Microsoft has made a passing attempt to clarify some of its policy on free upgrades to Windows 10. In an interview, senior director of product marketing at Microsoft Aaron Woodman detailed what the company has decided about the offering -- and an alarming amount of decisions seem to have not been made yet about licensing the OS.
As
previously reported, enterprise users have licensing agreements to navigate, and won't be recipients of free licenses. Additionally, the OS isn't a pay-as-you-go product, requiring an annual fee. Woodman told
Yahoo Tech that "Once you're on Windows 10, you're on Windows 10, and there will be no additional charge."
Microsoft believes that 1.5 billion users worldwide are using illegal copies of Windows. A recent announcement of all Windows users,
legal or not, being able to update to Windows 10 was alluded to, but not elucidated upon by Woodman. "There's a lot of value in the ecosystem," said Woodman. "There are a lot of future paying customers. Those customers are valuable to Windows." Yet, the executive didn't clarify the program.
However, Microsoft has yet to decide what to charge virtualization users or customers who build their own computer. Woodman claims that "we never said Windows is free" but also noted that the discussion has yet to be had what to charge, if anything, to that class of user.
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