In a new preview build (14371) of the massive Windows 10 Anniversary Update coming later this summer, Microsoft has revealed it will change how free upgrade licences are handled – and it raises serious questions.
What the company unveiled is the Windows 10 ‘Activation Troubleshooter’ and, in short, it ties Windows 10 licences (‘digital entitlements’ as Microsoft dubs them) to users’ Microsoft accounts for the first time.
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On the surface this is a great idea.
Upgrading PC components has famously been a nightmare for Windows owners as past a certain threshold the operating system can think it’s a new machine and demand you pay again to register it. This shouldn’t happen now there’s the Activation Troubleshooter.
Unfortunately, however, that’s not all there is to it.
What Microsoft hasn’t done is answer any of the numerous questions that tying your Windows 10 licence to a user account creates. For example:
Ultimately there are so many fundamental questions here that it is currently impossible to tell if the Activation Troubleshooter is a good or bad thing.
- What happens when you have multiple accounts on a PC?
- What happens if you own multiple PCs?
- Can multiple licences even be stored to a single account?
- What happens when you sell a PC? Can you give away the licence register to your account? If not every Windows 10 PC sold from now on will require the new owner to buy the operating system again.
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There are just four weeks to go until the free Windows 10 upgrade period ends. Meanwhile Microsoft, like a bad season of Lost, continues to toss out ever more convoluted plotlines rather than provide answers to core questions everyone has been asking for months.
Seriously Microsoft it’s time to come clean. Answers would be a lot more useful than your Windows 7 scare stories…
When the Activation Troubleshooter became the most popular piece of PR out of Redmond last week, I was reflexively uneasy. I felt in my bones that there had to be problems with it that I wasn't seeing, and questions about it that Microsoft wasn't answering, but I couldn't put my finger on what those were, and the stenographers that currently make up most of the media weren't at all helpful.
I'm glad to see that someone has finally dug deeper, and "put a name to my pain," so to speak; Gordon Kelley, you have my thanks. And I agree, it's time (maybe long past time) for Redmond to come clean about a lot of things, where #upgradegate is concerned. The fact that I greeted what should have been good news with basically automatic suspicion shows just how badly Satya Nadella & co. have eroded what remained of the trust and goodwill that I had for them. Clearly, I am not alone in that.