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Microsoft might want to be making Windows 12 a subscription OS, suggests leak

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Re: Microsoft might want to be making Windows 12 a subscription OS, suggests leak

#181

Post by jrflowers »

grotorea wrote: post #179
jrflowers wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Half-devil advocating here, but is this the end of the world? I agree. Consumers being able to confidently and simply calculate total cost of ownership is archaic — it only got Microsoft to $2.4T in valuation. What consumers really want is to get MSFT to $2.49T and we’ll happily accept a black box of personal and business costs to get them there

Eh, you can just get the price and include it in the budget as a monthly expense, no different from any other. Consider that the normal one time price will only last for as long as you use the OS. Why is a one time fee that will last an undetermined but long time always simpler than a repeating fee? And what if the one-time fee is too expensive and I wanted to spread it? Unless Microsoft decides to change the price l…

> Eh, you can just get the price and include it in the budget as a monthly expense, no different from any other.

Exactly! Before you could add the cost of hardware and Windows together and come up with a single number that reflects how much money you’d spend before retiring a pc once the hardware gives out. With this innovative new model we can simply forecast the number to be higher or lower, or ideally just leave it blank until we fill it into the spreadsheet at hardware EOL.

Re: Microsoft might want to be making Windows 12 a subscription OS, suggests leak

#182

Post by grotorea »

donmcronald wrote: post #171
grotorea wrote: post #168

Half-devil advocating here, but is this the end of the world? Right now, we have software that we expect that keeps being updated, but the company gets a one time payment. With a subscription, things get more stable financially and the company can adjust the budget accordingly. It also incentivized keeping Windows good and working so those subscriptions don't get cancelled.

It's a way to significantly increase the total cost of owning Windows. I have tons of PCs that are 10 years old and have a $100-200 Windows license on them. There's no way on earth Microsoft is going to offer a $10-20 per year subscription for Windows. My guess is that we'll be looking at something in the range of $5 USD per-month with some kind of bundle deal around $100 USD per year that includes MS365. A best case…

I do wonder how they expect to compete on the home PC market against Android and iOS devices with a subscription that is more expensive than the one time license.

As for business, yeah they're probably going to bundle it on MS365 and deal with it. Even for consumers, how many home Windows PC users don't use Office?

> I think we'll see a solid 3x increase in the total cost of owning Windows for anyone that keeps their computer for 10 years. That's about where Office got priced. It broke even at about a 3 year lifecycle IIRC, so any individuals or small businesses that ran a longer lifecycle saw a dramatic increase in cost.

Maybe they're hoping that a lower initial price will lure in more users? Are the people with longer lifecycle easier to extract higher prices from for some reason?

Re: Microsoft might want to be making Windows 12 a subscription OS, suggests leak

#183

Post by xg15 »

grotorea wrote: post #179
jrflowers wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Half-devil advocating here, but is this the end of the world? I agree. Consumers being able to confidently and simply calculate total cost of ownership is archaic — it only got Microsoft to $2.4T in valuation. What consumers really want is to get MSFT to $2.49T and we’ll happily accept a black box of personal and business costs to get them there

Eh, you can just get the price and include it in the budget as a monthly expense, no different from any other. Consider that the normal one time price will only last for as long as you use the OS. Why is a one time fee that will last an undetermined but long time always simpler than a repeating fee? And what if the one-time fee is too expensive and I wanted to spread it? Unless Microsoft decides to change the price l…

Because a one-time fee isn't a monthly expense but a subscription is - and your budget of monthly recurring payments is much more limited than your budget of one-time payments.

> Consider that the normal one time price will only last for as long as you use the

Which can be decades if people aren't artificially forced to abandon the os.

Re: Microsoft might want to be making Windows 12 a subscription OS, suggests leak

#184

Post by kyriakos »

fluoridation wrote: post #52
alanfranz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usd 10/year is entirely reasonable. But I fear an higher fee.

If your average user buys a new version every 5 years and the Pro version costs $250, they could charge $50/yr. $10/yr would be quite generous, unless they think they can get lots of people to stop pirating the OS. $10/month seems like an unlikely price point.

I honestly don't understand why anyone would pirate windows. Its full featured if you don't activate apart from a watermark. If you choose to activate you can get an oem key for like 10 usd.

Re: Microsoft might want to be making Windows 12 a subscription OS, suggests leak

#185

Post by kyriakos »

ChrisRR wrote: post #17

I'm not even sure why Windows 11 exists, I can't see any real difference over Windows 10 (once I move the start menu back to the left) Hell, I don't even know what's the difference between Windows 7 and 11

Windows 11 has a lot of improvements under the hood, like better memory management, extra wsl features, better multi screen management etc

Re: Microsoft might want to be making Windows 12 a subscription OS, suggests leak

#186

Post by mock-possum »

grotorea wrote: post #168

Half-devil advocating here, but is this the end of the world? Right now, we have software that we expect that keeps being updated, but the company gets a one time payment. With a subscription, things get more stable financially and the company can adjust the budget accordingly. It also incentivized keeping Windows good and working so those subscriptions don't get cancelled.

I mean it would be the end of me using windows for personal computing. The only reason I use Microsoft office these days is if my employer springs for a subscription for me - windows could easily be the same.

Re: Microsoft might want to be making Windows 12 a subscription OS, suggests leak

#187

Post by deprecative »

jorts wrote: post #98
nrr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are windows hard to manage under macOS?

It just requires an app on Mac versus windows key + arrow to move windows around. It's a non-issue.

Requiring an app is a blocking issue.

Re: Microsoft might want to be making Windows 12 a subscription OS, suggests leak

#188

Post by archerx »

linguae wrote: post #166
k12sosse wrote: post #156

Alternate title: how Microsoft handed Linux the keys to desktop dominance I wonder if Windows will be included with GamePass™

Windows has long had its detractors, yet during every upcoming Windows release when some controversial change causes some people to exclaim that this will finally be the year of the Linux desktop, most Windows users end up grinning and bearing it, and thus the year of the Linux desktop gets pushed back for the umpteenth time. Even if Microsoft charges subscription fees for Windows 12, I predict that people will eithe…

I have been using windows since version 3.11, I will never pay a subscription for windows, will not install windows 11 and will not install windows 12. I have been a die hard windows user/fan for decades but windows is dying, the corpse is starting to stink. My future will probably have less microsoft and more Linux and MacOS once windows 10 is no longer usable.

Re: Microsoft might want to be making Windows 12 a subscription OS, suggests leak

#189

Post by jiggawatts »

Vaguely similar to the notion of an “alive” business and a “dead” one, I look at any application or website with a community in the same light: the second that some suit-wearing MBA is allowed to alienate the power users, the contributors, the developers, or the equivalent, it’s downhill into inevitable doom from there.

Sure, the bulk of the user pyramid might be retained — for a while — but the peak is where the action was. Like the growing shoot at the end of a branch, that’s where new applications are written, new content is produced, and new markets are created. The rest just consumes, uses, and follows.

Microsoft is insisting on driving away their most important but least numerous users as hard and as fast as they possibly can.

No metrics will show the consequences of these decisions, and no one will be punished for tragically abusing the commons. I tiny vocal minority is lost, sure, but who cares? They were troublemakers and hard to market to! Good riddance.

The uptake of the each new Windows version is slower and slower than the one before. The excitement and innovation has been replaced by telemetry and built in crapware.

People stood in line to buy a copy of Windows 95.

Hardly anyone will install Windows 12 on purpose.

Re: Microsoft might want to be making Windows 12 a subscription OS, suggests leak

#190

Post by gridlocdev »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #124

I have a bottle of champagne put aside for when I can finally quit windows. I’m actively porting my software stack and dependencies to cross platform so it’ll be pretty soon. They’ve clearly taken their monopoly position for granted and now there is serious inertia behind getting rid of them. I’m actually responding to customer demand for cross platform so the customers are clearly hating windows as well. The thing a…

I switched to Linux around the time the TPM stuff started since my hardware was “no longer supported” on Windows 11, and honestly more people should try Linux. I feel like aside from multiplayer online gaming (where anticheat is basically a self-inflicted rootkit) there’s not much missing here. Most Steam games are playable thanks to Valve, I legitimately almost never need to touch the terminal since apps are containerized now and distros ship a software store application to manage them, and the major desktop environments (GNOME, KDE) all have a stable and modern-looking UI.
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