I'm not on Microsoft's marketing team, so I can't say for certain. There is a reason the Win 10 is free, but I don't think it's for the reasons people are thinking.
Giving away Win 10 for free makes sense from a business standpoint. Microsoft's main source of revenue is not the private sector. I highly doubt the income from selling the OS to consumers even covers the cost of development and marketing. I'd imagine that Microsoft makes a lot more money by selling corporate licenses and support. After all, most business's back and front ends are tailored around Windows software.
Why give it away free? While for one, this proves to be a very effective marketing strategy. More people are talking about Windows 10 for what could be considered a "good" reason, rather than the "bad" reason people talked about Win 8.
Since "ideally" most users are now on a single OS, support budgets can be tailored to provide more effective support for that OS version.
This is most likely also why updates are non-optional on Win 10. People, especially non power users, can be very bad when it comes to trouble shooting. Every call to tech support which ends with, "Update Windows, we fixed this bug 2 years ago", is expensive and prevents customers with more impact issues from having them solved.
Recently, Microsoft has been trying to make good on a lot of promises. IIRC, they open sourced their implementation of the .NET framework not to long ago, and with DX12 they are trying to give more power to developers.
Microsoft is also developing a unified API across all their platforms, the UWP. However, they can't retrofit this into older versions of Windows. They can only implement it going forward.
good luck getting a post that isn't "le install gentoo" from /g/.
>>51422449
Nice blog, reposting for visibility! :^)
>>51422473
Upvoted
M$ released Win10 for free because they were afraid of losing market share to Apple. They wanted to secure their position as top dog. The only reason it "collects" data is to give you personalized results, I highly doubt they store it.
Besides, m$ only cares about money and market share not what loli porn you watch.
>>51422637
>The only reason it "collects" data is to give you personalized results, I highly doubt they store it.
They ain't stupid, anon. They know that a big database of information on people and what they do online and search for and such is worth money. That's where all of Google's money comes from. If they aren't using it now, they are most certainly saving it to use later, for the same reason you don't throw away the $20 bill in your wallet even if you don't plan on spending it today.
They most certainly do make the lions' share of their revenue off business licensing and support. That doesn't mean you don't try to monetize other areas. Actually that's exactly what you want to do, you want to have revenue coming in from a diverse set of places, that makes it less prone to crashing suddenly and shareholders like that. And the way you monetize consumer devices these days - where they still have a big market that's worth trying to do something with - is giving away the software and tracking people and shoveling ads in their face. Twenty years ago it was a Big Deal when Windows 95 was released and people waited in line at stores at midnight to pay quite a bit of money for boxed copies of it. Consumers don't do that anymore, you can't get them to pay for version X + 1 just because it's version X + 1.
>>51422449
we plagiarism now
https://np.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/3tapwt/wtf_windows_how_about_you_let_me_control_things/cx4ob4o
>>51422637
what is wrong with your brain? no one is afraid of losing market share to fucking apple in the desktop world. windows 10 is not free to enterprises and that is where their income comes from, that and oems.
why would you even use the term m$ when apple is just as if not more greedy with money than microsoft?
Along these lines, I noted profs in uni stating that companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Vmware want to indoctrinate professionals with their wares as soon as possible. Put Windows in your hand for free isn't to impress you, It's to impress your children (maybe not /g/, they would need to get close to a woman first) so that in 10-20 years when those children start working, they would be familiar with Microsoft wares so that larger corporations will instinctively use Microsoft software in the far future to come. Windows 10 for free is history repeating itself. Bill Gates biggest success was getting IBM to include DOS/Windows on their new computers to get all new computer users familiar with Windows because this was the first time computers were in the home for all the family to use.
>>51422637
>The only reason it "collects" data is to give you personalized results, I highly doubt they store it.
this is bait, right?
>>51422449
You can't reason with freetards and their manchild mentality. Let them rot in their own ecosystem, we are quite happy with win10 and office 365.
>>51423364
this is actually plausible desu
i can see ms doing that to secure the younger userbase
>>51424106
The best OS wins every time. If not OSX/Linux would have kicked the shit out of it like they did in mobile which Apple monopolized through their first mover advantage. Windows mobile is a good OS but people are psychologically brainwashed to using Apple as the media always shows rich and successful people holding Apple devices. Its all paid sponsorship, these people don't give a fuck.
>>51424153
but why are they collecting all that data, buddy?
because they're profiting too much? :^)
>>51424204
service packs, driver updates, security updates, patches, crash reports and system diagnostic reports to see what hardware you have and how it is interacting with the OS.
this is the crucial data required by devs to provide support and updates on a regular basis. doesn't take physicist to figure this out.
>>51422449
Even if that's true, it's still a botnet.
Windows 10 is the first edition of Windows to be delivered as a service rather than an OS outright. It will inevitably become saturated with even more tracking and targeted ads on your desktop. Possibly some way to only purchase programs through their own store only, too.
>>51422449
install gentoo
>>51424204
have you even read the kb's? they are looking for shit like uac escalations, shit that happens so infrequently and is so useless to complain about its fucking stupid to mention
you arent one of those fucking dumb shits who thinks they are collecting all of your keystrokes and other bullshit are you?
>>51424354
Keep shilling, goy.
>>51424354
Or at least that's what they tell you they're looking for. You can't be naive enough to think that they'd actually tell you they were invading your privacy "for realsies" or keeping track of every keystroke because they want to suck the NSA's cock. Of course that last part has little to do with Microsoft and more to do with muh surveillance state.
>>51424463
I am in no way claiming that ISP's aren't a problem. The post I was replying to was making it seem as though Microsoft was not. Now you appear to be insinuating that since complete privacy isn't possible on the Internet, we shouldn't bother with it at all, which is retarded.
>>51422473
>using the smiley with a carat nose
>>51424253
and that just so happens to generate as a natural consequence a database of "User ID# 1234 at IP address 5.6.7.8 has such-and-such applications installed, uses the PC mainly on these days at these times, and has the following hardware in his machine"
EVEN IF IT GOES NO FURTHER (and they try very hard to make it go further) this is still a dataset that marketers would pay good money to get their mitts on. And they will, either internally at Microsoft or through Microsoft licensing access to some third party. This is why telemetry is equivalent to explicit ad-targeting tracking in it's not-okayness.
>>51424656
it's just a coincidence, anon, microsoft wouldn't do anything evil! :^)
