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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!
It sounds like you don't like the idea. It's good that you're not forced to take them up on it.
Unsuccessful troll is unsuccessful.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
"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.
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!
They're just scared to death that no one will upgrade, just like with Vista. They probably hope that if enough people are trying for free at home, they'll want it at work and on their next computer. Then they might be able to finally sunset XP.
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.