You can offer people Windows 10 for free, but you can’t make them take it



For the first year after its official release, Microsoft will offer Windows 10 upgrades to current Windows 7 and Windows 8 users completely free of charge. Windows upgrade licenses currently start at $119.99—discounts from that MSRP are pretty common, sure, but there's no discount that can beat a 100-percent discount.

The intent behind this move is to unify the Windows ecosystem. "With Windows 10, we think of Windows as a service," said Microsoft Operating Systems Group VP Terry Myerson at the Windows 10 Consumer Preview event earlier today. "The question 'what version are you running' will cease to make sense."

That's a noble goal. It's a good reason to offer Windows upgrades for free. It's also completely unrealistic, at least for the foreseeable future.

Sometimes you can't even give away upgrades

We can't predict the future, but there are a few desktop operating systems out there that can show us how users treat free updates. Let's look at OS X first.

Apple made new OS X updates free back in October of 2013 when it released Mavericks, and it made the update free to a pretty significant swath of the userbase. You needed a compatible Mac and you needed to be running version 10.6 (released in 2009) or newer. According to NetApplications data, over 90 percent of Macs at least met the software requirements as of September 2013, though that number won't be completely accurate since some of those 10.6 or 10.7 Macs wouldn't have been able to upgrade because of hardware restrictions.

Fast forward to April of 2014, six months after the release of Mavericks. Around half of the total OS X userbase was running Mavericks—not too bad! But 14 percent of the userbase was on version 10.8, meaning that there were definitely no hardware restrictions preventing those users from upgrading. And statistically some number of the 10.6 and 10.7 users—28-ish percent of the OS X userbase, all told—would have had compatible hardware, too.

Jump to October 2014, when OS X Yosemite was released (also for free, and with no additional hardware restrictions). Mavericks and Yosemite combined accounted for 70 percent of the total userbase, but 8 percent remained on 10.8, and 19 percent were still running 10.7 or 10.6. Today, around 44 percent of OS X users are running Yosemite, but 28 percent of them have stuck with Mavericks—that's still 72 percent of the userbase, meaning that many of those installs are just Mavericks users jumping to Yosemite—and 7 percent are still standing behind 10.8. You get the picture.

One final example, one that may be even more applicable to the Windows ecosystem: Windows 8.1 was released in October of 2013 as a free update to Windows 8, and by most accounts (including ours) it was a major improvement on all fronts. It introduced no major disruptions for people who were already familiar with Windows 8, and it improved things quite a bit for desktop users. And yet, as of November 2014, a third of all Windows 8.x users were still running version 8.0 (Windows 8.x accounted for around 20 percent of the entire Windows pie).

There may be some slow-moving enterprise customers included in that number, and there may be some installations held up by some kind of technical hiccup, but a significant portion of that number is either people who don't care to upgrade or people who aren't aware that they can upgrade.

iOS can also serve as a data point in this discussion, and we've already looked quite a bit at the relatively slow adoption rate of iOS 8. iOS updates are a bit different from OS X or Windows updates—Apple totally pulls support for older iOS versions when new ones come out, updates have always been free, and by the time a version has been around for six to 12 months, its adoption rate has climbed into the low-to-mid nineties. But still, even on a platform where prompt and universally available updates are the norm, it can take quite a bit of time to make the transition happen

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