| | | Windows 10 marks the end of 'pay once, use forever' software
Welcome to Microsoft's pay-pay-pay plan
theregister.co.uk
excerpt:
Windows 10 will be made available on July 29 for free for a year for existing users of Windows 7 and 8. But then what? Microsoft is already starting to talk about “ Windows as a Service." Anyone who knows anything about Microsoft and the IT industry in general knows what that means. The current trend among tech vendors is to flip you from paying a one-off fee for a product or service and to pay a monthly subscription. A regular fee eliminates the prospect of the unexpected: customers not paying for product failure, the Son of Vista, or the trail-off of new purchases that traditionally occur at the end of a product's lifecycle.
Microsoft isn't the only one in the client operating-system game – Apple is, too, with Mac OS X. Most of the recent (although admittedly cheap) OS X upgrades cost less than $25 but the base functionality doesn't really appear to change massively. Sure there may be a reasonable number of tweaks, but nothing earth shattering. Microsoft charges more than twice that for the various Windows 7 and 8 SKUs.
The key difference, and the reason Apple charges so little for OS X versus a new edition of Windows from Microsoft, is that Apple is more concerned with having you upgrade to its latest hardware because it's a hardware company that does software and it can charge mightily for that hardware.
Microsoft, despite what former CEO Steve Ballmer would have you believe, is primarily a software company. |
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