I think you ought to re-read both those articles, because neither are stating what you think they do.
You said that Windows 10 may be a free upgrade for Win8x users.
Both articles say that
after Windows 10, upgrades will (the correct word is 'might') be free (so a completely different claim to what you suggested), but neither cite any MS sources for the claim.
Article one
only has Gartner saying what they think will happen.
The second article bizarrely has this paragraph in:
It looks like Microsoft will take a note from Apple’s book and make Windows 10 (also Windows 9) free for all consumers. Notice the last bit? Yep, Microsoft will still offer paid features and upgrades for enterprise, the one market they can count on.
Notice the last bit of what? I think the second article forgot to quote Gartner as its source (or perhaps it simply lifted the article from some other site but forgot to include everything in order for it to make sense).
Even if I take what they're saying as fact, they're saying AFTER Windows 10 (ie. customer pays for Windows 10), upgrades will be free.
I personally think it would be great if Win8x users all received free upgrades to 10, but consider a few points:
1 - A lot of people are going to be looking at Win10 as their saviour since Win8 came out looking (as many people perceive it to be, look at the Windows version market share figures) like a dog's dinner. That means that as long as MS doesn't screw it up in some similarly major way, people are going to upgrade in droves from XP/Vista/Win7. Microsoft could definitely do with the financial fixer-upper that such an wave would provide, not because they're poor but because they have share holders to answer to.
2 - MS offered a cheap upgrade to Win8, which I bet a fair number of people took advantage of. I have done a fair few WinXP upgrades for customers whose computers I built with XP during the Vista era, and some of those were to Win8. So, we have one crowd of people running Win8x on kit that's older than Win7, another crowd running Win7 era kit with Win8x, and then we have Win8x native PCs. Also, MS inexplicably put a hardware requirement into Win81 64 that stopped some Athlon 64 CPU machines to be able to get the update (so those machines will stop receiving patches before Win7 expires! In order to get support until 2023, they have to update to Win81). That is a lot of hardware to ensure the upgrade runs on. Sure, MS will say as they always do, "you should check the compatibility lists", but people are a lot more likely to do that when the upgrade involves committing to a potentially useless software purchase. Without that conceptual hurdle, more people will try to upgrade on the off-chance and end up with a potentially non-functional machine until they downgrade (if they have the knowledge to do that themselves). This results in pissed-off customers. The last thing MS needs is more pissed-off customers. Vista was a serious mis-step which resulted in a generation of kids checking out Apple, Win8 was another one because MS failed to consider that most of their users aren't using touch-screens nor is there a compelling reason for them to have one.
3 - Offering OS upgrades for free would mark a radical policy change for MS. Apple does it to force obsolence in their hardware products as quickly as possible, but MS only has the Surface and its phones. MS also tends to work on a policy of maximum backwards compatibility which is pretty much the opposite of Apple's policy. MS adopting free Windows upgrades would have to come with a string of caveats in order not to be a support nightmare. Apple supports a few different platforms and configurations, MS supports thousands of different hardware combinations.
Clarification - I said "that boat has sailed", making it sound like I was stating a fact rather than something I believe. I believe that after the successor to Win8x was renamed to Win10, that was MS drawing a line and wanting to distance itself from Win8x.
I think MS ought to change their OS upgrade policies because they cost too much for too little in return (except when XP reached its expiry date, that was somewhat more compelling), but MS is currently making some major changes (at least to the UI) in Windows, and that doesn't lend itself well to the more evolutionary, polishing, bug-fixing, security improving, and performance streamlining strategy that IMO would make a heck of a lot more sense considering that MS's main audience is its business customers, and that's how they reached home users in the first place (through businesses), and my idea would lend itself a lot better to a 'upgrades will be free' plan in future.
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