Microsoft Reveals Windows 10 Will Be a Free Upgrade 570
mpicpp was one of many to point out this bit of news about Windows 10."Microsoft just took another big step toward the release of Windows 10 and revealed it will be free for many current Windows users. The company unveiled the Windows 10 consumer preview on Wednesday, showcasing some of the new features in the latest version of the operating system that powers the vast majority of the world's desktop PCs. The developer preview has been available since Microsoft first announced Windows 10 in the fall, but it was buggy, limited in scope and very light on new features. Importantly, Windows 10 will be free for existing Windows users running versions of Windows back to Windows 7. That includes Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and Windows Phone. Microsoft specified it would only be free for the first year, indicating Windows would be software that users subscribe to, rather than buy outright. Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Operating Systems Group Joe Belfiore showed off some of the new features in Windows 10. While Microsoft had already announced it would bring back the much-missed Start Menu, Belfiore revealed it would also have a full-screen mode that includes more of the Windows 8 Start screen. He said Windows machines would go back and forth between to two menus in a way that wouldn't confuse people. Belfiore also showed a new notification center for Windows, which puts a user's notifications in an Action Center menu that can appear along the right side, similar to how notifications work in Apple OS X. Microsoft Executive Vice President of Operating Systems Terry Myerson revealed that 1.7 million people had downloaded the Windows 10 developer preview, giving Microsoft over 800,000 individual piece of feedback. Myerson explained that Windows 10 has several main intents: the give users a mobility of experience from device to device, instill a sense of trust in users, and provide the most natural ways to interact with devices."
More details are available directly from Microsoft.
Or another interpretation (Score:5, Interesting)
"Once a device is upgraded to Windows 10, we'll be keeping it current for the supported lifetime of the device," said Terry Myerson, executive vice president of the Operating Systems Group.
Sounds like it could be either.
Subscription service eh? (Score:2, Interesting)
Jesus christ whatever happened to buying software and then owning it?
Re:Be afraid, be very afraid (Score:5, Interesting)
Myerson's quote from the presentation: "People care about their privacy. So do we. You are our customer, not our product."
Re:Only for the first year (Score:4, Interesting)
Request: Linux developers -- please provide us with a smooth migration path!
Let me get rid of my various Windows OS's.
Re:DVD (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Only for the first year (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the thing, is the upgrade "free for the first year" meaning you don't have to pay for the upgrade license , or is it "free for the first year" meaning after a year you have to pay some kind of subscription fee.
For the time being I am leaning towards the first option since I haven't read anything yet that says MS will have a subscription for the OS ala Office 365 ( if there is official confirmation please do let me know! ).
A subscription for an OS just seems awkward, with too many hurdles to jump. I.E. how long a grace period for renewal, IF there is an auto-renewal option how hard is it to get canceled, especially for business what happens when the version you are on - and don't want to upgrade away from - is EOL'd... I still use a networkless Win98 machine due to upgrade costs to the machine it is connected to being $50K+ just to upgrade from a P2 / Win98 setup.
Then again it _is_ MS we are talking about, they would probably just charge ahead without thinking like usual.
Re:Only for the first year (Score:4, Interesting)
I doubt it. There wasn't a massive revolt when Adobe went to subscription. Or Microsoft Office.
True. It does take time for people who are annoyed by such a move to respond to it and for the market to create alternatives, particularly if you're talking about an incumbent industry giant with a diverse user base like Creative Suite or MS Office. There is always some resistance immediately, but given that these subscription services quickly become more expensive for significant parts of the previous user base, it may still be more commercially beneficial to take advantage of those users and force the move to software rental as Adobe did (though Microsoft haven't so far).
That said, in both of those cases, it's quite clear that the market is creating alternatives, and that significant numbers of users are starting to defect (or simply didn't get on the subscription upgrade treadmill and are waiting for better options). For example, people doing Web work on Apple machines now have several promising graphics applications that are getting much more favourable reviews than anything from Creative Suite has for a long time, for a one-off permanent purchase costing the equivalent to just a few months of Creative Cloud subscription. The days of asking what's out there to draw UI elements or illustrations for an article, laughing amiably with the FOSS evangelist who suggests the GIMP and Inkscape, and then coughing up a thousand bucks for Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks are gone, and they aren't coming back.
As long as they don't completely mess it up, they will be ok.
I'm not so sure. I doubt anyone is going to come along with a single killer app in either case, but huge all-things-to-all-people suites feel a lot like yesterday's software to me, and I find it quite plausible that both Adobe and Microsoft will steadily lose market share to a hundred small but highly specialised competitors. The moment we reach the point -- and possibly we already have in some contexts -- that using Real Office Document Formats or Real Photoshop Files is no longer a killer compatibility requirement, a significant driver that keeps people on MS/Adobe has already been lost.
And just to get back on topic... I don't really see why all of the above arguments wouldn't apply to Windows as well if Microsoft do pursue some sort of rental licensing scheme where your system locks up the day you stop paying. They already lost phones and a large chunk of the server/back office market. Losing desktops as well would surely be the end of Microsoft as any kind of serious force in the IT industry, because I don't think they can afford another Vista/8 fiasco so soon. With mobile apps, web apps, native OS X apps, and all the things you can do with Linux these days, there are plenty of other ways the market could realistically move before Windows 11 arrived, and again once Microsoft has lost the critical mass of effectively Windows-only software that advantage is probably never coming back again no matter what they do.
As I've said before, if it were me I'd push hard the other way: promote Windows as the one platform where stability and true long-term support were absolutely trustworthy, so if you buy Windows or develop software to run on it you know it's still going to work five or more years later. Then sell the OS with a clearly stated support programme where you get security and compatibility fixes free as the ecosystem evolves for a certain reasonable period (maybe 2-3 years) and then you have the option to keep them going for a modest fee after that, but without ever going full rental and putting customers in a potential pay-or-it-stops position. I don't see this happening under the current management, unfortunately, as they put in place a CEO whose entire background pulls in the other direction.
Re:Only for the first year (Score:5, Interesting)
Still doing professional work with CS5. Still waiting to find a paying customer where this causes a problem. Still waiting for a killer feature in any more recent Creative Cloud release that makes us regret not paying Adobe more money.
Re:Only for the first year (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading that blog in more detail, I think I understand what they are doing. "Supported lifetime of the device" *probably* means that the license will be tied to the hardware and will not be transferable. Perhaps they will generally make licenses super-cheap, but not transferable? Or perhaps they will go subscription-only on new devices.
"IT'S A TRAP!" may be appropriate here. We will find out for sure soon enough.
Re:Only for the first year (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Only for the first year (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is the reason that software companies want to sell subscriptions. It's hard to employ an army of highly paid developers if you don't know whether you have any future revenue.
So maybe you should keep improving your software in ways that are actually worth more to your users. If you don't have a solid plan for doing that but you've got the point of employing an army of highly paid developers, you're doing it wrong and need new leadership.
There are literally dozens of changes that Adobe could have made to the major CS apps we use where any one of them would have justified a three-figure upgrade fee for everyone in my company who uses that app. I'm not even talking about huge changes that would have been expensive new developments; even some relatively small UI improvements to remove time-wasting frustrations might have made buying the upgrade an instant yes as a business decision.
They didn't do any of those things in several years before CC, and as far as I've seen they haven't since then either, so we wouldn't have upgraded so far. On the other hand, we would never rent essential software from anyone unless it was literally the only viable strategy to continue the related business activities at all, which in reality it never is. So in effect, Adobe have gone from a position where even one of many modest improvements would probably have earned a small business worth of upgrade fees from us sooner or later to a position where there is basically zero chance of ever getting more money from us.
You can play that game for roughly as long as the extra money you're making from other people makes up for the losses. However, as certain other big software companies have been learning in recent years, taking your user base for granted it rarely a viable long-term strategy in this industry. Sooner or later, significant people at your big customers start doing the sums, figure out you're charging them more in long-term pricing, and take steps to change that one way or another but invariably at your expense.
What about servers? (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if the server version of Windows 10, likely Windows Server 2015 or 2016, will have a similar update program, or if it will follow the same steps as previous server versions.
Windows Server editions are not as flashy as the client releases... but a single feature or set of features can impact the enterprise in a very large manner. For example, the deduplication ability of Windows Server 2012 and Storage Spaces/ReFS has put the OS near parity with ZFS for defending against bit rot, and the ability to add hard drive space without having to rebuild an array.
If an edition of Windows Server came out with a Hyper-V kernel on par with VMWare in management ability (as in RAM compression/deduplication/ballooning), with real-time drive deduplication. Couple this with Infiniband support and the ability to access another machine's hard drive volumes (in a clustered way, so locking between boxes is preserved), and this would allow a bunch of Windows boxes to not just act as a compute node farm... but also provide SAN-like access and redundancy. More drive space would be easily added by tossing more computers in the array as well as adding disks.
I have a feeling the server version will likely stay the same, with no real incentives to get people from 2012 or 2012R2... mainly because the UI (for the most part) isn't an issue, because one ends up using SCCM/SCOM/SCVMM for most management duties anyway, so the UI on the server doesn't matter as much.
Re:Only for the first year (Score:5, Interesting)
You evidently don't actually use Windows 8.1. The much-maligned UI is actually just the Windows 7 UI with a full-screen Start menu, which I find interrupts my workflow to exactly the same extent that the Windows 7 Start menu does, meaning minimally.
No.
Indeed I can live with the start screen. It's awkward, but I can live with it. The real disaster is elsewhere and I can't believe I still have to point this out after 2-3 years.
1. Default apps for many file formats are ridiculously dysfunctional Metro versions. This means users are cast into Full Screen Hell, showing Beelzebubs re-imagining of a PDF reader, image viewer or music app, designed for those confined in the darkest levels of hell. Escaping from these apps is actually hard. Noone can hear you scream.
2. Charms Bar on the right that pops up usually when I don't want it to. Which is always. Heh.
3. Some other bar on the left with any Metro apps that opened, usually without me wanting them to. What is that thing anyway and why is it there. Why is having two task/app switchers in a single OS ever a good idea? WTF Microsoft! W!T!F!?
4. Settings Schizophrenia. Where is that setting? Full-Screen-Hell-Mode or Control Panel? Or (gasp) BOTH? Oh My @#(&$ing GOD!
5. Installed Apps.. Where do they go? 8.0 Put everything and the kitchen sink in the start menu. 8.1. puts nothing in the start menu. Where are they? They're in a level below in the middle of a huge list of stuff. The only reasonable way to open an app is to search for it. So you better remember what it's called, Mom!
6. Search. I'm running out of expletives. It manages to open yet another full screen abomination in front of me when I'm looking for "Supplier Visit Notes 15Jan.docx", AND it starts finding stuff on the Internet.. What the hell MS!! You've messed up just about the most basic purpose of an OS user interface which is to let me store files, find them back and open them!
Anyway, you may feel less anger and pain about the above than I do but the point remains that Win 8's peculiarity (See, I can be nice too) isn't confined to having a start screen instead of a start menu. I guess I could have made that point in just a single line. ;)
Han.