The free option to upgrade to Windows 10 is still available for assistive technology users – including those that only use keyboard shortcuts like copy-paste – so why is Windows 7 market share of desktop operating systems still at 48.5 percent as of April 2017?
A Windows 7 to Windows 10 Upgrade Costs Money, Money, Money
Wait a minute. If the Windows 10 upgrade is free, what money am I talking about?
Let me elaborate.
Over a period of several years, Windows 7 users have “accrued” a whole bunch of software that is no longer supported or needs to be upgraded. That costs money – quite a bit.
Just to give you a picture of how much it might cost a user to upgrade to Windows 10 – even for free:
Cost of Office 2016 (without subscription): Office Home and Student version is $149; Office Home and Business version is $229; and Office Professional is $399.
Even if you opt for Office 2013, it’s not all that much cheaper, and you can’t get it directly from Microsoft – only third-party sellers have access to those now.
The other option is to take up a subscription plan, but a monthly cost for an indefinite period of time is not something a lot of people want to be saddled with.
And then there’s other software like Photoshop, which you’ll need to upgrade for Windows 10. That’s another $20 a month or so for a subscription to Photoshop CC (Creative Cloud), although it could be a lot more, depending on what plan you choose.
The list goes on and on, depending on how much old software you actually have installed on your Windows 7 machine.
The biggest problem is, even if you don’t mind spending hundreds of dollars on software upgrades, you might have older software that’s not even compatible with Windows 10. And you may not even have an option to upgrade some of that software, such as older classic PC games and such.
But even if you got past the software problem, there’s old hardware you need to deal with. A lot of old hardware won’t support software upgrades, and you’ll have to end up either ditching the idea of new software altogether, or throw the towel in and buy a new PC or laptop.
All that money spent completely wipes out the benefit of upgrading to Windows 10 for free, and is one of the biggest reasons why offering Windows 10 upgrades for free to Windows 7 users isn’t going to help one bit.
The only thing Microsoft can do at this point, as far as individuals and small businesses are concerned, is to wait for Windows 7 to “age” past its support period – that’s another four years. Until then, they’re only going to see drips and trickles of Windows 10 adoption from the Windows 7 community.
But if you still want to upgrade to Windows 10 from a licensed version of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, you can review this article we published a few days ago. The option is still open, as far as we know.
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