Microsoft Announces Surface as a Service, Windows 10 Enterprise E3 for $7 Per User Per Month (zdnet.com) 157
Mary Jo Foley, reporting for ZDNet: Microsoft plans to make its recently renamed Windows 10 Enterprise product available as a subscription for $7 per user per month, or $84 per year. Microsoft took the wraps off the pricing of one of the two renamed versions of Windows 10 Enterprise at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto on July 12. Windows 10 Enterprise E3 is the name of the lower-end of two different versions of Windows 10 Enterprise. Windows 10 Enterprise E5 is the new name of the Windows 10 Enterprise version that also will include Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, a new Microsoft service for detecting and responding to attacks. Microsoft announced the renaming of Windows 10 Enterprise last week, and said the E3 and E5 versions will also be available as part of "Secure Productive Enterprise" bundles.Microsoft also announced a subscription service for Surface tablet. The company says that its Cloud Solution Providers and Surface Authorized Distributors can now sell Surface as a Service.
Rent-Seeking (Score:1)
Can you say "rent-seeking," ladies and gentlemen? MS knows they're out of ideas, so their next step is to "Office-ize" their entire vertical stack, from hardware to OS to applications. Predictable, and ultimately a very dangerous move for ordinary consumers.
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Anyone that wants to decide when Windows lags them out of stuff in the interest of downloading updates, for one.
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Alright, I will admit to that particular point.
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Perhaps you are thinking of Windows 10 Pro?
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Windows Vista and 7 Ultimate version users, I believe. That's a superset of the Enterprise edition.
I was "burned" by Windows 7 not including the old Unix subsystem except on Enterprise and Ultimate (just kidding, I wanted it to play with it and run simple software but I'm still pissed over it)
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...to be followed by truly heart-felt apologies and the addition of a "No Thanks" widget that will immediately initiate the upgrade.
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Not to worry, citizen! Your OS and Tablet will be automatically upgraded by Microsoft to a subscription model, for your convenience!
No. Just no. Stop perpetuating this. While Microsoft has made many missteps with Win10, this isn't one of them. Yet.
Enterprise was never free to upgrade. It was always a product available only through volume licensing, usually with Software Assurance, which is a yearly fee.
Home and Pro have no sign of moving to a subscription plan at this point. That might change some day, but there's no sign of it yet.
Like last week's "revelation" that the latest Win10 build includes some SUBSCRIPTIONTHING.EXE
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Home and Pro have no sign of moving to a subscription plan at this point. That might change some day, but there's no sign of it yet.
That is only because they don't have the requisite datacenters built. Yet.
Re:Rent-Seeking (Score:5, Insightful)
Home and Pro have no sign of moving to a subscription plan at this point.
Are you sure? Does it need to be in 150-foot tall neon for it to qualify as a "sign"?
Given the direction they've taken consumer and enterprise Office, the newly announced enterprise Windows subscriptions, and the claim that "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows", what other conclusion can be made? And on top of that, desktop sales have slowed as newer machines tend to last users a lot longer than they historically did. With all this in mind I think it's entirely reasonable to deduce that within a year or two all editions of Windows will be sold via subscription.
The real question is what they will do with existing installations. Will there be a year or two grace period after which point your license expires and will require a subscription renewal? Or will they allow existing licenses to continue in perpetuity? Will offline installation still be possible or will yearly renewals be required via phone for disconnected machines? Either way, Microsoft will probably price it such that they even claim it's a "savings" because the "average user" would have spent more to upgrade Windows every two years than they will in subscription fees.
Re:Rent-Seeking (Score:4, Insightful)
The actual writing on the wall is that the home (and school) computing markets have become Chromebook markets. For Microsoft to compete there, they need to move their entire application stack into the cloud (which they've already done a great deal of). Then strip down Windows into a form that can be auto-upgraded behind the scenes like Chromebooks can.
There may remain a market for traditional Windows desktops, but it's a shrinking one. Microsoft already has enough of a strangle hold there to keep it, but it's losing the Chromebook market - and they don't like to lose. They'll make Windows available for traditional desktop PC's - and maybe they'll sell some kind of subscription service for upgrades, but ultimately PC OS upgrades are going to go away - in the sense that they'll be 'hidden and automatic' like on Chromebooks, or 'free and automatic' with a subscription on PC's - or just free as in "we can't sell upgrades any more, and it's more trouble than it's worth to continue to support old versions, so...".
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The actual writing on the wall is that the home (and school) computing markets have become Chromebook markets.
The reason that Chromebooks are winning the home and school markets is that they just work. I have a Chromebook along with all my other computers, and the problems are so few as to be negligible. I have yet to find a Microsoft OS computer that ever lived up to that not so lofty goal. I don't use that particular computer for anything serious unless I boot into the Linux side, but for most people, its email and browsing.
And you aren't chearged 80 some dollars a year (to start) for access to the Chromebook.
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Chromebooks sold something on the order of 1.6 million units last quarter. Considerable, and a strong growth trajectory, but overwhelming into education, not the broader consumer market.
But then you have the convertible market. The last quarter of 2015 saw unit sales hit 8.1 million units, including 1.6 million Surface devices and 2+ million iPad Pros).
That's what Chromebooks are competing against; not "traditional Windows desktops". There have been a ton of Windows devices flooding into the market, offe
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It's possible that by opening the platform up to locally installed apps and more local storage they may damage the essential appeal.
That seems unlikely. The addition of locally installed apps and more local storage doesn't mean they will lose all of the support for back-end services. Logging in with your Google account to a new machine will still give you access to all your apps. The locally installed ones will start downloading in the background, and meanwhile the online versions will be available. Your local files will start downloading from online backup.
Now if you took advantage of locally installed apps and that local storage t
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There are a ton of Android applications which strictly use local storage for state data, configuration and state. It doesn't matter that ChromeOS supports back-end services if the applications don't use them.
So you log with your Google account to a new machine, and maybe it restores the installed set of applications (or at least gives access; you probably don't want the same set of applications on every single device associated with your Google account), but your shopping list app is empty, your RSS feeds
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I would imagine schools and libraries, etc. will still have an option to disable loading android apps.
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Possibly, but that means someone needs to know to lock down the devices before deploying them, which is far from guaranteed. And even if they know, all it takes is one teacher successfully arguing that their students "need" some particular Android application before the floodgates are opened (especially if the OS/2 effect kicks in and ISVs stop targeting Chrome because Chromebooks can just run the Android app instead).
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The real question is what they will do with existing installations. Will there be a year or two grace period after which point your license expires and will require a subscription renewal? Or will they allow existing licenses to continue in perpetuity?
And therein lies the answer. Microsoft just pushed as hard as they could for everyone on Home and Pro to upgrade to Win10. Thing is, those licenses were perpetual, and the replacement license for Win10 isn't subscription. If they pull a bait & switch and degrade our perpetual licenses into a subscription product, there will be lawsuits. Successful ones.
Same thing goes for anyone who bought a new PC in the last year with Win10 installed on it. Perpetual.
They can't even play the game of "oh, you
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Or will they allow existing licenses to continue in perpetuity?
For a very long time, MS has done a good job of keeping KB archives active. Since the release of Windows10, I've noticed a large number of KB articles disappearing without a trace. It's getting very difficult to look up technical information on Windows7, let alone WinXP or earlier. In many cases, trying to find tech articles for Windows7 just redirects you to a page advertising an upgrade to Windows10.
MS doesn't need to officially revoke licenses. These days a product doesn't even need to be labeled "un
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Going to bookmark your post so that in 6 months we can all say "Toldya so!!"
Captcha: punitive
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Not
Yet.
at this point
Very soon I will be able to say
"I told you so"
MS has been introducing this change on us like proverbial 'boiling frog'. It's coming and I think even you are starting to see the light or you would have used more assertive in your statements.
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MS has been introducing this change on us like proverbial 'boiling frog'. It's coming and I think even you are starting to see the light or you would have used more assertive in your statements.
I hear you. I honestly do. Market trends make it seem obvious. But the repeated "there you, told you" posts every time news is posted that ISN'T about our existing licenses going subscription is getting really, really old.
Microsoft leasing hardware and offering software that already is subscription-related (mostly) isn't evidence. It's just not.
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Not to worry, citizen! Your OS and Tablet will be automatically upgraded by Microsoft to a subscription model, for your convenience!
No. Just no. Stop perpetuating this. While Microsoft has made many missteps with Win10, this isn't one of them. Yet. Enterprise was never free to upgrade. It was always a product available only through volume licensing, usually with Software Assurance, which is a yearly fee.
I notice that you conveniently forgot Surface. Tell me, do the same reasons aplpy to it as W10 Enterprise?
At what point does the truth become the truth? You can shill all you want, but the Cassandras, of which I am one, have pretty much nailed everything that you people say wasn't happening or going to happen. It phones home to mysterious places, it keylogs, it has your passwords and gives them to anyone on the social networks of people who you allow to access your computer. And it ignores hostfiles for
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I can't decide.... is the start menu's left side purposely annoying and cumbersome to use because they want to funnel our attention over to the pretty pictures (with ads) on the right.... or is the start menu's left side purposely annoying and cumbersome to use because they want to funnel our attention into Cortana...?
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You forgot to mention ads in the metro(sexual) start menu. I can't decide.... is the start menu's left side purposely annoying and cumbersome to use because they want to funnel our attention over to the pretty pictures (with ads) on the right.... or is the start menu's left side purposely annoying and cumbersome to use because they want to funnel our attention into Cortana...?
Yes.
Opening pdf's in Edge certain is enough to piss off the pope as well.
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You forgot to mention ads in the metro(sexual) start menu.
What ads? On the right are live tiles, which aren't ads and on the left the only thing close to an add is whatever appears under Suggestions, which you can just turn off. Problem solved.
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Too bad some of the faithful cannot refute all of my points, instead of shills with mod points trying to bury it.
I mean really, prove what I wrote is incorrect lies or just plain wrong.
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it has your passwords and gives them to anyone on the social networks of people who you allow to access your computer Now if this is true then you can demonstrate to me how such a person can get say my internet banking password. But I already know you can't do that because you're lying and your post is a troll.
Look up wifi sense. If you allow someone using Windows 10 or a Windows phone access to your wireless network, it will share that with others. So your buddy Joe's shady cousin can log on to your local network.
This is pretty well documented by Microsoft and others, I'm a little surprised that a W10 expert doesn't know that. Do you really need the citations? Okay, http://bgr.com/2015/08/03/wind... [bgr.com]
They did finally kill it after massive outrage: http://www.extremetech.com/com... [extremetech.com]
As for my other assertati
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So when you say "it has access to your passwords" what you actually mean is that there was an optional feature to share your wifi password with others. So why didn't you say that to begin with? Why were you being deliberately ambiguous? Because you were trolling, instead of spreading information you were purposely spreading FUD. I told you that you wouldn't be able to demonstrate how such a person could get my internet banking password, you failed just as I said you would.
If I told you I had "your passwords" what would you understand that to mean?
Bullshit. Tell me what the difference is when someone you don't know amd never met can access your wifi not because you let them, but because you let someone else log on to your system? You can even have typed in your password so the initial person doesn't know it. But it doesn't matter, because everyone they are friends with on FB can attach to your wifi, with absolutely no permission from you.
If thy are logged in. they have yer faking password dood! Doesn't matter if they don't personally know it, ju
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Their allowing other people in a known friend's social network onto your wireless network after you allow a known friend on it is known and called WiFi Se
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Yeah about that....then WTF was it doing in a HOME OS, care to answer me that? Last I checked Windows Insiders are NOT testing Enterprise Products, all the Insiders get is the Home/Pro version.
That's easy. It's one ISO. There's been a progression over the last few OS generations that one image is used for multiple different editions. You unlock Home/Pro/Enterprise by supplying the appropriate key. Same thing for many server products.
And please do not forget it won't have been the first time MSFT has lied to our faces, remember "The Kinect is an integral part of the Xbox One, we can't just flip a switch" until they did exactly that?
Something something Occam. Last week it's "this executable is regarding Enterprise subscriptions" and this week it's "hey, we're announcing Enterprise subscriptions", and you think it's more likely both events are evidence that Home/Pro is (in the immediate futur
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In 2-3 years when it does happen, I will be here to remind you, that I did indeed tell you so.
Yeah, I get it. The result is likely. What I object to is the "evidence" that isn't anything to do with the topic.
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But the people who still use Office (often because it's a requirement from school) are stuck with a monthly subscription.
No they aren't [microsoftstore.com]. Why would they be stuck with a monthly subscription when you can just buy the standalone perpetual version?
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Hmm....I'm not sure how well received this will be in the private corp world, but I'm pretty sure in the Federal Govt world, especially DoD and maybe VA with sensitive, classified or privacy patient data, this isn't going to go over too well, especially
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Aaaannnd there it is... (Score:5, Insightful)
So no shock here... windows as a service for 3x the price you used to pay. Nice move Micro$oft.
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Innovate.
Oh wait, M$ has copied Apple since '95 and instead we get a gaudy, crappy, UI in turn.
Hey it only took them 27 years to include Bash in Windows 10 !
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"Good artists copy, great artists steal" -- Steve Jobs.
No doubt said as he was running a device with a UI stolen from Xerox.
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Good artists copy, great artists steal
Yeah, Jobs stole that line from Picasso.
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All history now of course and I actually quite like Win 10. Just the Xerox myth keeps getting trotted out without any recognition of the fact Jobs paid and brought on the actual engineers to carry on working with it. More here [folklore.org], amongst other places.
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> If by stolen you mean bought, then yes. He recognised the people and paid for it.
Oh, big old citation needed for this one. Apple was known to have hired a few PARC people away from Xerox several months after Jobs visited PARC but there is to my knowledge no public mention of any compensation to Xerox whatsoever.
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First of all, two people replied both citing a site named Obamapacman as the definitive source. Just saying.
Secondly, from your own link:
"Jobs and several Apple employees including Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for the option to buy 100,000 shares of Apple at the pre-IPO price of $10 a share."
They were granted access for 3 days in exchange for that money. The shares paid - ahead of t
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Sure, no problem. But again, all your link says is:
"Finally, as several authors have pointed out, there were actually two visits by groups from Apple to Xerox PARC in 1979. Steve Jobs was on the second of the two. Jef Raskin, who helped arranged both visits, explained that he wanted Jobs to visit PARC to understand work that was already going on at Apple. The Macintosh project had escaped the chopping block several times, and Raskin had tried to explain to Jobs the significance of the technologies it was i
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If you can say "Surface as a service" ten times in a row, Microsoft will give it to you for free.
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Actually, Windows 10 Enterprise will be 100% cheaper for up front cost and 20% cheaper for annual cost, compared to the same SKU for Windows 8.1 Enterprise with Software Assurance (pre-paid upgrade rights, basically).
Not 3x the price you used to pay in any math system I'm familiar with.
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math
Just the one?
It's coming...... (Score:1)
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Hope the crow is tasty (Score:4, Interesting)
Now the question is if they'll turn the 'Home' and 'Pro' editions into subscriptions as well. It's clearly not beneath them, it's only a question if their execs determine that the hostage revenues will outweigh the massive bad will backlash they'll receive.
Re:Hope the crow is tasty (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that instead of MS choosing over "pay once" vs "subscription" they will introduce it as a "cost saving alternative" to "reduce the up front cost" of maintaining your operating system. Instead of paying $200 (or whatever) for an OEM copy it will be $5/mo. Then they can insist they are simply providing more options.
To move into complete subscription mode they will transition the "legacy free support" model to "ad supported" with the option to pay a subscription fee in order to eliminate (or at least reduce) the advertising.
Re:Hope the crow is tasty (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing has changed. Microsoft has had this type of licensing in place for Enterprise before now. Adding a subscription to Home and Pro would be a major change. But if they threw it into O365 it would actually be a good change, just as long as they still a purchasable copy that doesn't have a recurring fee.
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Office was, and still is available as a one time purchase. You're more than welcome to buy it outright and skip O365 if you want.
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For everyone who swore up and down that Windows 10 will never be a subscription and Microsoft will always stick with their old business model (pay once for the OS, additional support by subscription): hope the crow is tasty!
You gotta admit, whne the shills start trying to claim that Microsoft's subcription service really isnt a subscription service, it will be horrorshow fun.
Now the question is if they'll turn the 'Home' and 'Pro' editions into subscriptions as well. It's clearly not beneath them, it's only a question if their execs determine that the hostage revenues will outweigh the massive bad will backlash they'll receive.
It isn't a question of "if". If they are doing Surface as a service, there is no reason why everything won't be a "service' soon. So after say the 5 year lifetime of your computer, you'll have paid 420 dollars - not a bad deal eh? And we'd have to be fools to think that it won't soon rise to 10 dollars a month in short order.
What I wonder about howeve
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... looking forward to the shills tapdancing...
Standby... they are awaiting their instructions ... ;)
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For everyone who swore up and down that Windows 10 will never be a subscription and Microsoft will always stick with their old business model (pay once for the OS, additional support by subscription): hope the crow is tasty!
What? Who would have said that? Microsoft have been offering Windows by subscription for many years already.
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For everyone who swore up and down that Windows 10 will never be a subscription and Microsoft will always stick with their old business model (pay once for the OS, additional support by subscription): hope the crow is tasty!
You sure get riled up easy.
This isn't new: Enterprise Agreement [wikipedia.org].
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To combat this they came up with an insane number of SKUs, and sold a stripped down
It's heeeeeeerrrrrrreeeeeeee..... (Score:1)
Re:It's heeeeeeerrrrrrreeeeeeee..... (Score:5, Funny)
To all those Microsoft fanbois who said affirmatively that Microsoft was not planning a subscription model for Windows 10, please explain once again how Microsoft would never institute a subscription model for Windows 10.
Simple - it will be renamed to Windows Overlord Edition. So it won't be Windows 10.
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Simple - it will be renamed to Windows Overlord Edition. So it won't be Windows 10.
Given the past few years, I think it's more likely they'll call it Windows Sierra.
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To all those Microsoft fanbois who said affirmatively that Microsoft was not planning a subscription model for Windows 10, please explain once again how Microsoft would never institute a subscription model for Windows 10.
1) Windows Enterprise Editions via VLA have been subscription based forever. So this move in particular is much ado about nothing.
2) I don't think anybody has ever said Microsoft isn't moving towards a subscription based system. What people have said, is that the Windows 10 systems out there right now, they don't think will become subscription in the future.
IOW, that PC you upgraded to windows 10 last month... I'm skeptical it will EVER require a subscription to win10. I don't rule it out. But I don't think
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I don't think anybody has ever said Microsoft isn't moving towards a subscription based system.
That's funny, some people right here are saying it.
What people have said, is that the Windows 10 systems out there right now, they don't think will become subscription in the future.
Are people saying that? Many here including me are saying just the opposite. As MS have said Win10 is the last ever version of Windows, how are they to get any future income from non-enterprise Windows unless they turn those systems into subscription? MS control those Win10 installations so they can do it.
-- its one thing to have a perpetual windows license for a PC as a small line item in a $1000 purchase
It is not a small item, and you need to look hard to find a PC costing as much as £1000. Windows is a significant part of the cost of a high stre
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And don't talk about Linux - Joe Sixpack is never going to install it - can't, won't.
But dell might, if people balk at buying PCs that require a subscription. Or chromebooks or android PCs or something along those lines...
In my opinion linux doesn't sell well because people 'want windows' and linux is 'close but not windows' but if microsoft pulls a subscription model out, people might suddenly want NOT windows... and be a lot more open to alternatives. And because they are sitting their pining for windows they're satisfaction with the alternatives will be a lot higher.
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Little companies like this as they tend to prefer less fixed cost. Larger companies, companies that tend to vertically integrate prefer fixed costs as they know how to leverage that capital more effectively. At least they used to. This everything-in-the-cloud phenomenon has tended to stupefy C-suites into forgetting this.
Big enterprises tend to be the ones who prefer this type of thing actually, and they have for a long time since those also tend to be the companies where getting CAPEX involves lots of hoop jumping and usually a few satanic ritual sacrifices if it's over a certain threshold. Small companies tend to be more concerned about actual cost. Most big companies would rather lease software, hardware, hell even people.
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..linux..
Haven't you been paying attention? Microsoft has been dabbling in Linux now, too. Clearly they want to own all operating systems for all devices. They're probably just consolidating their resources and forces as much as possilble before attacking Apple. Microsoft has always wanted to be a monopoly, and nothing has changed. They of course have to be stopped, broken up into smaller chunks (again), and in general smacked on the nose with a newspaper (again) and have it made clear to them that they do not own
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If you honestly think that Linux users as a whole want the kind of unification and only-one-way-of-doing-things then you have missed the entire point of Linux/Unix design philosophy altogether.
Actually, I don't think that the Linux "community" wants that at all.
And that is both Linux' greatest strength, and its greatest weakness.
Lease? (Score:1)
Wouldn't "surface as a service" in any sane world just be called leasing it?
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Yeah, I read the article, and wow, what a bunch of mealy mouthed techbro gobbledygook. Just say what you fucking mean for once, instead of constantly inventing new terms for everything.
Yeah, what they meant to say is that it'll be "pre-owned", just like that clunker the used car dealer tries to sell you.
It's not leased, you just pay for it monthly!
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slightly bloated
He should get that looked at.
I'm okay with it being rented (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't mind if Windows 10 Pro is rented, per se. If the PC market is slowing, it strikes me as a reasonable way to fund (and incent) continued security patches and bug-fixes. I.e., make Microsoft re-earn my business every 6-12 months. After all, I can always migrate away at my leisure before the rental agreement expires.
However, I do object to other aspects of Windows 10, that if anything I would expect to get worse under such a model:
* An EULA that gives Microsoft unfettered access to all of my data, and using it in whatever way they see fit.
* The inability to assess each proposed patch, and to choose if/when to apply it.
* The inability to prevent Windows 10 from phoning home for reasons I'm prevented from knowing.
If it were just the rental cost, the cost/benefit analysis for my wife's photography business would be easy. But the snooping, and particular the risk of uncontrollable, unpreventable, unnecessary downtime on her production computers... that risk is unacceptable even if Windows 10 were perpetually free (as in beer).
I really don't look forward to the cost of migrating her photo-editing workstation to a sufficiently powerful Mac. But we'll probably need to find a way.
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* The inability to prevent Windows 10 from phoning home for reasons I'm prevented from knowing.
If you care, there's a great PowerShell script available [github.com] that turns off everything that's known so far. We're going to include it in our deployment script on principle.
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* The inability to prevent Windows 10 from phoning home for reasons I'm prevented from knowing.
If you care, there's a great PowerShell script available [github.com] that turns off everything that's known so far. We're going to include it in our deployment script on principle.
Thanks for the link. I really hope I don't end up needing to us it. I really don't have the spare cycles to engage in an arms race with our OS vendor.
Na na boo boo (Score:2)
I told you this would happen. I toldja toldja toldja.
Yeah, they'll start with Enterprise customers but mark my words, within a few years every Microsoft OS released will be a subscription model. Hang on to Win 7 and 8, because that's the last "pay once" OS you'll ever see from Redmond.
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What are you expecting? That they'll upgrade everyone currently on Windows 10 to a subscription without notice? Why can't we just upgrade now and hang on to that. And assuming they would, Windows already works without registration. It'll just nag you and take over the desktop background. You're not going to have your work interrupted or kept from you unless you're hit by a Cryptolocker.
And assuming I'm wrong and they block you from your work on your currently purchased copy of Windows 10, what's to stop the
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What are you expecting?
I'm expecting them to do whatever is necessary to impose their will on everyone who runs Windows regardless of what they want. Like making the close window control opt you in to the Win 10 upgrade instead of just closing the nag window. [slashdot.org]
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And assuming I'm wrong and they block you from your work on your currently purchased copy of Windows 10, what's to stop them from also taking over Windows 7 and 8?
I dunno...the the fact that I can turn updates off if I choose to?
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I mean, if you want to believe that Microsoft has evil plans, where do you draw the line?
I don't want to believe that, it's the conclusion I'm forced to draw after watching their behavior for the last 20 years or so. As far as me drawing the line, that's really up to them, based on what they do.
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Can you be sure that updates are really "off" short of unplugging your computer from the internet? I mean, this is Microsoft we're talking about, and you are clearly more cynical towards them than I.
No, I can't be 100% sure, but none of us can regardless of the OS we use, right? I've mostly switched over to Linux Mint so the whole Microsoft thing isn't a big deal for me, but honestly, how do I know Mint is doing stuff in the background that I'm not aware of?
It'll be even less sure what Microsoft is doing behind your back in Windows 10....the stuff they've publicly admitted to is bad enough. God only knows what other goodies they have in store or will decide to do during their hourly stealth updates.