Microsoft, in a bid to keep Windows 7 PC sales strong through to the end of the operating system’s lifecycle, has a plan: offer people a dead cheap Windows 8 upgrade , thus making the option of waiting for the upcoming operating system to drop a poor decision.
How cheap will the deal be? According to Paul Thurrott, the bump to Windows 8 will cost a mere $15. Of course, this sort of promotion is hardly new – Microsoft does something similar every time it releases a new operating system. It helps people get onto the new code quickly, and ensures that Windows revenue doesn’t take a massive dive in the quarter preceding the new operating system’s release.
Even worse, as the company doesn’t formally announce the release date of the software for some time, not offering a cheap upgrade could add to consumer uncertainty, which might lead to a wallet-closing situation.
One more note, however: this time ’round the upgrade bush, Microsoft is pushing people to Windows 8 Pro, and not its normal flavor. There won’t be (so far as can be told) an upgrade to the vanilla Windows 8 edition. Why MSFT is pushing people to Pro is hard to say, and until we have a final feature breakdown of the various editions of the operating system we won’t be able to say much more.
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The promotion is set to kick off on June 2nd, so if you were thinking about picking up a new machine, you might want to count to ten before you pull the trigger.
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