As someone who is both a heavy Office user and who plays AAA games, I pretty much have to use Windows at least some of the time, which I'm OK with; it works and I'm used to it. And I would be perfectly OK to pay money to get a work-focused OS that doesn't have any of the Windows monetization tricks where it tries to harvest my data or bombard me with ads, so this sounds promising on the surface.
But then I realize that I already pay for a work-focused OS, because Windows wasn't free - I bought a (somewhat expensive) copy of Windows 10 Professional when I built my current machine, and they still try to do all of that crap. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you have to buy Windows 12, then pay a monthly fee to keep using it, then get bombarded with ads and all your activity tracked and then sold to third parties.
Source site seems to be down. Windows Central has some clarifications:
> Now, references to a subscription model were found in the latest Windows preview builds, suggesting that Microsoft is finally going to force users to pay a monthly subscription to use Windows, right? No. These references are almost definitely tied to the newly discovered "IoT Enterprise Subscription" edition of Windows 11, not the client version of Windows vNext.
> I've wondered why microsoft hasn't done this already.
Step 1 was to make TPMs ubiquitous. As soon as everyone's computer can make attestations on behalf of (or, more accurately, against) them, then it's game over. I bet Microsoft starts splitting out app features and charging for them individually similar to how Adobe does with Acrobat.
Nah - the alternative is choosing software that is stable and open.
Not some crazy "not made in house - gonna code it myself" crap... that seems like some weird personal thing.
Approach software as a set of tools, with the expectation that you must learn and master its use, but then you will be functional and productive for a long time.
That's what stand-alone installers or self-hosted alternatives are. They require more learning, but they don't sell you out, close down, jack up the price, or turn off features because it's "not generating new users".
They also don't randomly rework the UI nearly as often because "if it's not shiny we can't sell it".
But they do require more work and learning up front. For me, at least... that tradeoff is a clear and easy win.
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Good software is like good woodworking tools - hard to master, but very productive once you're there. SaaS is always the opposite: Super easy to start, incredibly frustrating to be a power user.
Saas doesn't want power users - it wants more subscriptions.
> Approach software as a set of tools, with the expectation that you must learn and master its use, but then you will be functional and productive for a long time.
Are you referring to people not having the desire or time to learn how to set up these types of things, but want to use them?
The solution is... centralization, on a smaller scale. Maybe that's a home network admin, or a whole street, neighborhood, city, community. I don't really know.
It's not reasonable to think everyone needs or wants to manage their network and services, of course. The cost to ensure everyone has this specialized knowledge is terribly high, it will waste what else they could have known instead.
Now to provide these kinds of services as a city or community is certainly not free, even if the software is free. It costs people's time, experience, and knowledge. It requires powerful enough servers to handle requests and storage for everything.
Another thing to mention is that these open source services are probably full of very critical and damaging exploits, but they are not seen or cared about yet because these services are not mainstream popular or often not public facing at all. Popular open source services have had many of their high level exploits discovered, and closed source things are scrutinized differently.
The first 2, LOL. People just click some buttons and frequently create abominations with them. They in no way, shape or form, "master them".
Image editors and the like are pro tools, not mass market tools. You either use them well or you don't have a job.
If you're wondering why word processors and spreadsheets don't count is that for most jobs you just use them incidentally, it's not your day job. And there is a very small minority that masters them, but it's just that, a minority.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, especially in the context of something as monumental as Microsoft Windows. But just in general, how does a subscription model prevent naive competitors from trying to make an alternative?
The kernel team doesn't use either version, they use release monikers internally (ie. Threshold, RS1-RS5, 19h1-22h2, Sun Valley 1, SV2 etc.)
But also, internal interfaces and external interfaces are rev'd so teams tend to talk about the different interfaces they work with (ie. dxgi 1.2, dx12_3, wddm 3.2, UMDF 2.1) or the different internal versions of apisets.
> Wasn't windows 10 supposed to be the "last windows ever"
Microsoft has never said that.
Edit: since people are still confused.
1. What was said was "...and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10".
This was said by a Microsoft developer evangelist, never it was an official corporate position or an announcement. And most certainly no one said "ever".
2. You could argue "the last version" meant "the most recent".
3. When Microsoft has been reached for a comment, they produced a usual corporate speech about how Windows 10 is going to be "reflective of the way Windows will be delivered as a service" (whatever this means) but they never confirmed there won't be the next version.
Your article largely agrees with the parent comment. A developer evangelist mentioned it once, Microsoft didn't immediately deny it, loads of people made assumptions of what that meant. Your article even mentions 11 and 12 were still a possibility.
And to an extent the basic idea they did agree to has been true. 11 was a free upgrade for machines that were eligible to run it. I didn't need to go out and purchase a new Windows version.
I had both friends and family working in Microsoft when Windows 10 was released, and it definitely was sold as the last OS that would just get free updates forever. And that they would run it as a loss-leader.
I believe it was heavily implied, but either way, it was clearly something they didn't handle well if tons and tons of people believe they said it when that wasn't their intention.
Accepting that “charge a large amount of money up front for the OS” is a dead end business model I’d be okay with this if they stripped all the user hostile and adware crap back. They won’t.
Valve investing in SteamOS and Proton looks really prescient. It took years, but the investment has really paid off (for me, not sure Valve).
Games is/was my only need for Windows and I finally ditched my Windows machine last year. I have had to give up on playing some incompatible titles, but there is still a wealth of options available.
When I started college in the early 2000s my one and only computer dual booted so I could run games and Windows-only university software on the Windows side and everything else under Linux.
In the middle of college, I went full Linux with Wine for some games but moved the rest of my gaming to console.
After college, I went back to dual booting because PC gaming was the more economical choice and I had bills to pay.
Then I went back to full Linux with Wine for a number of years because I didn't have a lot of time to play anyway and keeping Windows running was a pain.
After I made the jump to full time employee from contractor I went two machines - a Linux machine for everything but gaming and a gaming machine for gaming, moving the gaming machine to the every day driver for a couple of newly built gaming rigs.
Now I'm full time Linux with Proton for most games and a single GPU-passthrough for anything that doesn't run on that.
I could probably spend my entire time gaming and never touch a title that doesn't run under Proton and still have plenty of things to play with my friends and plenty of new releases to try.
It is amazing how much a company run by former Microsoft employees has dumped into never having to deal with Windows again. It's been good for their bottom line too.
Windows is already a subscription OS, usually for businesses. Subscription licenses are included with higher Microsoft 365 tiers. It's just one of the many ways that it's sold. This doesn't indicate that the perpetual licenses are going away, but it seems logical that they would package certain services in a subscription tier like bundling Microsoft 365 with Copilot and other future features.
I think they will offer two options, advertising or advanced features. The advertising option speaks for itself. The will put ads in different parts of the O/S. Kiss goodbye to any privacy you thought you had.
The features option will make more O/S options like photo and video editing apps a subscription type model. Pay $10 a year and get the advanced features.
Either way, I think this should help Apple and open source operating systems.
$1/year is entirely unreasonable. They build a product, they sell it to you, transaction ends there. They should sell you a product that works. Bug fixes are part of making the thing you bought closer to what was advertised, so it's part of the initial purchase. An OS is not a SaaS, and nobody considered doing it until it became popular, because it's a fad.
If your average user buys a new version every 5 years and the Pro version costs $250, they could charge $50/yr. $10/yr would be quite generous, unless they think they can get lots of people to stop pirating the OS. $10/month seems like an unlikely price point.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would pirate windows. Its full featured if you don't activate apart from a watermark. If you choose to activate you can get an oem key for like 10 usd.
Reckon that's true (I mostly use Linux). Trouble is, Windows has such wide usage and large legacy that one often can't avoid it (some important commercial/industrial software just won't work under, say, Wine no matter how much tweaking and unfortunately there's no Linux version).
You must be hallucinating. Of course Microsoft will abuse you with ads and tracking, no matter how much you pay. And now that every last coffee machine in the world runs Windoze, they cannot grow by increasing the number of installations any more. The only way “up” is by raising the price.
No, sorry, that will be the premium tier above the paid basic ad subsidized tier. Today they only offer the basic ad subsidized tier with a subscription period of their support window.
Somehow we ended up in a time line where there is this great mainstream full stack os where not only do you get the full source code you also are allowed to use and distribute it with very few restrictions. All of which is based on the critical generosity of a few key individuals. It is easy to imagine a history where this did not happen at all.
The coolest thing is, say you are a snob like me, "Ah yes, your source code based os project is very nice and all but it's inclusiveness has made it far to big and messy for my small hipster mind" there are multiple source code based operating systems to choose from! Really it is pretty great.
I am willing to believe that MS might try a subscription model, but this doesn't look like particularly strong evidence for it.
Those strings could be anything - For all we know, it's just tracking office 365 subscription status/enterprise enrollment, or tracking windows account notification subscriptions, or any of a hundred other valid reasons.
Those terms are just too generic to be particularly meaningful.
I already dual boot windows 11 and NixOS. I only use Windows for some games on Steam, everything else I do in nix land. (My work computer is a Mac but that could be switched easily as well.)
There isn't a world where I would pay a subscription for an OS, given the plethora of good and stable distros of linux (and OSX)
Similar story here, I take it a step further and boot windows as a guest VM with hardware passthrough w/ evdev + ddcutil as a software kvm switch. The only time I boot it baremetal is for programs that are hostile to being run in a VM.
It's a good learning exercise, and the community over at /r/vfio + their discord is pretty helpful.
I used to run Windows as a guest os with passthru access to a dedicated disk/drive and it did run great. I could even reboot natively into Windows using the same disk.
I haven't done it again on my upgraded machines and instead use a dedicated Windows gaming machine. Proton should work fine for the games I play as it doesn't need any (incompatible) anti-cheat software--just haven't got around to it.
If Microsoft does, I am not using Windows 12, I am going to Ubuntu. I won't even pirate it. I refuse to pay a subscription for an OS, that should be pay once and be done paying.
You can't be serious. This is a subscription of an entirely different kind, and most certainly will not be too useful for most people. So long you run an LTS release, you get a stable target that will remain stable and supported by security updates for 5 years. For free.
The problem is, in a capitalist world even libre/open source needs money to live. A race to thr cheapest is a loss for everyone in that kind of society. No OS is ever "done", there is always maintenance, security updates, ...
Yes but what is the right price for a one-time payment of software ? If you're going to use maintenance, updates, all the work that comes after you paid, what do you consider is a correct price to pay in advance for all future changes ?
The "correct price" depends entirely on the specific software, so this is an impossible question to answer in its literal sense.
> what do you consider is a correct price to pay in advance for all future changes ?
You don't. Outside of security updates, which should never be charged for, you pay for the software as it exists when you buy it. When future changes come around, you buy the upgrade (if you want it).
It's the tried-and-true method of charging for this stuff.
We're specifically talking about an OS here, so the scope is not really the same, but still: are you ok with no package updates ? No update to the documentation, the wiki, and stuff like that ? No forum or chat ?
You are already paying a subscription for an OS. How old is your computer, 4 years-5 years old? Take $200 (cost of OS) and it's $40 or $50 a year or $3-4 dollars a month. Same applies for Apple Mac OS you just pay the $200 in the price of the $2,000 computure.
That's an oversimplification because it requires the utility of the device to be maintained over it's operational life. Routinely the utility of the device changes as new features are added or removed during OS upgrades, support for software, and eventually hardware support is dropped entirely. It doesn't matter if the hardware is still functional.
This isn't even necessarily in the vendor's control. For example, Google Chrome just stopped loading TLS encrypted sites on my partner's MacBook this past week and displays a lovely pink banner over every tab saying the OS is no longer supported.
Companies are not held to any standards for support and the amount of support they give varies based on the product. Apple has provided decades of support for some products but considerably less for others because they shared an architecture or platform that was eventually dropped. Google is notorious for just dropped support for products on a whim.
The problem with Amortization in the consumer space is the lifetime of the device. Sure, you can keep running a computer for year 6 instead of the standard 5 years...but 90% of consumers don't - What machines from 2016 are you using today? If you do, let's get serious you're already looking to upgrade in the near future, no?
I agree no one uses devices for long. But as a pedantic N=1...
I use a computer from around 2011-13.. can't quite remember.
Added a stick of RAM(it came with 4gb), and changed the HDD to an SDD, and had to replace the coin cell battery in the nvram once, all told for <10000INR. So it's the original cost + 10000INR for something that works perfectly well today, after 10+ years ;)
So yes, we exist too.
But, no complaints, linux windows all of it work flawlessly.
What? Say you bought some pants last year for $60. Do you think you paid a $5/month subscription for that? What have you ever purchased that's not a subscription then?
Rolling this out would be a business disaster studied for decades.
I've know enough people already honked off about all the gorp in Windows 11 that many of them are refusing to move from Windows 10. This would be the icing on the cake to finally get them broken free from Windows as an OS.
This, sadly, won't break the hegemony of Office 365, though.
10 and 11 sure, but 7 and 11 have quite a few differences under the hood. WSL, the new terminal system, hardware scheduling for GPUs, direct storage, REBAR, etc.
11 was meant to be Microsoft's "Windows 10X" for a Surface brand dual-screen folding product. The product folded before launch and they decided to merge Windows 10 stable to the 10X as an outcome of their infighting around the fold.
Windows 11 has two features that I appreciate enough to hesitate going back to 10, specifically AtlasOS.
The first being auto-HDR. I don’t have to manually switch my displays to HDR when I launch a 3D game with HDR support, and I don’t have to have the awful always on HDR on my desktop.
The second being Windows 11 remembering window position when you disconnect and reconnect monitors. It’s great being able to take my laptop off the dock with two monitors, then bring it back and my windows go back to where they were in each display. Windows 10 just puts them all on the primary display.
Windows has long had its detractors, yet during every upcoming Windows release when some controversial change causes some people to exclaim that this will finally be the year of the Linux desktop, most Windows users end up grinning and bearing it, and thus the year of the Linux desktop gets pushed back for the umpteenth time. Even if Microsoft charges subscription fees for Windows 12, I predict that people will either grin and bear it, or they will stick to Windows 11 for as long as they can. If enough people don’t upgrade to Windows 12, Microsoft might relent, like how Windows 8.1 brought back the smart menu and how later releases of Windows 10 addressed some criticism of earlier releases. But given previous patterns, I don’t expect a mass exodus to Linux.
It certainly pushed people towards MacOS and Linux. Office usage has also been decimated by Google docs and similar. Early education is largely on Chromebooks.
Mass exodus to Linux won't happen, but W11 may become the next XP that people won't upgrade from for decades. And then the price of hardware+subscription will be compared to buying an otherwise overpriced Mac...
I have been using windows since version 3.11, I will never pay a subscription for windows, will not install windows 11 and will not install windows 12. I have been a die hard windows user/fan for decades but windows is dying, the corpse is starting to stink. My future will probably have less microsoft and more Linux and MacOS once windows 10 is no longer usable.
Vaguely similar to the notion of an “alive” business and a “dead” one, I look at any application or website with a community in the same light: the second that some suit-wearing MBA is allowed to alienate the power users, the contributors, the developers, or the equivalent, it’s downhill into inevitable doom from there.
Sure, the bulk of the user pyramid might be retained — for a while — but the peak is where the action was. Like the growing shoot at the end of a branch, that’s where new applications are written, new content is produced, and new markets are created. The rest just consumes, uses, and follows.
Microsoft is insisting on driving away their most important but least numerous users as hard and as fast as they possibly can.
No metrics will show the consequences of these decisions, and no one will be punished for tragically abusing the commons. I tiny vocal minority is lost, sure, but who cares? They were troublemakers and hard to market to! Good riddance.
The uptake of the each new Windows version is slower and slower than the one before. The excitement and innovation has been replaced by telemetry and built in crapware.
> Sure, the bulk of the user pyramid might be retained — for a while — but the peak is where the action was. Like the growing shoot at the end of a branch, that’s where new applications are written, new content is produced, and new markets are created. The rest just consumes, uses, and follows.
And the suit-wearing MBA will probably say "yup, that's fine, it's harvest time!"
It's a good thing that Valve made so much progress making games runable on Linux over the past 10 years. Imagine your plumber charging an annual fee for the copper pipes he replaced a decade ago.
I would guess that they are not planning on charging a monthly fee to use windows on your own hardware. If I had to guess I would say that this is related to a subscription for an online version of windows. Pay a monthly fee and get a full version of windows dekstop in a browser that you can use anywhere.
Yes. There's already leaked screenshots that kind of show what this might look like. Windows already allows for multiple desktops (Win+Tab, Win+left or right). An idea is you would have cloud desktop instances available seamlessly in the list when logged in with your Microsoft account. Or through a browser.
Microsoft already has a chunk of this infrastructure in place with Xbox Cloud Gaming, which in my experiences works pretty well. I've been playing a lot of Starfield on cloud streaming on a cheap $300 Walmart laptop on WiFi, even public WiFi at places like cafes and tethered on my phone.
We currently have two main versions of Windows 11 - Home and Professional, which cost a set price and include free updates for the lifetime of the operating system.
I don't know about you but I personally paid for windows pro for workstations.
I just got a steam deck and I have to say, it’s amazing. Not only that but it’s driving Linux support for AAA games. So, my advice, if you want to drive a nail into windows gaming, get a steam deck as the metrics report back to development houses and form product strategy.
My bootloader is all screwed up because of the TPM2.0 requirement for Windows 11 so I have to boot to BIOS and select my drive whenever I restart. It's a pain.
I'm perpetually surprised to see this. Windows has flaws, but every time I've tried Linux, it's been a bad experience. Ie, starts smooth from a clean install, but breaks once you install things outside the distro's package management. Turns into a cycle of internet searches, then C+Ping text into the terminal, hoping it will fix things, and the GUI will still boot afterwards.
I've been running the same Ubuntu install on my desktop for over 5 years now and I haven't run into any issues (if I did they were small enough that I don't remember them). It my experience, it's much more stable, usable, and aesthetic than Windows.
Not to be that guy but Windows is the best OS out right now with all its faults. I don't have to dick around with Linux, and my USB ports don't crap the bed every two seconds and I can actually manage my windows unlike with MacOS.
Have to agree. I regularly use Windows 11, OS X, and Debian-based desktop distros. Nothing comes close to the built-in functionality of Windows. Such a shame it's subject to advertising and aggressive telemetry.
I usually get away just fine with Control+Command+f to fullscreen the window, and Control+Up will open up Mission Control so that I can get two fullscreened windows side-by-side. It's all built into macOS.
Windows 11 adds snap layouts, for which there is currently no analog, but this will let you do the side-by-side thing from earlier versions of Windows as long as you can tolerate the fullscreened windows becoming their own Space. (I actually find this preferable myself, but YMMV.)
The insistence that window be the only thing I need to be looking at on MacOS is also a frustrating one. No, Steve, I really do want to manage my windows.
Which ones? Proton via Steam (and even outside of Steam) is doing a fantastic job of most recent games. I don't run Windows at all anymore, and gaming is the primary usage of my desktop.
I have a bottle of champagne put aside for when I can finally quit windows. I’m actively porting my software stack and dependencies to cross platform so it’ll be pretty soon. They’ve clearly taken their monopoly position for granted and now there is serious inertia behind getting rid of them. I’m actually responding to customer demand for cross platform so the customers are clearly hating windows as well.
The thing about ads is that quite often whatever you will pay to remove it, someone will pay more to put it back. Paying to remove ads is a signal that you’re the exact kind of person they want to send ads to. So not having ads has to both be either a moral position instead or a long term sustainability position. Microsoft expect their monopoly status to sustain them and have been ratcheting up their abuse of their monopoly to extract more money. In my view they’re on track to losing that privilege.
Just recently YouTube has started blocking videos due to add blocker presence. I already pay producers via patreon and I guess I will just go watch over there. YouTube is a bad habit I need to break and their new policy will help me do that.
Oh, and while I’m shitting in windows; the defender has made file access almost unusably slow, and I get intermittent stuttering both in games and with music on an absolute overkill of a computer speced this way precisely because it needs to run windows.
I switched to Linux around the time the TPM stuff started since my hardware was “no longer supported” on Windows 11, and honestly more people should try Linux. I feel like aside from multiplayer online gaming (where anticheat is basically a self-inflicted rootkit) there’s not much missing here. Most Steam games are playable thanks to Valve, I legitimately almost never need to touch the terminal since apps are containerized now and distros ship a software store application to manage them, and the major desktop environments (GNOME, KDE) all have a stable and modern-looking UI.
> I have a bottle of champagne put aside for when I can finally quit windows.
This is an odd incentive. One might consider it as a reason for using Windows as long as possible, since the bottle would be of a mature vintage and worth more?
It's kind of like the furniture store that refunds people's mattress purchases if the baseball team wins. Given the advantage of not making people's purchase free retroactively, the promotion is kind of like betting against the team even though it is proclaimed as if it is in support of the team.
If age was a consideration I would have bought an older bottle. I'm not a connoisseur, or even a lush. It's a large bottle so that I can share it with my friends, I'm the last windows holdout so they're waiting on me. My windows experience isn't even that bad as I disable most of the crap they try to foist upon me. It's the forced breaking upgrades that have caused the most personal grief. Apart from that it really is about responding to customer demand. I'd like to buy an apple laptop and hopefully by then there is a really good linux experience. I'd hate to go from Windows anti-consumerism to Apple anti-consumerism but it's hard to get good laptop hardware.
People refuse to pay (intentionally or financially) and they won't receive security updates on older OS and see how the world unfolds.
It's already a mess that people are using so many different Windows versions and MS took the effort to beg users to upgrade. They will be unwinding that effort altogether not to mention bug the developers to support so many different OS versions.
Apple has always been right that they release OS upgrades freely and see how much saner it is.
God damn it. I really like the Windows ecosystem I grew up in. Feel so much at home on Windows; I dislike macOS profoundly, and can barely function in a Linux UI distro (feels like I'm working with one hand tied behind my back).
But there's no way I'm buying into more ads and bullshit from MS; if this comes to fruition I'll hold on to debloated Windows 10/11 for as long as I can then begrudgingly move over to the least disruptive distro of Linux I can find :(
I fully defend Microsoft's right to do this (whether they actually will do it is as yet unknown), but it in no way benefits users. There is competition in the OS area, and a few people will gravitate to Linux; more might go to ChromeOS or MacOS. The subscription rate will have to be set so that it's not more expensive over say 3 years to buy a PC with Windows than it is to buy a comparable Mac (if they don't do that, they will be handing Apple a massive tool to increase sales).
I think Chromebooks might do well in that environment, especially for naïve users (though they have their uses even for advanced users; I like my Chromebooks and their Linux VMs). You buy the machine, plug it in, and it fires up almost immediately; and your machine has software support now for 10 years at no cost (if you trust Google to deliver on that). I suspect that many canny purchasers will compare Microsoft's subscription cost to Google's ($0), and decide accordingly.
My guess (and my track record is clear, in 1976 I predicted that Apple would be bankrupt within a year) is that Microsoft will offer a combined Windows/Office365 subscription, and a barebones “free” Windows that nags the user to “upgrade”.
I think the strongest competition is actually other Windows versions: People are usually fine with the Windows version they know and use - Microsoft already had to drag it's users kicking and screaming to update from XP to 7, then later from 8 to 10.
I feel they'd have to up that kind of pressure by a lot to get people to switch not just to a new version, but now even one that requires a subscription.
So if this ever becomes reality, I expect a massive campaign of FUD, dark patterns and deliberate incompatibility to get people to leave the old versions.
> The subscription rate will have to be set so that it’s not more expensive over say 3 years to buy a PC with Windows and than it is to buy a comparable Mac…
i agree with your overall point. tho for me, i suspect the price would need to be significantly less than than that (PC price included.)
my main driver is linux, but im on windows for probably 40% of work stuff. however, i have incredible subscription fatigue. its to the point now that i forego products regularly if i cant just buy it outright. i’ll happily even pay more than i would over time just to 1) not have to manage and deal with the constant little pin pricks of soooo many subscriptions, and 2) to feel like i own the thing.
if windows goes subscription, i will almost certainly just move to mac for the things i cant do with linux and if my read of others is correct, i suspect many many others would do the same.
On a side note, in a universe where ReactOS[0] had comprehensive drivers support, would it be a better alternative to modern Windows? Or would desktop Linux?
I mostly use Linux but still have some Win-7 PCs and I'll never upgrade them. That said, I've tried ReactOS over the years but it's hardly even in alpha it's so incomplete. If it were usable I'd certainly use it.
In my mind ReactOS conjures images of building the pyramids with a team of three—completion date estimate sometime between forever and eternity. Never has there ever been a software project that's been so long in gestation and still going nowhere.
Unfortunately, I've given up on ReactOS but what I'd really love to know is why it's taken so long. Given the long saga of Windows and of MS's abuse of its users—many of whom are annoyed and disgruntled because they've little or no option but to continue to use Windows—then you'd think there'd be an almighty rush to develop a Windows clone. But no, there's stuff-all interest and it's always been so.
I'd go as far to say the failure of ReactOS is one of the strangest and most curious events to occur in software history. One perhaps can understand why ReactOS was never developed in the US or even any Western country but why hasn't say Russia or China or other ex-Eastern Bloc countries thrown money into its development (seeing that much of its development already comes from that part of the world)? You'd reckon there'd even be both a strategic and financial advantage for these countries (as there was during the Cold War when they threw huge sums into developing an alternative source of tech).
If MS bundled in some hardware it would be similar to the iPhone Upgrade Program where one pays monthly and gets new hardware every year (which is bundled with the OS). How much of the consumer's payment hardware and how much OS/software? The consumer is just paying for value provided by peace of mind that they have something that works. (This is a hypo on my part as my personal value is to keep using the same phone until the OS is too far out of date.)
this would be an enormous mistake unless it is radically cheaper than I know it will be. It would have to be under $5 a month to be worthwhile. The market of windows users able to afford more than that is a tiny fraction of current owners, and no a lot of them aren't even pirates they just paid for it with a pc bundle deal. See netflix usage rates in romania (2.5%), hungary (3.6%) etc as an illustrative example, these are middle income countries where I can assure you people are interested in the content but will not pay $8 a month
I'm sure you're making a clever joke and I'm just not getting it.
All Windows branded as NT as well as 2000 (the first NT not branded as such) predate Windows 8 by over a decade, so I don't understand why you'd think one of them would be number 9.
Ah, my bad... I mean the last one worth using wasn't 9, but either 2000 or NT, which for the love of god always confuse nowadays despite having used both back the day... I think my preferred one of all time was 2000, but again not sure if actually was NT... I'm getting old...
Edit: Just realized GPs joke... There never was a Windows 9... And it isn't even that late...
NT version numbers were weird, and major releases didn5 increment major version numbers, but if you the first major release (NT 3.1) as the next major windows version after Windows 3.x, (so as 4) you would get to 9 about Windows 2000 (this counts 3.51 as a major release.)
Of course, that would leave out the consumer line starting with Win 95.
Half-devil advocating here, but is this the end of the world?
Right now, we have software that we expect that keeps being updated, but the company gets a one time payment. With a subscription, things get more stable financially and the company can adjust the budget accordingly.
It also incentivized keeping Windows good and working so those subscriptions don't get cancelled.
It's a way to significantly increase the total cost of owning Windows. I have tons of PCs that are 10 years old and have a $100-200 Windows license on them. There's no way on earth Microsoft is going to offer a $10-20 per year subscription for Windows.
My guess is that we'll be looking at something in the range of $5 USD per-month with some kind of bundle deal around $100 USD per year that includes MS365. A best case scenario would be some type of MS365 family plan that includes a Windows license.
It's going to be the same as when Adobe switched to subscriptions. The internet will be filled with people proclaiming how great it is for everyone because "updates aren't free", but then we'll see the total cost of ownership go up drastically.
I think we'll see a solid 3x increase in the total cost of owning Windows for anyone that keeps their computer for 10 years. That's about where Office got priced. It broke even at about a 3 year lifecycle IIRC, so any individuals or small businesses that ran a longer lifecycle saw a dramatic increase in cost.
> It also incentivized keeping Windows good and working so those subscriptions don't get cancelled.
Lol. For most people, they need it and don't have any other options, so the status quo is going to be paying a subscription, watching ads, and giving up all your personal data. The subscription is a price increase, not a move to give us a better product.
If they bundle it with MS365, that's the time to break up Microsoft. If it were up to me they'd get split into so many different companies that each product within the Office suite would be a separate company. Excel should absolutely be it's own company at this point.
I do wonder how they expect to compete on the home PC market against Android and iOS devices with a subscription that is more expensive than the one time license.
As for business, yeah they're probably going to bundle it on MS365 and deal with it. Even for consumers, how many home Windows PC users don't use Office?
> I think we'll see a solid 3x increase in the total cost of owning Windows for anyone that keeps their computer for 10 years. That's about where Office got priced. It broke even at about a 3 year lifecycle IIRC, so any individuals or small businesses that ran a longer lifecycle saw a dramatic increase in cost.
Maybe they're hoping that a lower initial price will lure in more users? Are the people with longer lifecycle easier to extract higher prices from for some reason?
> Half-devil advocating here, but is this the end of the world?
I agree. Consumers being able to confidently and simply calculate total cost of ownership is archaic — it only got Microsoft to $2.4T in valuation. What consumers really want is to get MSFT to $2.49T and we’ll happily accept a black box of personal and business costs to get them there
Eh, you can just get the price and include it in the budget as a monthly expense, no different from any other. Consider that the normal one time price will only last for as long as you use the OS. Why is a one time fee that will last an undetermined but long time always simpler than a repeating fee? And what if the one-time fee is too expensive and I wanted to spread it?
Unless Microsoft decides to change the price later of course. In which case you'd have little recourse since changing OSes is hard.
> Eh, you can just get the price and include it in the budget as a monthly expense, no different from any other.
Exactly! Before you could add the cost of hardware and Windows together and come up with a single number that reflects how much money you’d spend before retiring a pc once the hardware gives out. With this innovative new model we can simply forecast the number to be higher or lower, or ideally just leave it blank until we fill it into the spreadsheet at hardware EOL.
Because a one-time fee isn't a monthly expense but a subscription is - and your budget of monthly recurring payments is much more limited than your budget of one-time payments.
> Consider that the normal one time price will only last for as long as you use the
Which can be decades if people aren't artificially forced to abandon the os.
Windows is free when I buy a PC. If I need to pay additional money to keep the OS running then I may as well save some money in the first place and just use Linux.
Windows is free because the price is bundled. There's the possibility that the PC will be cheaper with a subscription since the OEM won't have to pay Microsoft for the Windows license if it's the end user paying the subscription. Microsoft could even end up paying the OEM for preinstalling Windows.
I mean it would be the end of me using windows for personal computing. The only reason I use Microsoft office these days is if my employer springs for a subscription for me - windows could easily be the same.
I think if they did this manufacturers would get sued. You have to have windows on some computers. They're locked in. If you further have to pay, this might brick the device, and that I think would mean violating your rights of ownership.
Most people will pay for it, I’m suprised it took MS that long to realise it. I love Haiku, use Linux professionally, also have a MacBook Pro, but lets face it, all the best software works best on Windows.
Interesting. I bought a Mac this year and I don't think I'll be coming back to windows and if this is their endgame, PC makers will go a different route too.
Except the part where Windows used to be installed on a machine and that was the end of that. Then Win10 encourages you to use a Microsoft account "for syncing". Then Win11 insisted you use a Microsoft account, making it close-enough-to-impossible for regular users to still use a local account at all.
So there's nothing new here, because MS already started down this path years ago, we're just commented midway through. If they'd gone cloud at Win8, no one would have gone for it. At Win12, after this gradual descent into "listen to my voice, you don't even want a local account, you can't even remember why you ever wanted one in the first place, this is so much less of a hassle", it'd be a fairly easy sell to the masses.
Throw in an yearly subscription plan that buys your company permission to run windows server, where your hardware can act as access point, syncing with MS's infrastructure, but isn't the primary data host, and that sure sounds like something Microsoft would absolutely love to be in charge of.
More likely, if you choose to signin with a windows/live/entra id, your subscription activates it, else you out in a code. It would be utter incompetence when macos is a thing to not frog-boil consumers. It might be sunscription only, but probably not right away.
That does not have the same catalog of games as Windows, that does not have the same catalog of useful third party apps as Mac, that does not have the ease of maintenance as Windows and Mac...
I heard there will be the year of Linux desktop since maybe 15 years but there's a reason that hasn't happened.
But then I realize that I already pay for a work-focused OS, because Windows wasn't free - I bought a (somewhat expensive) copy of Windows 10 Professional when I built my current machine, and they still try to do all of that crap. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you have to buy Windows 12, then pay a monthly fee to keep using it, then get bombarded with ads and all your activity tracked and then sold to third parties.