The Unintended Consequences of Free Windows 10 For Everyone

Ammalgam writes: Microsoft seems to be really driven to pushing over a billion people to the new Windows 10 platform as soon as humanly possible. In the latest push to make this happen, the company has basically decided that (somewhat off the record), pirates can come in the side door and it really doesn't matter what the state of their Windows license is, they can get Windows 10 for free. To get deep into the weeds on how this is happening, you have to read Ed Bott's excellent article on ZDNET – "With a nod and a wink, Microsoft gives away Windows 10 to anyone who asks." However, on Windows10update.com, Onuora Amobi asks whether the cost benefit analysis has been done and if this deluge of new members will have a detrimental effect on the Windows Insider Program.

Comments

wtfsrsly

[drinkypoo]

Whether the CBA has been done? Are you fucking serious? If there's one thing Microsoft has done, it's the CBA. Whether it's based on well-founded assumptions is another question.

However, if you actually tunnel down into that article, they don't actually speculate about the CBA at all! They actually just show that they don't understand what they're talking about. Here's what the relevant paragraph from TFA actually says:

This all comes down to cost benefit analysis. Hopefully someone at Microsoft has done the analysis and decided that it makes more sense for the company to open the gates wide than it does to preserve the integrity of the Insider Program.

The author goes on to speculate that "if hundreds of millions join the Insider Program just for Windows 10, their participation and active feedback levels will be tremendously low" and that "It will make it a lot harder for Microsoft to nurture and mine this group for good information because the data sample size will grow exponentially." But this is a lot of cockery that shows that the author doesn't understand data reporting. Most low-quality information will be readily characterized; the users will have given incomplete or terse information, for example, and you can simply "throw away" any such reports unless they pertain specifically to an issue you care about — in which case, someone is going to loot the database specifically for problem reports which are relevant to the case at hand. And presumably, if the quality is going to suffer so badly, Microsoft already has a significant corpus of higher-quality problem reports to compare new ones against to determine whether they're worth looking at.

However, the author has also apparently missed the full import of the Windows 10 experience program, which has unprecedented levels of snoopery built into it. Now that Microsoft has gone through the hardcore cadre, they open the floodgates to the general population so that they can collect more automated testing data. As users attempt to run their programs on Windows 10, Microsoft gathers crash reports that tell them not just what users are running, but how to shape Windows 10 to serve the majority as regards backwards compatibility.

TL;DR: Everything about the idea that Microsoft hasn't run the numbers on this thing is stupid.

Dear Microsoft.

[Lumpy]

Stop being retards.

Make windows 10 FREE for home or personal use. Purchased License required for anything else, it's really brain dead simple and protects your income stream as business licensing is 90% of your revenue from the OS. You will still charge DELL and HP and others got the OEM licenses if they want it pre-installed on their computers. AS they would not dare to sell a PC with no OS installed to the drooling masses.

But home users that have an IQ above 60 that can install it on their own? give it to them for free and utterly destroy the piracy of your OS.