Windows 365 Pricing Revealed
techradar.com
techradar.com
Halt the comms and half of the industry in my province gets shut down in less than 10 minutes.
There are around 750M PC in business sector, and I would not be surprised if around half of those are "enterprise". That is ~300M market. Or would those goes to Chromebook?
Many of these big Enterprise hate CapEx with a passion and loves OpEx. ( I assume there are additional benefits in accounting as well ). This Windows as a Services is also something Microsoft has been looking forward to for decades. I remember there were already talks about Windows as Services in Windows 2000 era. Although the Windows 365 isn't anything similar to what they had visioned, the end result of a monthly payment is still the same.
I am also wondering if this opens up enough incentive for Windows on ARM, where Microsoft finally owns the whole stack on windows 365 and can do better testing and optimisation for further cost saving. Although the CPU cost in TCO is still relatively small.
You still need bare metal on the client end. Your licence costs just go from ~£90-100 for a key (no idea what MS gives you on bulk rates) to £20/month...
Unless they are doing hourly/per second billing and you have some well tuned scripts that won't screw over Jenkins in accounting when he's working on the big report one evening, I just don't see the cost savings.
the intent is to lower one-time, up-front costs as much as possible, and spread that cost of entry out over multiple fiscal years as a smaller repeating subscription fee, even if the overall cost increases.
service vendors, like AWS and Microsoft, LOVE more constant, predictable, and even income, and businesses love lowering one-time expenses, even if it costs more overall in the long run to do it.
yes, thin clients (at a minimum) are needed, but those are cheap, easily deployed, and last for years.
I'd have normally thought the goal would be to minimize expenses.