3 ms·

I really think if you explained this properly to most end users they will still want something like what Microsoft is moving toward. Let Microsoft worry about

I really think if you explained this properly to most end users they will still want something like what Microsoft is moving toward. Let Microsoft worry about it, is what they'll say. Non-tech people don't want to buy and upgrade operating systems. They see the operating system as part of the device. I'd like to say selling operating systems to non-technical people doesn't work, but I'm not sure it's ever really been tried. The bulk of Microsoft's OS sales have never been to end users, but to OEMs and companies on Software Assurance. Now technical people are certainly involved where an IT department builds systems for companies, but I think Microsoft wants to eliminate that too.

saghm 7y ago
Sometimes selling operating systems to technical people doesn't even work! Last week, my friend got a new laptop, and he wanted to try out Arch along-side Windows (instead of Ubuntu like he usually did), but he accidentally messed up the boot partition the pre-installed Windows was using when he was installing it. I tried to convince him to just do a fresh Windows install with an .iso since he already had a license key (and that's technically not even necessary, since you can use Windows 10 indefinitely without registering it as long as you don't mind not being able to configure things like the theme and fonts), but he absolutely refused because he liked how the vendor-specific face unlock software worked and wasn't sure if he could get it with a fresh install. He ended up spending several hours figuring out how to repear the partition (which he ended up succeeding at). If someone willing to install Arch and muck around with bootloaders for most of a day still prefers to use preinstalled Windows, I can't imagine how selling operating systems separate from machines can possibly be the optimal business model for Microsoft to sell to non-technical people.

saghm 7y ago

Sometimes selling operating systems to technical people doesn't even work! Last week, my friend got a new laptop, and he wanted to try out Arch along-side Windows (instead of Ubuntu like he usually did), but he accidentally messed up the boot partition the pre-installed Windows was using when he was installing it. I tried to convince him to just do a fresh Windows install with an .iso since he already had a license key (and that's technically not even necessary, since you can use Windows 10 indefinitely without registering it as long as you don't mind not being able to configure things like the theme and fonts), but he absolutely refused because he liked how the vendor-specific face unlock software worked and wasn't sure if he could get it with a fresh install. He ended up spending several hours figuring out how to repear the partition (which he ended up succeeding at). If someone willing to install Arch and muck around with bootloaders for most of a day still prefers to use preinstalled Windows, I can't imagine how selling operating systems separate from machines can possibly be the optimal business model for Microsoft to sell to non-technical people.