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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

#51

Post by cptskippy »

itishappy wrote: post #14
ianceicys wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are already paying a subscription for an OS. How old is your computer, 4 years-5 years old? Take $200 (cost of OS) and it's $40 or $50 a year or $3-4 dollars a month. Same applies for Apple Mac OS you just pay the $200 in the price of the $2,000 computure.

That's not a subscription, that's amortization. The critical difference is that amortization decreases your cost per unit time with use. More use, better value. Subscriptions do not work that way. Having to pay $50/year for a 5 year old laptop doesn't excite.

That's an oversimplification because it requires the utility of the device to be maintained over it's operational life. Routinely the utility of the device changes as new features are added or removed during OS upgrades, support for software, and eventually hardware support is dropped entirely. It doesn't matter if the hardware is still functional.

This isn't even necessarily in the vendor's control. For example, Google Chrome just stopped loading TLS encrypted sites on my partner's MacBook this past week and displays a lovely pink banner over every tab saying the OS is no longer supported.

Companies are not held to any standards for support and the amount of support they give varies based on the product. Apple has provided decades of support for some products but considerably less for others because they shared an architecture or platform that was eventually dropped. Google is notorious for just dropped support for products on a whim.

And subscriptions won't fix this problem.

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

#52

Post by fluoridation »

alanfranz wrote: post #24
aNoob7000 wrote: post #13

I think they will offer two options, advertising or advanced features. The advertising option speaks for itself. The will put ads in different parts of the O/S. Kiss goodbye to any privacy you thought you had. The features option will make more O/S options like photo and video editing apps a subscription type model. Pay $10 a year and get the advanced features. Either way, I think this should help Apple and open sour…

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.

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

#53

Post by seanw444 »

alanfranz wrote: post #24
aNoob7000 wrote: post #13

I think they will offer two options, advertising or advanced features. The advertising option speaks for itself. The will put ads in different parts of the O/S. Kiss goodbye to any privacy you thought you had. The features option will make more O/S options like photo and video editing apps a subscription type model. Pay $10 a year and get the advanced features. Either way, I think this should help Apple and open sour…

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

$1/year is entirely unreasonable. They build a product, they sell it to you, transaction ends there. They should sell you a product that works. Bug fixes are part of making the thing you bought closer to what was advertised, so it's part of the initial purchase. An OS is not a SaaS, and nobody considered doing it until it became popular, because it's a fad.

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

#54

Post by k9unit »

oblio wrote: post #27
horsawlarway wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah - the alternative is choosing software that is stable and open. Not some crazy "not made in house - gonna code it myself" crap... that seems like some weird personal thing. Approach software as a set of tools, with the expectation that you must learn and master its use, but then you will be functional and productive for a long time. That's what stand-alone installers or self-hosted alternatives are. They require…

> Approach software as a set of tools, with the expectation that you must learn and master its use, but then you will be functional and productive for a long time. This does not scale to end users.

Are you referring to people not having the desire or time to learn how to set up these types of things, but want to use them?

The solution is... centralization, on a smaller scale. Maybe that's a home network admin, or a whole street, neighborhood, city, community. I don't really know.

It's not reasonable to think everyone needs or wants to manage their network and services, of course. The cost to ensure everyone has this specialized knowledge is terribly high, it will waste what else they could have known instead.

Now to provide these kinds of services as a city or community is certainly not free, even if the software is free. It costs people's time, experience, and knowledge. It requires powerful enough servers to handle requests and storage for everything.

Another thing to mention is that these open source services are probably full of very critical and damaging exploits, but they are not seen or cared about yet because these services are not mainstream popular or often not public facing at all. Popular open source services have had many of their high level exploits discovered, and closed source things are scrutinized differently.

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

#56

Post by vel0city »

alt227 wrote: post #36

I would guess that they are not planning on charging a monthly fee to use windows on your own hardware. If I had to guess I would say that this is related to a subscription for an online version of windows. Pay a monthly fee and get a full version of windows dekstop in a browser that you can use anywhere.

Yes. There's already leaked screenshots that kind of show what this might look like. Windows already allows for multiple desktops (Win+Tab, Win+left or right). An idea is you would have cloud desktop instances available seamlessly in the list when logged in with your Microsoft account. Or through a browser.

Microsoft already has a chunk of this infrastructure in place with Xbox Cloud Gaming, which in my experiences works pretty well. I've been playing a lot of Starfield on cloud streaming on a cheap $300 Walmart laptop on WiFi, even public WiFi at places like cafes and tethered on my phone.

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

#59

Post by ianceicys »

itishappy wrote: post #14
ianceicys wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are already paying a subscription for an OS. How old is your computer, 4 years-5 years old? Take $200 (cost of OS) and it's $40 or $50 a year or $3-4 dollars a month. Same applies for Apple Mac OS you just pay the $200 in the price of the $2,000 computure.

That's not a subscription, that's amortization. The critical difference is that amortization decreases your cost per unit time with use. More use, better value. Subscriptions do not work that way. Having to pay $50/year for a 5 year old laptop doesn't excite.

The problem with Amortization in the consumer space is the lifetime of the device. Sure, you can keep running a computer for year 6 instead of the standard 5 years...but 90% of consumers don't - What machines from 2016 are you using today? If you do, let's get serious you're already looking to upgrade in the near future, no?
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