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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.
About 1 billion users will start to cry for 7 and even 8.1 back!
I am letting everyone know that I have been tested this on a Pc at work and on a VM in my virtual lab. Avoid this release like the plague! No RSAT tools, a VLAN change can crash it, install will corrupt itself, Windows updates break to the point a DISM image fix is required, and the list goes on and on.
The odd thing is we are just a few weeks before release and there is no change freeze yet??! MS laid off their QA team so they only add features and fix them after enough people complain on the internet with their discussion app.
I am sticking with Windows 8.1 for at least a year. Bloodstone which is the first bug fix update will come out next fall if rumors at www.neowin.net are correct. Another update will hit next summer. Maybe just maybe it will be stable enough??
For me even Windows 8.1 is not stable. I do a dism and a WindowsUPDATE FIXIT every freaking month! Literally after 2 years 8.1 still corrupts itself with updates.
Windows 7 the best most stable MS OS ever. If I were not an IT professional in charge of being up to date for myself and my employers systems I would still be on it. If you are not an IT admin or help desk jockey reading this stay on 7 for a few more years and let myself and the countless 1 billion fix the OS for you before it is time.
http://saveie6.com/
When I read through TFA, it sounds like the offer is being revised and updated every time somebody points out a loophole or potential gotcha to the lawyers.
Reading this, it seems to make more sense to me to:
1. Make Windows 10 Open Source and available to everybody
2. Charge for patch notification/installation. "For $10/year, we'll keep your copy of Windows current and in tip-top shape." For your average user, this would probably be a deal, and, I believe, is equivalent to the license fee Microsoft gets when the PC is first sold. For corporate users, this means they are outsourcing some IT responsibilities. For the technical user, they can maintain their workstations themselves and contribute fixes to the things that are important to them.
Sounds like utopia.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If this had been done with Windows 8, would it have been successful?
This would not have helped windows 8.
People only get an OS update for three reasons
New hardware comes with it. Windows 8 (can to a lesser extent Microsoft itself) had such a bad reputation that people would avoid new hardware purchases to avoid windows 8. Corporate customers refused to retrain their workforce, so windows 8 was out of the question. Had windows 7 not been an option, One of the Linux variants might have had a real shot...
Microsoft fanbois buy the new OS (or join the beta testing programs) to stay abreast of the latest and greatest. This category includes (whether they like it or not) tech journalists.
Some people need a new version of the OS because the old one did not do something they felt they needed. Hard core gamers tend to fall into this category which is why the directX program was so vital to Microsoft for the last 15+ years.
Microsoft is finding it harder and harder to generate new *must have* features with each new version of windows. That is why Windows XP enjoyed such a long run. Based on features alone, there would be no compelling reason to move to windows 8. This keeps Microsoft continually off balance. They have to continue creating new OS's so they don't get left behind, which costs a great deal of money, and runs the risk of breaking legacy programs. When they do, they need to convince people to buy the new OS (which most people really don't want to do). Microsoft can force the issue by discontinuing support for old versions (like XP), but each forced transition causes some percentage of windows customers to migrate away from windows. Microsoft is dying by inches, but like most things tech, once the avalanche lets go, the transition will be fast, powerful and will leave companies dying 15' under. People give Balmer a lot of shit, but he managed to avoid this fate for Microsoft, so all other things aside, he managed to avoid making any fatal mistakes which is more than can be said of many other tech companies.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
he's senile or out of loop of what his approved or ms approved tactic leads to.
the tactic is fairly simple, to get as many users to windows which is post win 7. that is, to get as much users to sign up for ms accounts and more importantly to use the store to download their software.
that's the "subscription". not anything else.
and giving away windows licenses to people who ask? that's been a microsoft tactic for half a decade now at least. if you have a smallish business, home/edu user or whatever and have been paying windows(not counting bundled with your laptop or whatever) then you're in minority by now. they've been shoveling the shit out as marketing tactic for a long time now. giving away windows 10 licenses to beta installers is not surprising at all.
and heck how many of those don't have already a windows 7 or 8 license that would be eligible for upgrade anyways? very fucking few. in the west practically everyone who has a new enough computer to run windows 10 already was covered to get it for "free".
and yes we are quite sure windows 10 will launch as non subscription just a normal thing and that it will be free for win7 and up upgraders. the microsoft pushed ad through the windows update has made that painfully clear for everyone who actually uses windows and thus might give a shit about windows 10 anyways.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
We've been here before: When Vista game out it immediately got a reputation as such a worthless, buggy, unstable, over-ornate piece of utter rubbish that very few people got it - and demand was so low that many OEMs were advertising 'comes with Windows XP' as a feature. Vista became the skipped version, as people held off on upgrading until seven game out. We seem to be in the same situation with windows eight: It's got such a poor image already for a hellish interface that everyone sensible has skipped it, and will go straight from seven to ten.
Some people need a new version of the OS because the old one did not do something they felt they needed. Hard core gamers tend to fall into this category which is why the directX program was so vital to Microsoft for the last 15+ years.
Kid, I hate to break it to you, but most Windows users are business users. Businesses upgrade when they need to. There have been plenty of good reasons to move to Windows 7 from Windows XP that have nothing to do with games.
I don't respond to AC's.
Honestly, install Classic Shell, follow the instructions you can find on the intertubes to make the Metro crap almost completely go away, get rid of their stupid start screen altogether, disable the Windows store and the apps ... and then just realize that the crap Microsoft has "innovated" is useful for touch screens, and beginning users and get on with their life.
Windows 8.1, once you remove the crap interface stuff Microsoft put into it, is a stable platform with a Start menu, which looks like it has for years.
I had to track down what update Microsoft snuck in as an "important update" which immediately started nagging me to install Windows 10 so it would leave me in peace. I fully expect to have to do that again because I'm sure Microsoft is going to try to decide for me that I really did intend to upgrade.
Sorry, Microsoft. It's my computer, not yours. I'll fucking decide when to upgrade the OS, and I'm not using my time and resources to be a damned beta tester for you.
Out of the box, Windows 8.1 is nothing but crap interfaces optimized for tablets, but terrible as a desktop. Get rid of the Metro crap and run Classic Shell, and it's pretty nice.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
They were cagey and had some misspeaks along the way, but the final picture is shaping up: Only those who are currently entitled to a currently supported Windows release level product license are entitled to Windows 10. Full stop. In short, it seems they are trying to rework their product development scheme to simplify their offering and reduce their exposure on support lifecycles while redefining the consumer space to enable them to keep up with their competition timelines on more equal footing (all the 'supported' desktop/mobile platforms abandon users pretty quick compared to microsoft).
The initial confusion around pirated copies: only genuine copies get to be 'genuine' Windows 10 versions. Basically the statement about update turns out to be a non-statement, though they allude to some 'attractive' offer.
The recent confusion that any Windows 10 previewer gets it for free: "It’s important to note that only people running Genuine Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 can upgrade to Windows 10 as part of the free upgrade offer." They edited the blog post to basically say 'no you are not entitled to a free copy just because you ran Windows 10 during preview".
So that's the strictly legal side. From a technical perspective, I wager that blog post hints at the reality that preview users will be able to get 10 for free fully activated without MS being the wiser, just without legal entitlement to do so.
I think if MS published numbers on Windows revenue from system vendors versus retail sales, we'd see that retail sales of Windows is a drop in the bucket. It seems entirely likely that the retail pricing is like list price of a vehicle: it's there to make you feel like you are getting a better deal when it gets 'included' with a device. All these shenanigans that let determined illegitimate users run Windows 'Genuine' are not worth addressing, because the opportunity cost is just not there in any realistic view of the world. They can selectively audit folks that *would* represent an opportunity cost and that threat keeps the viable revenue stream running from the world that actually licenses Windows in significant volumes: OEMs and corporate users. Yet they do make those people go through shenanigans so there can be no mistake, that someone is knowingly violating their agreements and that is not ok, so you better buy a copy of windows, or just give a little extra money to an MS partner and get new hardware while they are at it.
Of course the reason that the shenigans work is that MS licensing/'genuine' program is so convoluted, there are several scenarios and times when MS has no hope of masking illegitimate users without hitting some legitimate users. For example, in the 'Insider' case, it's probably the case that MS won't be able to stop a non-entitled user without also screwing over a Windows 7+ user that replaced their Windows 7+ platform with Windows 10 preview, probably losing the ability to prove to installer/activation servers they once had Windows 7+ genuine. Or maybe they could, but would require them to reinstall Windows 7/8/8.1 before update to Windows 10, which would just blemish their image just to keep it out of the hands of some people who weren't going to be giving MS money by any stretch.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
They keep using 'Windows as a service' and 'supported lifetime of the device' which strongly hint at subscription.
On the financial side, they have done something with a strong hint about what they means: they declared they will defer a license revenue purchase and only count a part of it a year until the projected useful life of the hardware device is over. So they need to come out and be explicit, but it seems nothing really changes from the customer side and they play accounting tricks to transform their revenue to resemble a subscription offering.
So all signs currently point to Windows 10 being more of the same. Their upfront price is large enough and in pracitce gets thrown out with the hardware it was running on.
So they gussied up some fancy accounting and marketing and suddenly they look like they are a 'free' platform to customers and subscription to investors. Nothing however really changed in any real fundamental way.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The toshiba laptops in my supplier's catalogue nearly all come with "Windows 7 32/64bit pre-installed. Also supplied with Windows 8/8.1 media"
Now, why would Toshiba go to the extra effort to pre-install what is effectively a downgrade, unless 1. customers are demanding it and 2. it's a selling point - "you don't have to downgrade, we've already done it for you!"
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You know... it's funny because a few weeks ago, I made the point on Slashdot that I, too, believed Windows 10 was Microsoft's vehicle for moving people to a subscription model for their OS upgrades. But I was immediately modded down as a troll.
I have lots of reasons to believe this is so, though - including attending a conference a few months ago where several Microsoft business sales reps were in attendance. They made it clear that moving forward, Microsoft is strongly focused on serving everything to you via the Cloud. They made the off-handed comment that the next release of Windows Server will likely be the last one you can actually buy to install on your own hardware. The future, according to them, lies in subscribing to everything hosted on Microsoft's Azure. You need a print and file server? Fine ... spin a new one up on Azure and configure as needed, and pay the monthly fee to keep it going as long as you need it. Same for SQL, SharePoint Server and more. And just the other day, they announced an internal restructuring of Microsoft's CRM/ERP software division (Great Plains Accounting software, basically) so it will go under their division doing Enterprise Cloud computing initiatives.
It sounds to me like Win 10 puts the "mechanism" on everyone's computer that will allow MS to push future OS updates to it via the Internet ... not just patches or "Service Packs", but complete new versions of the OS. They don't HAVE to do things that way, obviously ... but it sets the stage for a change to that deployment method.
Are you kidding? They were making poor business decision after poor business decision. They've completely turned everything they were doing on their head. I know I got rated down because I must be a M$FT fanboi, but realize I'm an investor and know good business practices when I see it. Just to name a few...
1) Backwards compatibility on Xbox One. Since the Xbox 360 uses big-endian it's no easy task to import all that to the Xbox One's little-endian architecture. But the fact they're doing this on a business rather than technical level screams a huge dedication to their users, who they could have just left out in the cold. It makes money because people will be more willing to buy an Xbox One if they can take their 360 collection with them. This is a complete reversal of the previous decision.
2) A change to the subscription business model. The slow change to the subscription based model is a step up for revenues everywhere and demonstrates that MS is business savvy and knows how best to earn revenue from consumers.
3) To the cloud! The cloud is just something people are going to have to accept one way or another. Because of the growing proliferation of the internet and the introduction of the IoT, everything will soon be connected to one global netspace. It's unavoidable and MS is (smartly) one of the few (like Google) leading the charge. If it wasn't them it would just be someone else.
4) .NET goes open source. MS does care about developers who develop on their platform. Increases market proliferation. And as much as people whine about it not being enough, it's more than reasonable from any business perspective.
I just switched to FreeBSD and I'm kicking myself for not doing it years ago.
Jails are exactly what I've been looking for for most of my 'virtualization' (Separate containers for different apps). The separation with /usr/local/ is strict. Ports and pkg cover all of my software needs.
I just built a Kodi HTPC with FreeBSD as the OS. It supports Nvidia VDPAU video acceleration. Transmission and an autostarting VPN is in its own jail.
Plus ZFS on root file system. I've moved the same ZFS poolbetween 3 different OSes (Solaris, ZFS on Linux, FreeBSD) in the last 7 years. Hard drives just get replaced and and the pool enlarges. I think I started with 250 GB drives and it now has 5-2TB drives. I haven't lost a file since then. It'll make a great set top box.
The only real reason is if she plans on keeping it past 2020, when extended support ends for Windows 7. Which is pretty unlikely if it's not upgraded to 8GB. Or, if there's a business reason to buy new software which then requires newer Windows (because of being badly coded).