If you ‘reserved’ your free upgrade to Windows 10 but you haven’t seen anything popup or appear to prompt you to install yet, if you really want to get it installed right now, Lifehacker have a link to the Windows 10 Media Creation tool which you can download and use to do an upgrade of 7 or 8.x to 10 right now.
Windows 10 – is it ready?
Only a day away from Windows 10 starting to rollout on July 29th, and people are wondering whether it’s really ready for release or not, or as The Register puts it, Microsoft are still playing ‘whack-a-mole’ with bugs before the actual release: “A number of nagging bugs have cropped up in the last few days that have some Windows 10 testers scratching their heads at just how an OS this raw can be considered production-ready.”
But if we’re prepared to accept’s Microsoft’s concept of ‘Windows as a Service’, this is all perfectly ok, because you’ll be getting a continual stream of Windows Updates to patch all the issues after the first release is pushed out. I’m not sure how this differs from any other Microsoft release of any prior release of Windows, but ok then, if you say so.
So your release forecast for tomorrow is: extremely buggy, with a very good chance of patches released later in the day.
Is Microsoft planning a ‘bait and switch’ with the ‘free’ upgrade to Windows 10?
There’s a lot of uncertainty around exactly what Microsoft are offering for the ‘free’ upgrade to Windows 10 that’s going to start rolling out on July 29th. winsupersite.com have a good collection of questions people are starting to ask about what is included in the upgrade offer.
An article in Forbes discussing some internal presentation slides that ComputerWorld obtained is suggesting that the ‘free’ upgrade may not turn out to be entirely free after all, as a cryptic statement from Microsoft states:
“Revenue allocated is deferred and recognized on a straight-line basis over the estimated period the software upgrades are expected to be provided by estimated device life…. [The estimated device life] can range from two to four years”
We can only speculate exactly what Microsoft means by this statement, but it implies the ‘free’ upgrade is only initially free, and thrn at some point during the lifetime of your installation, the cost will be recouped. Exactly how or on what timescale the cost is recouped is unclear, but this statement implies at some point you will be charged for your Windows 10 – possibly ransomware style (‘Pay $199 now to continue using Windows 10’), or maybe subscription style (a monthly subscription to keep the install active?) – at this point there’s not enough information to be able to say. But it does seem clear, we’re not getting Windows 10 for ‘free’.
Does the leadership shakeup at Microsoft mean their Phone business in finally dead?
Microsoft have struggled forever to get a foot in the mobile device market, with a trail of failed products and mis-steps over the past years. Who even remembers Project Pink (here), the Kin One and Kin Two, or the time they bought Danger and then had a server failure and lost all their user’s data?
With Microsoft announcing recently that it’s haemoaging cash on it’s mobile business, and that Stephen Elop, the ex-Nokia chief and lead of the Mobile Devices Group, is out the door in the recent exec shakeup, you have to wonder just how much focus Microsoft is going to put on it’s promise of Windows 10 to be the OS to run on all device types. Maybe all devices as long as it’s not a Nokia phone, or all devices but not phone hardware coming from Microsoft. Which at this point this probably means any phone at all – without Nokia Windows devices, what devices are left?
I doubt anyone’s upset that we won’t see Microsoft phones running Windows 10, but it is sad that at this point, Microsoft’s failed acquisition of Nokia most likely means that Nokia, as a brand and as the phone, is now dead.