Poll: Windows 10 - Whats the Motive?

[jklinders]

I believe that it may (for once ) be exactly as it says on the tin.

Microsoft's big sugar daddy is the corporate clients. they still need to pay for licenses. They may have decided that it is easier to get people to opt out of older versions of their OS (saving them the effort of supporting old decrepit versions of their OS over a decade after it should have shuffled off) by making it free. It will likely allow them to downsize their staff and paradoxically make them more money.

 

[Cryselle]

Seriously you need to take off the corporate trust. And no, I'm not ignoring app sales. I'm being cautious about the motives of microsoft. Yeah it's greed and I said that.

People aren't blindly trusting that Microsoft is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. You don't /need/ to trust in that. People are saying, quite rightly, that Microsoft doesn't make a lot of money on selling to the home user. Where they make money is on business sales, sale of programs like Excel and Word, and licencing.

Here's the thing. Even if they're not profiting off of home sales, they /need/ the market. Because if everyone uses Linux at home, they're going to want to use it at work. People like to use what they're comfortable with. And people will write programs for the largest install base. So you get a cycle of "People run this OS" > "People write programs for this OS" > "People need the OS to run the programs" > "People run the OS". That's how Microsoft became big in the first place, remember. That's why free Win 10. They simply make more money running the dominant OS than they do selling it, so they're taking steps to make sure they stay the dominant OS.

 

[DoPo]

Seriously you need to take off the corporate trust. And no, I'm not ignoring app sales. I'm being cautious about the motives of microsoft. Yeah it's greed and I said that.

People aren't blindly trusting that Microsoft is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. You don't /need/ to trust in that. People are saying, quite rightly, that Microsoft doesn't make a lot of money on selling to the home user. Where they make money is on business sales, sale of programs like Excel and Word, and licencing.

Here's the thing. Even if they're not profiting off of home sales, they /need/ the market. Because if everyone uses Linux at home, they're going to want to use it at work. People like to use what they're comfortable with. And people will write programs for the largest install base. So you get a cycle of "People run this OS" > "People write programs for this OS" > "People need the OS to run the programs" > "People run the OS". That's how Microsoft became big in the first place, remember. That's why free Win 10. They simply make more money running the dominant OS than they do selling it, so they're taking steps to make sure they stay the dominant OS.

Don't forget the friggin' support costs. More people run older OS at home -> more people use older OS at work -> more that OS needs to be supported. XP already went through a really long support phase. Heck, Windows 98 was supported for 8 years.

That is costly.

Thanks to that long support other completely unrelated people also had to support Microsoft's shit. In the case of IE 6 that's even more true. I can't even imagine what the total support cost from around the world would be. That's excluding Microsoft - just from everybody else. I can definitely tell the figure is big.

I am fairly sure it's actually quite more cost effective to drop support earlier and just give home users a free upgrade. Well, everybody except businesses, of course - they'll be bled for money. Also, of course, most new machines will also need a Windows license, so it's not like Microsoft completely give up the home user market.

As I said before, Microsoft's business model was a bit broken. They finally got some sense.

Also, it's not like this is new for Microsoft - they are already giving out some OSes for free - University students can get them and there is also the Modern IE website [http://dev.modern.ie/] where anybody can download a bunch of different versions of Windows + a bunch of different versions of IE for absolutely free. Well, they aren't really that usable as a main OS...as far as I know, that is, but, again, they are literally there for free. With the full backing of Microsoft.

 

[inmunitas]

Seriously you need to take off the corporate trust. And no, I'm not ignoring app sales. I'm being cautious about the motives of microsoft. Yeah it's greed and I said that.

People aren't blindly trusting that Microsoft is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. You don't /need/ to trust in that. People are saying, quite rightly, that Microsoft doesn't make a lot of money on selling to the home user. Where they make money is on business sales, sale of programs like Excel and Word, and licencing.

Here's the thing. Even if they're not profiting off of home sales, they /need/ the market. Because if everyone uses Linux at home, they're going to want to use it at work. People like to use what they're comfortable with. And people will write programs for the largest install base. So you get a cycle of "People run this OS" > "People write programs for this OS" > "People need the OS to run the programs" > "People run the OS". That's how Microsoft became big in the first place, remember. That's why free Win 10. They simply make more money running the dominant OS than they do selling it, so they're taking steps to make sure they stay the dominant OS.

They're not really taking steps to remain the dominant OS, they already tried that and they lost, now it's about trying to be competitive against other products.

 

[Vigormortis]

Valve, GOG, Humble Bundle, Kickstarter. The last one not quite directly, but backers of successful Kickstartes have asked for Linux versions and received them.

You have to admit - it's way different from merely 5 or 6 years ago. I would definitely classify it as a huge push.

And more than that, you can count Intel, AMD, nVidia, DICE, EA, CDProjectRed, Epic Games, and a host of other devs among those making this 'push'.