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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.
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
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.