Windows Anytime Upgrade

~ the obit ~

I have never met anyone in Turkey who bought a Windows upgrade key, and I should say that at the top rather than bury it. Anytime Upgrade was a shop, and a shop assumes a relationship with software licensing that a large share of the world simply did not have in those years.

Microsoft introduced it alongside Windows Vista on 30 November 2006. The premise was that the edition of Windows on your computer was not a permanent fact about it. If your laptop shipped with Home Premium and you wanted Ultimate, you were not expected to go and buy a boxed copy; you opened Anytime Upgrade, paid something below the retail price, and came out the other side with the better edition on the machine you were already sitting in front of.

Vista did this the heavy way. The upgrade performed a full reinstallation of the new edition while carrying your files and settings across, which meant installation media and a long afternoon. Windows 7 changed the mechanism completely, and that is where it becomes worth writing about. The components for the upgraded editions were already installed on every machine. Home Premium and Ultimate were the same pile of files with different things switched on.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the funny part ~

Everybody's Windows 7 disc contained every edition. The installer decided which one you were getting by reading the product key you typed, and the files belonging to the versions you had not paid for stayed sitting on the drive afterward, occupying space and doing nothing. Anytime Upgrade was the supported way to switch them on.

There was an unsupported way too, and it was widely known. A small file named ei.cfg on the installation media controlled which edition the installer would offer, and removing it made the disc stop and ask you which one you wanted. That changed nothing about what you were licensed to run. What it did was make visible a thing that licensing normally keeps comfortably abstract, which is that you had already been shipped the expensive version and were being asked to pay for permission rather than for software.

~ the last day to buy ~

Windows 8 kept the machinery and renamed it Add Features to Windows. Its main business by then was selling an upgrade to Pro, or adding Windows Media Center onto a Pro install, which was its own peculiar little transaction: Media Center had been free inside Windows for years and was now a paid extra on its way out of the product for good.

Microsoft shut the service down on 31 October 2015. Windows 10 had arrived three months before that, on 29 July, and it was free for anyone running a genuine Windows 7 or 8.1. A feature built entirely around charging you to climb one rung has very little left to do once the whole ladder is being handed out.

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