Microsoft just announced the pricing scheme for upgrading from various flavors of Windows 7 to other flavors of Windows 7 through the “Windows Anytime Upgrade (WAU)” program. For Microsoft customers, this comes as a relief as it should make life much easier in scenarios such as the following:

One day you decide to purchase a new, sweet looking Dell Mini 10 netbook with Windows 7 Starter. A few weeks later you are reading personal email via Gmail (Internet Explorer), on Twitter (TweetDeck) and listening to music (iTunes), when all of a sudden you realize you missed an important business meeting with Katy Perry and Tay Zonday on the topic of how to solve world hunger because Outlook never served you with a “Meeting Reminder” because you already had three applications open. This would obviously force you to smash your teeth in requiring a long hospital stay and painful oral surgery. Following your release from the hospital you may say to yourself “Hey, self. It might be nice to upgrade that piece of crap Windows 7 Starter edition to something that’s actually functional. Why the hell didn’t Dell warn me about this in the first place? I might still have some of my natural teeth if they had done that.” After an hour on hold with Dell, a Dell sales representive finally picks up and tells you to hang up and call Microsoft and inquire about the “Windows Anytime Upgrade (WAU)” program.

NOW, aren’t you glad Microsoft established this program? Isn’t it fucking convenient? You’re damned right it’s convenient. You can upgrade ANYTIME. Not just on Tuesdays or alternating Saturdays like with all those other operating system manufacturers. Is Caldera or Tandy forcing you to upgrade your OS on weekdays from 9am-5pm? With Microsoft you can upgrade from Windows 7 Home Basic Starter Premium Small Business (Northeastern US) 2009 Edition to Windows 7 Prosumer Advanced Home Theater CE Touch Tablet at 4:30am on a SUNDAY! Yes, you read that right. On a SUNDAY! Anytime. Daylight savings time, Christmas Eve, Boxing Day, while you’re in the shower–wait, actually–anytime, except anytime you want to upgrade from say Window 7 Starter directly to Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate. That’s just unreasonable and impossible. You’re an asshole. That’s what you are.

It seems extremely straightforward, but just in case you’ve missed anything or are more visually inclined, I’ve gone ahead and provided a chart for my readers.

And please remember that there’s no official way as of yet to go from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Ultimate or from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Professional outside of buying two upgrade packages. Also unknown is how one might move from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 7 Ultimate.

Let’s look at the pricing plan for OS X upgrades now: $29.

Sometimes I wonder if the Product Marketing and Management folks at Microsoft have any say at all in the things they make. (Is that statement too Marxian for you? Scary, eh?) Perhaps there are just so many people and layers of management that even when they know something such as their pricing is an impending train wreck more than six months from launch, they can’t do anything to correct course. So who does makes deicisions like this inane pricing scheme? Most folks would say “Clearly, a committee.” But I know the real answer. There’s actually one man at Microsoft who made the decision. I hear he calls all the shots in Redmond these days. His name is Clippy.

Parting thought–what about the pricing of this upgrade path?

If I post this graphic on that official Windows 7 Blog, do you think they’ll respond?