Windows 10 Subscriptions Coming For Enterprise Users

How long before consumers end up with a subscription?

[engine]

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 10 for enterprise users will become a subscription service at $7 per user per month.

The company has not said anything about consumer users, at the moment, neither confirming or denying its plans.

"Windows 10 Enterprise E3 for CSP is for business customers of any size (including one person) to get enterprise features and functionality on a per monthly/per seat cost," a Microsoft spokeswoman said via email. "This new subscription model is not associated with our current upgrade offering or applicable to the Windows 10 consumer edition." Windows 10 Subscriptions Coming For Enterprise Users [pcworld.com]

How long before consumers get hit with subscription, I wonder. Microsoft has, successfully, moved Office products to subscription based, but will people also pay for the OS? I'm not so sure.

[jmccormac]

Think you are conflating Office365 with Office there. Microsoft has an online Office suite (Office365) but it also has the Office software which can still be purchased either as a suite or as individual products. (That said, I really, really hate that stupid "backstage" thing. It is like some idiot UI "designers" with Xbox only experience thought it was a good thing to add because they were more used to click and drool menus.) Some larger enterprises have probably switched to Office365 but there may be a large segment, including SMEs, that have not.

Regards...jmcc

[tangor]

Predicted this even before Win10 was even announced, much less make an upgrade option available. "Selling" software "once" that is used for DECADES (as some is) hurts the big corps who live or die by constant income. Take $7/m per seat from now and forever and compare that to the old way and that's a no brainer .... for MS!

Quick and dirty numbers (10 year span based on 7.5M businesses in USA only)

As a subscription: $15,693,909,000.00
Pro/Seat sale only:$14,925,000,000.00
Net income improve: $768,909,000.00

NOTE: I had to guess the size of computer departments based on number of employees/company size... though I did try to be more pessimistic than optimistic! As the One Man Shop hit near I did NOT include numbers for companies 5 and under as that total number was around 9 million, but how many of those actually use computers?

And that does not take into consideration the SAVINGS of not having to do all those "enterprise" updates, etc as the software is in constant flux with the consumer/business paying most of the delivery cost (bandwidth) as opposed to burning and bundling/printing all those CDs and then delivering them to distribution points. I suspect that will be a cool $50M/yr all by itself!

Pretty sure I left out other bennies and perks MS foresees... but all I can see is that we, the consumer/business are getting tied back to a monopoly provider and CHOICE will take a hike down the Highway of Forgotten Dreams. Sigh.

[smilie]

Ha-ha. As predicted , MS is trying to jam more revenue from dry well.

Business users who did not see this coming deserved their expenses.

@tangor, savings? what savings? You think that MS will get into a habit of running Windows-As-A-Service and that won't break something on a desktop with every other "upgrade" or "patch"? When is that going to happen.

Luckily, nobody in my office is upgrading to Windows 10. We are staying on old platform and getting rid of all office docs where we can with OpenOffice, Google docs and open-source Thunderbird email client.

I do have a bunch of older Windows 7 desktops that I can put on people's desks when one will go dead. And I can buy one for $100-$200 a pop if I run out.

But I guess it's time to start seriously looking into Linux.

[jetteroheller]

It's mad, that they take much more money than the hardware vendor.

For example my new Acer-ES1-331-C0YK ist 240 EUR.

With 5 years expected usage, this is 4 EUR per month.

With an OS subscription and an office subscription, Microsoft would earn 3 times more money for the software, than the cost for the hardware.

After Microsoft became more and more out exchange and extreme unpolite, I changed now to Ubuntu Linux.

[J_RaD]

to be honest your laptop hardware vendors are spending exactly...jack #*$! into your system.

laptops are garbage built by the OEMS to break... APPLE.. YOU TOO.

[engine]

>laptops are garbage built by the OEMS to break... APPLE.. YOU TOO.

Buying a cheap laptop built to reach a low price point, yes, but, i don't have that experience with a decent laptop. The hardware vendor has been great whenever i've needed support, although, thankfully, it's not been too often.

[jetteroheller]

>to be honest your laptop hardware vendors are spending exactly...jack #*$! into your system.
>laptops are garbage built by the OEMS to break... APPLE.. YOU TOO.

And? Are there better sort of computers, I could use?

When You tell me, also apple is bad,
better to loose a 250 EUR than a 1000 EUR notebook

[ergophobe]

>>better sort of computers

These ratings fluctuate over time. For a long time, Apple was the undisputed king of reliability, but they slipped a lot. Toshiba was next. Last I looked, Apple was middle of the pack, Toshiba near the bottom, and HP was the bottom. I finally did this research after two failures of a new HP laptop. At that time (now out of date, so don't take this as meaning anything today), the best rating was for Asus. I bought an Asus and it has run like a champ ever since.

The ratings I was going off were from a large company that serviced the extended warranties that some retailers offer and had a very large sample set, but I'll leave it to you to guess what the biases in that data are. I have no clue, but felt that *some* data was better than *no* data.

>>Predicted this even before Win10 was even announced

That's the trend all over. We are becoming a subscription-based economy, not just with respect to software. That said, I'm not convinced that in this case MS will be in a hurry to go there. Why not? Consumer sales of Windows are a minuscule portion of revenue for MS (about 2% I believe). Meanwhile, supporting legacy OSes is a huge portion of cost.

I think MS really wants to avoid another Windows XP situation where they kept trying to get it to EOL and couldn't. They ended up supporting XP, Win2K, Vista, Win7 and Win8 all at the same time. So if the cost of subscription becomes a barrier to upgrading on the consumer end, this becomes hugely expensive to MS for a tiny gain.

I'm not saying they will or won't do it, but the economics of it are not obvious. There are bit savings if they can get companies to pay and then give Win10 to consumers in return for getting them off Win7 and Win8.

[jetteroheller]

Asus?! I purchased August 2010 an Asus UL30A.
I was enthusiastic about this notebook and the very long run time.

2012 I had to resolder the power input
2013 again no power to the notebook, resolder failed, I ordered a new IO-board
2015 also the new IO-board developt the same failure. I ordered a second time a new IO-board
2016 a service technican resolders the power input, it works again
some month later, again defect.

3 IO-boards failed with the same failure.

Until now, Acer was the most reliable notebook brand.
An Acer Travelmate 800 from March 2003 to December 2007 in my usage
and until 2011 used by my children was the longest working notebook ever.

Only trouble, the touchpad button devlopt a problem to show a single click as a double click.
Two times, the touchoad board exchanged, always the same again,
but to have problems with single clicks interpreted as double clicks is
less annoying than notebook can not receive power from the power supply.

[ergophobe]

Sorry, I probably should have left the laptop question alone. Didn't mean to divert the thread. We could start a discussion in the Webmaster Hardware forum [webmasterworld.com] if people are interested.

My main point that I wanted to make was that the economics of charging consumers for Win10 subscriptions are complex and not as obvious as it might seem on the surface. There's no question that MS is trying to develop a strategy that reduces the number of OSes they need to maintain and that there is little money in the consumer market. They're real money is in the enterprise - Office 365, Exchange, servers, Azure and so on. Maintaining old consumer OSes are a distraction.

They will seek to maximize profit, not revenue. The question is whether charging consumers for Windows achieves that.

[tangor]

I think that at some not too distant time the cost of the MS sub will be included in your phone or utility bill. That's why the push to 1 bellion units is so important.

[engine]

I suspect that a subscription for consumers for an OS would be the death of Windows for the end user sector. I can understand why the enterprise might more readily accept it, but consumers, no. It'll send people to Apple, Chrome, Android, and, less so, to Linux.

For sure, the supported Microsoft OS will eventually end up being one system for consumers: Windows 10. There will be the end users holding out until the very last moment of an old system, but they might end up moving away from Windows altogether.

[ergophobe]

Well, so much for my thoughts here that it's not in their best interest financially...
[webmasterworld.com...]