3 ms·

What stops MS from raising OEM windows licensing prices 3x

• dspillett 4y ago
  Those bulk licences are very cheap – the change would make them surprisingly little (a lot to you or I, but not in the grand scheme of MS finances!) and the backlash would be loud because OEMs would push that change 100% to the end user. Politicians would be all over it too: it would be a great point to distract voters away from other matters with, the donations they'd need to make elsewhere to distract enough of those politicians might eat a fair chunk of any extra income! The backlash wouldn't just affect that market: competitors would be quick to throw out “if they can do that to Windows, they can do it to your Office/VisualStudio/Azure/other subscription too”. That, and while there is a push to get other apps stable and feature complete online or otherwise on other-OS options, they are not close enough to any such goal that trying to kill their own OS that way is desirable enough to make it worth the risk yet. This is what I mean by “if they could they would”. To be more specific: “if they could without it pushing people away from their other products as well”. Also, the big EOM contracts will have some pricing guarantees within they. All others things permitting, they still couldn't make such a change quickly.