Microsoft Will Sell Office, Windows as a Bundle (axios.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft announced plans on Monday to start offering Windows 10 and Office together in a single subscription service. Microsoft 365, as the service is known, will also include security and management tools and come in two flavors: one for large enterprises and the other for small-to-medium businesses. The company didn't say how much it will charge for either version of the service.

Comments

Not just no.

[Chas]

HELL FUCKING NO!

I am NOT going to rent my OS from Microsoft. Not now. Not EVER.

Re:Not just no.

[Rick Schumann]

Hey there Bob, nice computer you have there, running our Windows 10. Would be a shame if something.. happened to it, now wouldn't it? Oh by the way we're doubling our subscription fee starting next month, just so you know..

..or did that scenario not occur to you? How would it make you feel, if your computer refused to boot one day, instead displaying a message from Miscreant-o-soft, demanding additional payments from you? Pretty shitty, I'd hope. That's what we're fighting against, at all costs. Personally if it was a choice between Miscreant-o-soft and no computer at all, I'd go with no computer. Luckily there's myriad flavors of Linux out there so there's still choice. Otherwise Microsoft is leaning in the direction of not being much better than ransomware authors.

Re: Not just no.

[saloomy]

1: this offering is aimed at businesses which would much rather have subscriptions to their software in order to skip having to shell out tons of money for the next iterative release.

2: almost every other software aimed at professionals works this way now, like Adobe Creative Suite, MS Office, and of course every cloud based software.

3: this offering is aimed at businesses who don't buy their OS bundled with their computer, but use some sort of virtualized environment (either on or off premises).

4: At $7/month this software (over a 2 or 3 year time period) is significantly cheaper than buying the license outright and paying for software assurance.

This makes sense for just about any business that plans on keeping their software up to date for their knowledge workers. Obviously if you have a grungy old PC in the back you use to print barcodes that is kept around for a decade and still runs Windows XP, this model may not be for you, buy the license (which you still can do).

Re:Not just no.

[iampiti]

I disagree. With the previous model you made a one time payment and had X years of fixes but you could use that license afterwards.
With the new model either you keep paying every X months or you can't keep using the software (in theory at least).
I'm still running 7, not because I'm cheap or specially attached to old software but because I dislike many things about Windows 10. If I liked it I'd gladly pay the upgrade.

Re:Not just no.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Software is typically licensed, not sold...

It's nominally on permanent loan to you.

Those aren't necessarily the same thing at all. For a long time, your copy of software you bought with a permanent licence was yours. Various software companies tried to limit rights to it through EULAs, copyright tricks, and so on, but at least in some parts of the world the courts have pretty consistently undermined those moves.

So now there is a move in certain parts of the industry, particularly the parts selling expensive business software and selling games, to move away from any pretense of permanent sales and make it quite explicit that you're just renting something on a subscription basis. This is what has a lot of professional and power user types upset, because relying on something that can be changed or even permanently switched off at any time is not a reliable way to run anything, and is why a new generation of tech laws may now have to deal with questions of service longevity, data portability, and so on.

Re:Keep Trying

[TheRaven64]

The flip side of this is that people want a one-time payment but not a one-time purchase. They don't want to just buy Windows, they want to buy Windows and a multi-year supply of security and bug fixes. This seems like a better model to me: it hopefully gives Microsoft a financial incentive to keep versions of Windows that people actually want to use supported, rather than killing them and pushing people to buy new ones if they want security updates.

Re:Keep Trying

[gfxguy]

Yes, that's true, but shouldn't I expect bug fixes for my one time payment? They sold me a broken product! As far as security goes, I assume we're talking about viruses and trojans; I suppose it's fair to suggest that people pay for additions to their virus and malware protection to account for new threats, but paying for bug fixes has always been a load of BS.