Re: Why are Microsoft giving this away?
This is THE key question everyone needs to be asking. Microsoft is not a charity. It's safe to assume it's doing this "free upgrade" for ITS OWN benefit, not ours. In fact, we know that Microsoft benefits in several massive ways:
1. Windows 10 has advertising built into the Start Menu, the Lock Screen, and elsewhere. (Microsoft refers to these as "opportunities" for "spotlighting" apps you might like.) Cortana, in particular, is designed to return not just your desired search results, but also suggestions for things you might want to buy. (Microsoft showed a demo of this at Build.) Windows 10 is free for the same reason Facebook is free - because we've shifted from being the customers, to being the product.
2. Windows 10 moves everyone closer to Microsoft's dream of running Universal Windows Apps. These are far more constrained than previous Win32 applications, they offer new opportunities for monetization, and most importantly (despite the "Universal" moniker), they don't run on Windows 7 or Windows XP, currently the most popular versions, which Microsoft would dearly love to eliminate so we'd have no further reason to resist future updates.
3. Microsoft HOPES (vainly) that UWAs will be its foothold in mobile.
4. UWAs are sold only through the Windows Store, giving Microsoft a tasty 20% of all third-party software sales going forward. (The 'dev switch' allowing 'sideloading' in the preview builds is not guaranteed to be in the final release, and Microsoft has recently reiterated several times that it will be retaining exclusive rights to sell UWAs, as it did in Windows 8.)
On the plus side, the benefits of this "free upgrade" are... well, negligible. A Web browser is still a Web browser when it's programmed as a UWA. A few tweaks under the hood, an ugly new look, Ribbons in Explorer, a revived Start Menu that looks like it was designed by Barnum & Bailey, no DVD playback, no Media Center. More privacy intrusions, more attempts to get us all on to Microsoft accounts. And, as usual, new hardware drivers to find, new problems to shake down. Zero increase in productivity. Zero new capabilities. Zero fundamental architectural improvements (other than UWAs, which are a downgrade from Win32 in many ways). Even if you absolutely adore UWAs and the new flat look, a negative ROI.
Sometimes, "FREE" is not nearly cheap enough. In fact, it's almost inevitably cheaper to pay with MONEY than in some other way you may not even know about.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
