More likely they will make the base OS free and charge for the premium SaaS features ... like they already do with one drive, O365 and game pass
Yeah that seems like the more likely move, have a free tier that starts off decent and a premium tier with 'power features' or whatever, and then slowly drift almost everything over to the 'premium' tier until in a few years you won't be able to change your desktop wallpaper without paying. That definitely sounds like the MS way to me.
they've already done various low-cost or no-cost (to the oem) windows editions that you can't change wallpaper, or default search engine, stripped out utility programs included in 'regular' editions, and even one that limited multitasking, disabled some network functions, and had hard limits on ram and total disk space.
Is that what Win 10 X was? I thought it was supposed to be a light build
windows 8 'with bing', and 'starter' editions of earlier versions, are the ones that came to mind.
YUP! And then something like a 1 year free demo when you buy a computer from an OEM ... to make sure all the normies get used to it.
Right of the M$ playbook.
I for once can't wait, it's going to be a fun dumpster fire to watch
Seems a dumb way to destroy the desktop PC market.
People will feel scammed that after one year everything needs a subscription, will dump that shit on eBay, prices will crash, and the market will be dominated by iPads with mouse and keyboards
They're too smart to do this ...
More likely they will make the base OS free and charge for the premium SaaS features ... like they already do with one drive, O365 and game pass
Yeah that seems like the more likely move, have a free tier that starts off decent and a premium tier with 'power features' or whatever, and then slowly drift almost everything over to the 'premium' tier until in a few years you won't be able to change your desktop wallpaper without paying. That definitely sounds like the MS way to me.
they've already done various low-cost or no-cost (to the oem) windows editions that you can't change wallpaper, or default search engine, stripped out utility programs included in 'regular' editions, and even one that limited multitasking, disabled some network functions, and had hard limits on ram and total disk space.
Is that what Win 10 X was? I thought it was supposed to be a light build
windows 8 'with bing', and 'starter' editions of earlier versions, are the ones that came to mind.
YUP! And then something like a 1 year free demo when you buy a computer from an OEM ... to make sure all the normies get used to it.
Right of the M$ playbook.
I for once can't wait, it's going to be a fun dumpster fire to watch
Seems a dumb way to destroy the desktop PC market.
People will feel scammed that after one year everything needs a subscription, will dump that shit on eBay, prices will crash, and the market will be dominated by iPads with mouse and keyboards
They may still for enterprise customers.