We set out to make it as easy as possible for everyone to upgrade to Windows 8. Starting at general availability, if your PC is running Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 you will qualify to download an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for just $39.99 in 131 markets. And if you want, you can add Windows Media Center for free through the “add features” option within Windows 8 Pro after your upgrade.

While some may look at $40 as low, I see this as a very minimal cost targeting consumers (and not enterprises??) to upgrade faster to Windows 8. The best part of this promotion, the fact that it applies to Windows XP and Vista users too. As of last December there were 1.25 billion PCs and around 500 million of them running Windows 7. So we have more than 750 million PCs running older stack, most of them XP and few Vista. I would tend to believe that most of these PCs are not with large enterprises as most of them have corporate refresh cycles and with XP support ending most of these would have moved to Windows 7. Math is still simple, even if we have 100 million of these 750 million PCs take the benefit of this promotion, we are looking at $4 Billion uplift in Windows revenues.

I say, get your hands on Windows 8 while the promotion is on.