Source site seems to be down. Windows Central has some clarifications:
> Now, references to a subscription model were found in the latest Windows preview builds, suggesting that Microsoft is finally going to force users to pay a monthly subscription to use Windows, right? No. These references are almost definitely tied to the newly discovered "IoT Enterprise Subscription" edition of Windows 11, not the client version of Windows vNext.
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/no-o...
I've wondered why microsoft hasn't done this already.
The $oftware boys already have a full explainer about why $aa$ is the best thing since open source, so why shouldn't Microsoft jump on board too?
C'mon SaaS devs, tell me again about value add and how you love paying monthly for the software you use...
Wasn't windows 10 supposed to be the "last windows ever" ? Have been hearing about the subscription windows for 20+ years and it hasn't happened yet.
Accepting that “charge a large amount of money up front for the OS” is a dead end business model I’d be okay with this if they stripped all the user hostile and adware crap back. They won’t.
Valve investing in SteamOS and Proton looks really prescient. It took years, but the investment has really paid off (for me, not sure Valve).
Games is/was my only need for Windows and I finally ditched my Windows machine last year. I have had to give up on playing some incompatible titles, but there is still a wealth of options available.
Windows is already a subscription OS, usually for businesses. Subscription licenses are included with higher Microsoft 365 tiers. It's just one of the many ways that it's sold. This doesn't indicate that the perpetual licenses are going away, but it seems logical that they would package certain services in a subscription tier like bundling Microsoft 365 with Copilot and other future features.
I think they will offer two options, advertising or advanced features. The advertising option speaks for itself. The will put ads in different parts of the O/S. Kiss goodbye to any privacy you thought you had.
The features option will make more O/S options like photo and video editing apps a subscription type model. Pay $10 a year and get the advanced features.
Either way, I think this should help Apple and open source operating systems.
This is ridiculous. Of course Windows 12 won't require a subscription.
It will only be required if you want to disable the native data collection and advertising.
How did we all get stuck in the worst possible [tech] timeline?
I am willing to believe that MS might try a subscription model, but this doesn't look like particularly strong evidence for it.
Those strings could be anything - For all we know, it's just tracking office 365 subscription status/enterprise enrollment, or tracking windows account notification subscriptions, or any of a hundred other valid reasons.
Those terms are just too generic to be particularly meaningful.
I already dual boot windows 11 and NixOS. I only use Windows for some games on Steam, everything else I do in nix land. (My work computer is a Mac but that could be switched easily as well.)
There isn't a world where I would pay a subscription for an OS, given the plethora of good and stable distros of linux (and OSX)
If Microsoft does, I am not using Windows 12, I am going to Ubuntu. I won't even pirate it. I refuse to pay a subscription for an OS, that should be pay once and be done paying.
Oh please oh please oh please oh please.
Rolling this out would be a business disaster studied for decades.
I've know enough people already honked off about all the gorp in Windows 11 that many of them are refusing to move from Windows 10. This would be the icing on the cake to finally get them broken free from Windows as an OS.
This, sadly, won't break the hegemony of Office 365, though.
I'm not even sure why Windows 11 exists, I can't see any real difference over Windows 10 (once I move the start menu back to the left)
Hell, I don't even know what's the difference between Windows 7 and 11
Alternate title: how Microsoft handed Linux the keys to desktop dominance
I wonder if Windows will be included with GamePass™
Vaguely similar to the notion of an “alive” business and a “dead” one, I look at any application or website with a community in the same light: the second that some suit-wearing MBA is allowed to alienate the power users, the contributors, the developers, or the equivalent, it’s downhill into inevitable doom from there.
Sure, the bulk of the user pyramid might be retained — for a while — but the peak is where the action was. Like the growing shoot at the end of a branch, that’s where new applications are written, new content is produced, and new markets are created. The rest just consumes, uses, and follows.
Microsoft is insisting on driving away their most important but least numerous users as hard and as fast as they possibly can.
No metrics will show the consequences of these decisions, and no one will be punished for tragically abusing the commons. I tiny vocal minority is lost, sure, but who cares? They were troublemakers and hard to market to! Good riddance.
The uptake of the each new Windows version is slower and slower than the one before. The excitement and innovation has been replaced by telemetry and built in crapware.
People stood in line to buy a copy of Windows 95.
Hardly anyone will install Windows 12 on purpose.
It's a good thing that Valve made so much progress making games runable on Linux over the past 10 years. Imagine your plumber charging an annual fee for the copper pipes he replaced a decade ago.
Microsoft has charged a subscription to enterprise for Windows for a long time now.
Finding information about subscriptions is unsurprising.
I would guess that they are not planning on charging a monthly fee to use windows on your own hardware. If I had to guess I would say that this is related to a subscription for an online version of windows. Pay a monthly fee and get a full version of windows dekstop in a browser that you can use anywhere.
We currently have two main versions of Windows 11 - Home and Professional, which cost a set price and include free updates for the lifetime of the operating system.
Still stuck with using Windows to be able to play any latest AAA game.
I have a bottle of champagne put aside for when I can finally quit windows. I’m actively porting my software stack and dependencies to cross platform so it’ll be pretty soon. They’ve clearly taken their monopoly position for granted and now there is serious inertia behind getting rid of them. I’m actually responding to customer demand for cross platform so the customers are clearly hating windows as well.
The thing about ads is that quite often whatever you will pay to remove it, someone will pay more to put it back. Paying to remove ads is a signal that you’re the exact kind of person they want to send ads to. So not having ads has to both be either a moral position instead or a long term sustainability position. Microsoft expect their monopoly status to sustain them and have been ratcheting up their abuse of their monopoly to extract more money. In my view they’re on track to losing that privilege.
Just recently YouTube has started blocking videos due to add blocker presence. I already pay producers via patreon and I guess I will just go watch over there. YouTube is a bad habit I need to break and their new policy will help me do that.
Oh, and while I’m shitting in windows; the defender has made file access almost unusably slow, and I get intermittent stuttering both in games and with music on an absolute overkill of a computer speced this way precisely because it needs to run windows.
There can't be a subscription based Windows.
People refuse to pay (intentionally or financially) and they won't receive security updates on older OS and see how the world unfolds.
It's already a mess that people are using so many different Windows versions and MS took the effort to beg users to upgrade. They will be unwinding that effort altogether not to mention bug the developers to support so many different OS versions.
Apple has always been right that they release OS upgrades freely and see how much saner it is.
God damn it. I really like the Windows ecosystem I grew up in. Feel so much at home on Windows; I dislike macOS profoundly, and can barely function in a Linux UI distro (feels like I'm working with one hand tied behind my back).
But there's no way I'm buying into more ads and bullshit from MS; if this comes to fruition I'll hold on to debloated Windows 10/11 for as long as I can then begrudgingly move over to the least disruptive distro of Linux I can find :(
I fully defend Microsoft's right to do this (whether they actually will do it is as yet unknown), but it in no way benefits users. There is competition in the OS area, and a few people will gravitate to Linux; more might go to ChromeOS or MacOS. The subscription rate will have to be set so that it's not more expensive over say 3 years to buy a PC with Windows than it is to buy a comparable Mac (if they don't do that, they will be handing Apple a massive tool to increase sales).
I think Chromebooks might do well in that environment, especially for naĂŻve users (though they have their uses even for advanced users; I like my Chromebooks and their Linux VMs). You buy the machine, plug it in, and it fires up almost immediately; and your machine has software support now for 10 years at no cost (if you trust Google to deliver on that). I suspect that many canny purchasers will compare Microsoft's subscription cost to Google's ($0), and decide accordingly.
My guess (and my track record is clear, in 1976 I predicted that Apple would be bankrupt within a year) is that Microsoft will offer a combined Windows/Office365 subscription, and a barebones “free” Windows that nags the user to “upgrade”.
On a side note, in a universe where ReactOS[0] had comprehensive drivers support, would it be a better alternative to modern Windows? Or would desktop Linux?
That's a fun thought exercize, at least for me :)
If MS bundled in some hardware it would be similar to the iPhone Upgrade Program where one pays monthly and gets new hardware every year (which is bundled with the OS). How much of the consumer's payment hardware and how much OS/software? The consumer is just paying for value provided by peace of mind that they have something that works. (This is a hypo on my part as my personal value is to keep using the same phone until the OS is too far out of date.)
this would be an enormous mistake unless it is radically cheaper than I know it will be. It would have to be under $5 a month to be worthwhile. The market of windows users able to afford more than that is a tiny fraction of current owners, and no a lot of them aren't even pirates they just paid for it with a pc bundle deal. See netflix usage rates in romania (2.5%), hungary (3.6%) etc as an illustrative example, these are middle income countries where I can assure you people are interested in the content but will not pay $8 a month
I still haven't seen one good reason to upgrade from windows 10.
I would not mind a family pack - already paying for Office 365 - R1,400 ($71) a year for 5 computers.
Includes 1TB cloud storage - cheaper than copy of Starfield.
They tried that in Brazil in 2006. Google for "computador pré-pago" to find out (in Portuguese) how it was intended to work.
Half-devil advocating here, but is this the end of the world?
Right now, we have software that we expect that keeps being updated, but the company gets a one time payment. With a subscription, things get more stable financially and the company can adjust the budget accordingly.
It also incentivized keeping Windows good and working so those subscriptions don't get cancelled.
It is said that the mentioned is not the transition of Windows 12 to a subscription, but a new SKU for Windows 11 for IoT.
I think if they did this manufacturers would get sued. You have to have windows on some computers. They're locked in. If you further have to pay, this might brick the device, and that I think would mean violating your rights of ownership.
Honestly, I would be fine with Microsoft having a subscription IF they made Windows executable interoperable with Linux.
If I have to pay a tax to make software for Windows work flawlessly on Linux, I would take it (I already donate to Wine).
Most people will pay for it, I’m suprised it took MS that long to realise it. I love Haiku, use Linux professionally, also have a MacBook Pro, but lets face it, all the best software works best on Windows.
I’m old enough to remember when windows 11 was going to be the last windows.
Interesting. I bought a Mac this year and I don't think I'll be coming back to windows and if this is their endgame, PC makers will go a different route too.
I guess this canary found some Compulsory mOnotization
I don't see Microsoft making Windows 12 subscription only, just as they haven't made Office subscription only.
That's what people have been saying about Windows for quite a while now. Nothing new here.
And people will continue pirating
Perfect time to buy a MacBook.
are there any games that doesn't run well on linux? Asking for a friend.
Is this a surprise? Microsoft has been saying that this was their roadmap.
Adoption rate will be very small
This would mean they're ready to all but abandon the consumer market and become a pure business OS.
You will own nothing...
TL;DR: The canary channel of Windows contains some references which hint that Windows will become a subscription instead of an upfront sale.
please don't
Linux
This is my surprised face. I am surprised by this. /s
I don't know if you guys have heard but there's this other operating system Linux and
if so, it makes perfect sense - pretty much all enterprise OSes arev "subscription-based" in some form
As someone who is both a heavy Office user and who plays AAA games, I pretty much have to use Windows at least some of the time, which I'm OK with; it works and I'm used to it. And I would be perfectly OK to pay money to get a work-focused OS that doesn't have any of the Windows monetization tricks where it tries to harvest my data or bombard me with ads, so this sounds promising on the surface.
But then I realize that I already pay for a work-focused OS, because Windows wasn't free - I bought a (somewhat expensive) copy of Windows 10 Professional when I built my current machine, and they still try to do all of that crap. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you have to buy Windows 12, then pay a monthly fee to keep using it, then get bombarded with ads and all your activity tracked and then sold to third parties.