Slashdot Mirror
Windows 7 Will Be Free For a Year
Barence writes "Microsoft is effectively giving away Windows 7 free for a year with the launch of the Release Candidate. The Release Candidate is now available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, and will go on unlimited, general release on 5 May. The software will not expire until 1 June 2010, giving testers more than a year's free access to Windows 7. 'It's available to as many people who see fit to use it, although we wouldn't recommend it to just your average user,' John Curran, director of the Windows Client Group told PC Pro. 'We'd very strongly encourage anyone on the beta to move to the Release Candidate.'"
Sounds like a good idea to me! Can't think of anything wrong with it, but I trust someone will come up with something.
You just got troll'd!
I'll give you the first one free. And if you want more, come back to me.
So you get people hooked in with a free release, then hijack them after a year with no good downgrade path and thus no access to their data (modulo switching operating systems) unless they pay up?
I'm impressed. I didn't think MS could sink any lower.
Your 4-year-old's account shouldn't have administrator access.
If you gave his account administrator access, neither should you.
"It's available to as many people who see fit to use it, although we wouldn't recommend it to just your average user,"
Oh, I see what you did there. By implying it's not for everyone, you're hoping to get everyone to try it so that they feel a cut above the average user. It's a far slicker move than most of Microsoft's last decade of marketing who carpet bombed the PC market to get every single person alive on windows.
I don't see what's new here. So the latest version will self destruct in one year, then what? Or maybe they are releasing it to the public instead of leaking it like they normally do?
Nothing here, move along. Move along. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
"Microsoft is effectively giving away Windows 7 free for a year with the launch of the Release Candidate.
It's only free if you don't value bug fixes, security updates, product support and potentially all manner of issues installing software that will be released for Windows 7 RTM on a pre-release version no-one will have done significant product testing on and won't care to help you with if you run into problems.
Keeping all this in mind, and the fact this is pre-release development code, it's not hard to see why this release is free. I do find it odd that it's got such a generous expiration date, but approaching this as a free (time-limited) lunch is probably a fairly bad idea for all the reasons above.
If you like it, but don't want to pay for it, just pirate it. You'll be better off, and so may many others when they don't have to worry about your compromised box congesting their network, because it was exploited by a flaw MS has no intention of fixing in pre-release code.
Weed isn't addicting in the physical sense that you are probably referring to. I have stopped for years when necessary with no trouble. The drug you are looking for is crack/meth/coke.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Windows a gateway drug?
No it's more of a Dell drug.
This is actually a wonderful idea for them. it lowers the barrier for the transition. Even companies can push their costs forward in time.
But i'm thinking of all the pirates in asia. The street vendors with virus laden bootlegs will be competing against free. this will hurt their market. Then a year later what will the chinese consumer do? He could go out an buy a bootleg and re-install his system or he could buy a keycode and continue with his current system state. in many cases the idea of re-installing a system would be daunting enough to suddenly make the key code seem cheap.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Microsoft isn't concerned about "hooking" people. They accomplished that decades ago. Microsoft's problem is that people are hooked on XP. They spent a whackload of money on Vista, and nobody went for it. (By nobody, I mean corporations. Everybody who bought a new machine was forced to get it, but even then many switched back to XP.) Now, they've spent another whackload of money on Win7, and they want corporations to buy it. They want people to move off of the XP platform. This free windows is the bait to get them to switch.
Frankly, I don't know if it'll work. Windows XP works fine. It's an operating system. All it has to do is run applications and manage resources. It does that well enough for most people and corporations, so why switch?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
A story about Windows is posted on Slashdot and all the comments are usless dribble about M$ being buggy and instable. I think I see a parrallel between the way the media is covering the Swine Flu and how Linux users cover Windows stories...Can we please stay on topic here...
What is the (anti)benefit of a company putting out a beta like this for a long period of time?
I installed Linux and I feel so much better now.
Dennis Leary
That sounds like your own mistake. XP install allows you to format only one partition. You must have messed up by not choosing the proper options during the install.
This space for rent.
Hey, it's not Ubuntu.
If you install this RC you can't update it / upgrade to RTM.
That's the "average user" part, if you want security updates and don't want to rebuild your system from sratch in a year, this is not for you.
Basically it's not a main
I think it's more likely that this is Ballmer's strategy against his own failings with Vista.
They're in desperate need of getting people off XP - it's starting to show it's age from marketing point of view and I'm sure MS would like to move to a new technological platform as well.
It's also nice to see they've really looked at things that went wrong with Vista launch - I don't think they really can afford to bomb Windows 7 launch.
Or Microsoft accurately recognizes that a vast majority of their revenue is from OEM bundles and is willing to take an extremely small hit from a million or so computer geeks who know how to download, burn and install a product they'll have to reinstall in 12 months.
Either you stop using it and wouldn't have payed them anyway, or you buy it and they get your money eventually anyway. Either way they lose no money.
How about instead of saying "Unknown Partition", make a driver that allows read access to the FS drivers in the linux kernel?
MS: Linux may have been good for you, but we provide you the tools to migrate your data back to a "Complete MS Solution". We support all fileystems that Linux can read and write to, along with BASH scripting and posix programs by default. We also run a Linux compat layer, like BSD, so we can run native ELF executables without changing.
but no.
they are not giving Windows 7 for free. /. can't seem to write decent titles.
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