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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.
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.'"
Billy,
Aren't your comments the same sage advice that should be used with each new version of Windows?
I am doing 95% of my development work on Win7 simply because, like you, I believe it's the best version of Windows available for use right now (I always liked the stability of Win2k), but I just did a Google search on "Initial Windows 7 bugs" and there are numerous problems (including incomplete installations, unable to access optical media, theme change problems, etc.) all with the recommendation to wait a year+ until it gets stable.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has the mindset to get it out and then fix the problems (with some bean-counter probably saying that they should only spend money/resources on the problems that users actually care about) instead of doing it right before shipping.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
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.
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.
Is Microsoft worse than any other major OS vendor, or even any other major software vendor?
New versions of OS X seems to have fairly severe issues like wifi not working at launch, and Apple has a much smaller range of hardware to target. Linux occasionally throws out some critical data destroying bug by mistake (remember the EXT4 thing with config files?)
Microsoft really screwed up with trying to extend DOS into a 32 bit system, and then again by failing to realize that ordinary users would be running highly networked operating systems, but that was all more than a decade ago. XP was what, 2002? These days, apart from annoying UI changes (just like Gnome/KDE/OS X/iOS/Android) they seem to have mostly sorted themselves out, and certainly don't seem to be any worse than other vendors.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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).