused to delete since 2009 out of some superstition that deleting it would jinx a sequel ever happening. Guess I can finally let that one go, assuming Steam doesn't eat it first.
Anyway. If you're running 7 or 8.1 and that little flag icon shows up on your machine too, it's not a virus, its just Microsoft getting an early headcount. Reserve it or don't, but know that "reserving" doesn't commit you to anything, and you've got until next summer before the free window closes. I'll probably actually install 10 sometime in the fall once other people have found all the bugs for me. Being an early adopter stopped being fun around the time I bricked a router flashing custom firmware on it for no good reason, and I'd rather let someone else's Tuesday get ruined first.