Even Jack Sparrow can have a copy of Windows

How do you combat software theft? Give it away for free.

Microsoft recently announced that anyone in China who has a copy of the Windows 7 Operating System (and up), legitimate or illegitimate, will be able to upgrade for free to the new Windows 10 version. The estimated number of users, who would be able to take the advantage of this offer, would be in the hundreds of millions!

Why would Microsoft do such a crazy thing as giving their operating system away for free?

Microsoft is moving thing to cloud – I know, I am stating the obvious here – and they not the first to do it. Well it turns out that having things in cloud makes it very difficult for a would be thief to use it without either previously registering or paying for it. Also with the free version of the Windows operating system, Microsoft will be able to push ‘upgrades’ to the end user much faster.

Windows 10 is intended to serve as a unifying platform for all the hardware devices Microsoft has introduced (or will in near future) so in providing this free upgrade it will ensure that the migration from on-device to in-cloud is done as quickly as possible.

The dog days of pirated software are slowly coming to the end.