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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

> In general people really are starting to run out of reasons to "hate" Microsoft. It will be interesting to see what they come up with in the future...

I agree with you overall, MS has made GREAT strides in the last year towards moving my needle from "Wouldn't touch if my life depended on it" to "Huh, that's actually pretty interesting". The old MS still shows through with things like how they are handling Win 10 (Both in versions and cost) but overall they are looking up. That said MS still has a long ways to go and I still wouldn't use Windows for anything (other than gaming) but some other stuff MS has done does interest me.

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> how they are handling Win 10 (Both in versions and cost)

I'm a bit confused by this. It's free for any genuine Windows 7 or 8 user, and $99 to $199 for anyone else. There are two SKUs (Home and Pro), rather than the multitude with XP or Vista. How is this not a reasonable approach? Especially since Windows 10 is supposed to be the last Windows release of this kind.

I believe they also have Windows 10 Enterprise, Windows 10 education and if we include the phone OS: Windows 10 mobile and Windows 10 mobile enterprise.

The versions are all pretty reasonable and not significantly different outside of the one thing that defines their SKU.

Enterprise is understandable - businesses may prefer not to use Pro. I don't believe that you can count Windows 10 Mobile/Mobile Enterprise against the count as they are merely part of Microsoft's effort to combine all their platforms under one operating system.

This is correct - there are 6 Windows 10 SKUs[1]. 4 if you exclude the mobile SKUs. The "only 2 SKUs" was just a rumour/wish.

I'm echoing speculation I read elsewhere: the reason for the numerous versions is Federal Money. The US government demands that it pays the lowest price the vendors offers an item for. Since Microsoft likes to offer discounts to universities, the government would be entitled to the lowest discounted price on the SKU. Their solution is to make Education & Enterprise versions and maintain the price disparity. Money trumps simplicity.

https://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/05/13/introdu...

(edited for clarity)

> The "only 2 SKUs" was just a rumour/wish.

Its only two consumer-facing desktop SKUs, but that's the same as Win 8.1. Its still down from Win 7, though.

> It's free for any genuine Windows 7 or 8 user, and $99 to $199 for anyone else.

It's free ONLY if you get it in their window (1 year I think) it just seems unnecessarily complicated when they should just make it free. Also they have 3-4 more SKUs than just Home and Pro (which really should only be 1).

> Windows 10 is supposed to be the last Windows release of this kind

I'll believe that when I see it also there is nothing I've seen so far to imply all further updates would be free.

Why should microsoft just make their primary commercial product free for everyone? I am curious to know what percentage of MS profit is from OS sales, but I assume it's very high?

Apple can make their OS free cause they make money on the hardware, which 99% of people buy from them to run the OS on.

And of course linux and other open source is another story.

I don't think microsoft makes that much money from customers buying their OS directly, but rather from OEMs installing Windows by default on the laptops/desktops they are selling.

Never once have I met a person buying a standalone windows upgrade/windows OS. Either they end up buying a new computer, they stick with whatever was installed on their computer (hello, XP/Vista users), or they illegally download the upgrades.

They definitely sell retail copies of Windows, and someone must be buying them, or else I can't imagine the retailers would bother stocking them.

For example, a good amount of the people that have Macs also need to run Windows virtual machines (or Bootcamp), and the primary way to do that is to buy a retail copy of Windows. I can't imagine that's a very high percentage of revenue, but I wouldn't say that nobody buys Windows directly.

If you illegally download upgrades, then you're almost certainly infecting your computer with significant malware.

Do people not care about this?

I'm not a big Windows fan (I've run Linux as my primary OS for years), but I've bought several Windows OS packages over the years for work (testing software).

> There are two SKUs (Home and Pro), rather than the multitude with XP or Vista

Two SKUs, and then a bunch more; whole list currently is: Home, Mobile, Pro, Enterprise, Education, Mobile Enterprise, IoT core. There are also upcoming still unnamed "industrial" SKUs. Oh, and of course MS is going to offer 32 bit versions too.

Also of course there will also be full suite of Windows Server SKUs, because obviously those are completely different from the client OS...

> Mobile

Is for an entirely different class of devices than the others.

> IoT core

Ditto

All the others are price discrimination for organizations. The typical end-user does not have to contend with the list you put forth.

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