From eWeek:
Businesses that missed out on Microsoft's free Windows 10 upgrade offer now have a second chance, provided they subscribe to Windows via the software giant's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partner program.
Microsoft announced the impending availability of the Windows 10 operating system as a subscription service during the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Toronto on July 12. In September, the companies and its partners began offering Windows 10 Enterprise E3 licenses for $7 per user per month.
Now, as an added perk, Microsoft is enabling those customers to upgrade their Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PCs at no extra cost. The offer extends to users with Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and E5 subscriptions as well as Secure Productive Enterprise E3 and E5 plans.
[...]
Once older Windows machines are upgraded to Window 10, the OS is theirs to keep, said Nic Fillingham, small business product manager at Microsoft Windows Marketing.
"The Windows 10 upgrade licenses issued as part of this process are perpetual and associated with the device. This means the license will not expire or be revoked if the customer chooses to end their Windows cloud subscription in the CSP program," he wrote in a Jan. 19 blog post.Microsoft's earlier scaremongering was probably aimed at Enterprise customers, who have (so far, anyway) been in no rush to switch to Windows 10. MS's corporate strategy really needed them to switch, and to pay for the privilege; in the absence of those two things happening, however, MS have apparently decided that they'll settle for one of two.
The problem is MS resorted to scaremongering first, and then attempted to sweeten the deal. Normally, the carrot is dangled in plain view before one begins tactlessly brandishing the stick, but MS have done these things in reverse order, and possibly further undermined trust in Windows products in the process. MS spent years trying to convince us that Win7 was safe as houses, remember, before suddenly announcing that Win7 was critically flawed in ways that they hadn't previously disclosed... and then announcing that they're giving it away again.
Oh, and they're adding more adverts to the OS, too, in the upcoming Creators Update. Gotta make money, somehow, I guess. They're apparently not going to make any by selling copies of Windows 10.
We'll see in upcoming months whether either the scaremongering or this renewed giveaway succeeds in pushing/pulling Enterprise users to Win10, when all previous attempts to appeal to them have failed, but one thing is clear: weak expressions of remorse notwithstanding, Microsoft's ham-handed ways are still very much a thing, and will be for the foreseeable future. This is just who MS are, now, and apparently who they'll continue to be, at least for as long as Satya Nadella is running the show.
We'll see in upcoming months whether either the scaremongering or this renewed giveaway succeeds in pushing/pulling Enterprise users to Win10, when all previous attempts to appeal to them have failed, but one thing is clear: weak expressions of remorse notwithstanding, Microsoft's ham-handed ways are still very much a thing, and will be for the foreseeable future. This is just who MS are, now, and apparently who they'll continue to be, at least for as long as Satya Nadella is running the show.