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.
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...
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.
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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).