All of which is why I said W9 should be free...because it'll be the update that fixed 8/8.1.
Also because of Apple's Update policy.
While I would not complain if MS delivered Win 9 for free, I don't know that it will Follow Apple's lead and offer 'free' OSes. For one, Microsoft does not have it's own hardware platform on which to deliver it, unlike Apple, and therefore has nowhere to hide the added cost. It could perhaps be done with Surface, given that's MS' own platform, but there would have to be some kind of a deal with the OEMs to help absorb the cost in the desktop environment, if 'given away for free'.
Now Apple might have thought it was being sneaky by announcing "free" OS updates, but I saw the price of a Mac Mini here jump by $200 not long thereafter. Of course it is included in the price of the hardware, and people buying Macs think they're getting a bargain, a free OS, but the truth is, that new hardware all of a sudden became more expensive to buy. So, OS-X Mavericks is no more free than Win 8 or any other MS OS... though the gullible, plain stupid and Apple fanbois will still rush in and buy themselves a Mac machine... with its not-so-bullshit-free OS.
As for MS getting it wrong, I do agree that making it so for W7 is a massive mistake if MS fails to include XP and Vista in the deal.... but then it would have to be an upgrade to 8.1 at the outset, because to do a piecemeal upgrade to Win 8 would be wrong, given the improvements of 8.1. However, I'm not so sure MS did too much else wrong... other than being late out of the starting blocks.
When Google and Apple came bursting out of the starting blocks with new and innovative technologies, they set trends and MS was already in catch up mode but didn't yet know it, and with the buying public being such a fickle bunch, that catch up was going to be a lot harder than it first imagined. The trends for smart phones and portable devices [read iPad, Google powered Tablets] had grown rapidly and were not easily going to be knock off the top of the pecking order. Hence, when Microsoft released the Surface tablet, which in itself was a good and innovative device, market trends had been set, buyer expectations and needs were pretty much decided, and Microsoft found itself having to pedal twice as fast to make up the ground it had lost.
The thing is, tech history and devices as we know them could be so much different, had MS released Surface and the W8 Phone first. Instead we'd all be using those devices as a matter of course, and Apple would be playing catch up.... because market trends would have been established and iThis and iThat wouldn't be selling half as well. More to the point, the OS that bridges 3 platforms and connects instinctively them would have been more warmly received. It's not that there is anything wrong with it so much, but rather that the buying public had already been conditioned by Apple hype and Google's... well Googl'es being into every feching thing except refuse and sewage disposal... though give 'em time, and your crap will be its business.
