
With Free Version of Windows, Microsoft Gives In to the Google Way - jorgecastillo
http://www.wired.com/business/2014/03/microsoft-turns-into-google/
======
kamaal
Actually a free Windows OS would actually be great. Here in India, Pirated
Windows OS are like as common as mosquitoes. No one but Microsoft was losing
in all this. The price of Windows is generally prohibitively high and was by
no way affordable to home and even small business users. The only option was
to pirate them or use Ubuntu.

People walk in to buy a laptop, check the difference in price for Laptops with
Windows OS and Laptops without them. Often the difference is in the range 7 to
8 thousand rupees. The obvious option is Pirate Windows OS or Ubuntu.

Instead of making it totally free. Microsoft can even charge a reasonable
price and I can assure you people will pay it. The problem was never with
Microsoft or Windows. The problem was always affordability.

If only Microsoft can make Windows affordable, they can kill all competitors
instantly.

~~~
ekianjo
> If only Microsoft can make Windows affordable, they can kill all competitors
> instantly.

Yeah maybe for the consumers market, but that's already the case with Piracy
anyway. But price is not the only issue, Windows is just horrible in so many
ways that there's a number of people who will not come back to it even if it's
100% free. I keep Windows (7) as dual-boot on my desktop PC, where I run
OpenSuse most of the time, and whenever I have to boot into Windows the
sluggishness of it all (on the very same hardware) makes me want to pull my
hair out. The very same application (Firefox) is way less reactive on Windows.
And just opening a window (no pun intended) takes way more time, too... the
overall experience is just deplorable. I only boot into that environment when
I really HAVE to.

~~~
nnq
Are you trolling? What's the hardware configuration?

(Just to make things clear before what follows, I'm not a Windows fanboy and I
use like 70% of the time Windows and the rest Ubuntu or Fedora. And I'd choose
Linux over windows anytime. But the current state of Gnome and KDE is
_deplorable!_ ...both from a UX/I perspective and from a performance
perspective. Actually the only DE that doesn't make me wanna push my fist
through the display after ~30min is Xfce and it's what I daily use.)

"Default config" Windows 7 and 8 feel as responsive as KDE, Gnome or Unity to
me. If you want more speed, there are lots of things to tweak and trim down,
but I never _felt the need_ , not even on _very cheap netbooks!_ The only real
performance improvements I got by tweaking were from tweaking individual app's
obscure perf settings (like Matlab or Photoshop).

About "just opening a window": admitedly, windows explorer does very weird
things from time to time, but just because you're on Windows it doesn't mean
you have to stick with the default file manager - find one that suits you (and
btw, some third party alternatives are actually faster than explorer).

Also it's a well know fact that some apps have better performance on some OSs
than other: Firefox has always been visibly faster on Linux, Opera (the old
Presto engine version) has always been visibly faster on Windows etc. Also,
since about ~5 versions ago the Firefox devs really got their shit together
and got rid of some of what seemed to me like "Windows only memory leaks" and
probably did some ui thread optimizations to make things feel more responsive,
so the _perceived_ performance feels as if it increased by about ~60% on
Windows, even if the actual webpage rendering speed is probably close to the
same.

Again, it may seem that I'm a Windows/Microsoft fanboy, but even if feature-
wise the Linux DEs are way better, if you compare each feature with its
equivalent, you'll see that there are zillions of little details that Linux
"failed to learn from Windows." And the current DEs seem to play some stupid
iOS/MacOS-copycat-ing game instead of stealing more of the true UI/X
innovation that came with Windows 8 for example (and yes, I'm actually one of
the people that love the Win 8 hybrid tablet/desktop gui and apps concept - I
just think that Microsoft blew it by over-geeking it, as any kind of "hybrid"
UI will appeal mostly to "geeks" and much less to "average joes" that prefers
a "one-piece uniform experience", even if it's really suboptimal).

~~~
boobsbr
Windows 7 crawls on my personal laptop and office desktop. Both have i5
processors and 4 GB of RAM. It takes several minutes to cold-boot or wake up
from hibernation and load Chrome. Minutes of non-stop HD reading.

OTOH Linux Mint boots up faster and is way more responsive. It's actually
faster to cold boot Mint than to wake up from hibernation on Windows.

It's anecdotal evidence, but for me Linux is very superior in this aspect.

~~~
nnq
Interesting to know about the difference. I never cared about boot time or
wake up from hibernation. I always keep my mobile systems charged and in stand
by when not used and I do a shutdown and cold boot maybe once a week (I know,
waste of power and battery cycles and all :) ).

The cpus are irrelevant here so it might be a real filesystems perf
difference. What do you use, ext4?

~~~
boobsbr
yeah, ext4.

------
skrebbel
As a Microsoft customer, this alienates me from them. Paid software means that
our interests are aligned: I want good software and Microsoft wants to make
good software so that I buy it.

Free commercial software means that I'll have to pay through other means,
typically means that I'll have less control over.

~~~
beagle3
Your interest and Microsoft's interests haven't been aligned in years.

Your interest is to keep an OS supported. Microsoft's interest is to release
Browser and DirectX updates only for the latest-and-greatest, so that you'd
updgrade.

Your interest is an open ecosystem. Microsoft's interest is to have a closed
garden. (They haven't been successful with that one, but they're trying).

Your interest might be a usable Desktop OS like Win7. Microsoft's interest is
to ram their touch interface down your throat so that you'd get used to it,
and your next phone may possibly run Windows - regardless of what's good for
you.

Your interest is a usable system that just works. Microsoft's interest is
providing a "Protected Media Path" that would degrade your experience if your
equipment is not xIAA certified.

You already have NO control. You're already paying through other means. You
might have had an illusion of control taken away from you - but that's a good
thing.

~~~
nivla
>Your interest is an open ecosystem. Microsoft's interest is to have a closed
garden. (They haven't been successful with that one, but they're trying).

I might get some heat for this but I must say Windows is still the OS with the
least closed garden or heck even a garden. To get even the legitimate and
popular x86 applications you still have to manually browse to websites and
download it. You can install whatever you want whether it has a digital
signature or not and yes it also includes the plentitude of crapwares and
spywares.

>Your interest might be a usable Desktop OS like Win7. Microsoft's interest is
to ram their touch interface down your throat so that you'd get used to it.

Or maybe some people like a touch OS with their touchscreen laptop and its
just MS thinking forward? I don't know what other OS can you recommend that is
touch friendly for my Surface pro?

>You already have NO control. You're already paying through other means. You
might have had an illusion of control taken away from you - but that's a good
thing.

No sure what you mean by this. I don't see MS cloud apps and ads preinstalled
on my OS. I don't see it being sponsored by Amazon shopping experience either.
The only crap that comes pre installed is done by the manufactures but MS
can't even do anything about it, thanks to the anti-trust decisions.

~~~
beagle3
> I might get some heat for this but I must say Windows is still the OS with
> the least closed garden or heck even a garden.

The Windows App Store is as closed as Apple's, just not as successful - and I
was comparing interests, not achievements.

> To get even the legitimate and popular x86 applications you still have to
> manually browse to websites and download it. You can install whatever you
> want whether it has a digital signature or not and yes it also includes the
> plentitude of crapwares and spywares.

It's not as open as Linux, or Android, and about as open as OSX. You can't
load unsigned drivers anymore without much work. I have no idea why you'd
think Windows is "least closed garden" \- unless you've never used any of the
others.

> Or maybe some people like a touch OS with their touchscreen laptop and its
> just MS thinking forward? I don't know what other OS can you recommend that
> is touch friendly for my Surface pro?

Stockholm syndrome? How can it be "forward looking" to force you to use a
touch interface when you don't want to? You want it? fine, use it. I don't.
But if I use Win8, I still have to use it. Forward looking? Bullying is the
only description I can give it.

> No sure what you mean by this.

Then read skrebbel's post I was replying to. He is under the mistaken
assumption that because he was paying for Windows, he had any control over the
direction it went in the last 10 years.

~~~
skrebbel
> _Then read skrebbel 's post I was replying to. He is under the mistaken
> assumption that because he was paying for Windows, he had any control over
> the direction it went in the last 10 years._

You sure like putting words into people's mouths.

~~~
beagle3
I apologize, I understood the words "less control over" in your post implying
that you believed you had "nonzero control" to start with. Can you please
explain what you meant (and what words I put into your mouth)?

------
hughdbrown
"Google offers free OSes to computer and phone makers as a way of driving the
use of its search engine and countless other web services, and now, Microsoft
is at least experimenting with the idea of doing much the same thing.
According to the report, its free operating system is known as Windows 8.1
With Bing. As the name implies, the OS is meant to feed the use of Microsoft’s
own search engine, as well as other Microsoft cloud services and software
applications."

That's not even the start of the problem with Microsoft OSes, from my
perspective. I bought a Dell machine this month with great specs and Windows
8.1 on it. I Clonezilla'd the drives with Windows on them and paved over with
Mint 16 because (1) it's less painful to maintain and (2) I can script the
installation of software I need to develop with. I've done battle with UEFI
once and now I have a system I like.

So Microsoft OSes are too expensive even if they were free. And I used MS DOS
and Windows for 20 years before moving to Linux. No, something huge would have
to happen before I go back, and free is not enough.

~~~
bruce511
What you are describing here is the cost of changing from an OS you know, to
one that you don't. Since this cost greatly exceeds the sticker price of
windows, or Mac for that matter, it is the real reason why people tend to
stick with the OS they already know how to use.

It's one of the reasons why Linux never got much traction on the desktop. Sure
it made a great desktop OS for the technorati but Joe Public knows how to do
what he wants in Windows, and saving $50 isnt incentive enough for him to
change.

As you say, "free is not enough".

Incidentally the exact same thing plays out with regard to apps. Office may
have strong Open Source competition, but free is not enough there either to
get most people to switch.

This effect is not limited to the OS itself, but extends to the flavor of the
OS as well. Despite what the popular press says, windows 8 is not bad, but it
is different. Vista was better than you think, but wasa different to XP and so
on. Xp was the gold standard for a long time, so it's easy to forget how much
people resisted it at first.

And before you get too smug, look at the division in the Linux market right
now over Unity.

Here's the thing. The price of the OS is irrelevant. Free is not an advantage.
Windows will exist on the desktop for many years to come, and will likely flop
on the phone. But price will have nothing to do with either outcome.

~~~
hughdbrown
Well, thanks, but I am not smug about this. I don't care if Windows lives or
dies. I've moved on. We are no longer dating.

And here's how it happened:
[http://www.iwebthereforeiam.com/iwebthereforeiam/2009/10/int...](http://www.iwebthereforeiam.com/iwebthereforeiam/2009/10/introducing-
windows-7-your-pc-simplified.html)

I was a happy Windows developer (DOS, Windows 3,1, NT, Windows 95, Windows
whatever) and found that windows was too annoying to live with.

And I don't pretend this is everyone's situation or even anyone else's. It
doesn't matter to me. I've moved on and I'm happy.

~~~
varkson
It's your dumb fault for installing a beta and expecting it to update cleanly.
It's never been that way and I wouldn't be surprised if it was made clear at
the download page, as it was with all the Windows 8 betas.

------
zdw
And I'll bet part of the license will say, "Can't be run in a virtual
machine", to prevent people from using it in combination with VirtualBox to
run Windows Apps for free.

Because I'd sure as heck do that and replace hundreds of licensing seats worth
of RDP as well as old XP VM's.

~~~
sliverstorm
Well, naturally. Microsoft wants to compete in the consumer space. Windows
Apps is not consumer, it is enterprise, and they are doing alright there.

------
tunap
Free today, tomorrow it will be subscription based SaaS. What else do you
expect from a former VP of MS's Online Services Division?

edit: subscription, not prescription. yet.

------
lstamour
Why does this article fixate on Google? For the clicks?

We all know that most of Windows won't be free until they've a sure-fire way
to make profits on top of that. And the answer lies in iOS and Mavericks more
than Google. Give away the OS to build the ecosystem, sure Android also does
that. But only Apple's making money at it.

If it goes free, it's going to look a lot more like iOS than Android -- a lot
more like Xbox One, in fact, which also gets free updates. Sure, it might look
like Office Starter edition, and be ad supported, but for productivity
purposes, ads are the enemy and so that model has less chance at success.

Ultimately, Microsoft wants in on this "free-to-play" OS market, and when they
do it, you can bet it will be in their interest, and it will exclude
businesses and still offer premium add-on packs for home users. Let's not go
crazy, this is, after all, Microsoft.

When would they ever release just one SKU of anything?

------
rando289
Windows for many years has given out hundreds of millions of copies for free
by intentionally limiting the strength of their DRM and licensing enforcement.
This makes perfect competitive sense.

~~~
panabee
I believe they recognized piracy was actually an early form of the freemium
model. Rather than forcing every consumer to pay up, they concentrated for
many years on extracting money from users with deep pockets -- i.e.,
enterprises and OEM partners.

~~~
rando289
Yes, thats basically what I meant to say.

------
malbs
The worst thing I found with Windows 8. Using any of the metro apps, there was
embedded advertising inside of the apps. Upsetting to be advertised to inside
of applications running on an O/S that I paid money for.

It's ok though, they fixed it, when I upgraded to Windows 8.1, the upgrade
destroyed my ability to run metro style apps at all - I just got some arcane
error message when I try to run/launch anything metro related.

I went back to Windows 7.

------
antonius
As the article mentions, Windows revenues have been important to Microsoft's
business for quite some time. It's hard to imagine how positively shareholders
would react to this type of business decision.

~~~
asdfaoeu
This isn't to promote Bing this is to stop people from switching older
machines to different operating systems.

------
zaidf
I miss the Microsoft that was known for making solid products that could have
a 5-10 year shelf life. It is sad that Office 2007 works better for me than
Office 2010; Windows 7 better than Windows 8.

~~~
sliverstorm
Their products get better with age. XP SP2 was a totally different beast from
XP. Vista was improved a lot post-launch, and so was Windows 7. I still
remember when Office 2007 was "buggy and slow" compared to Office 2003, but
today no one runs 2003 anymore and 2007 is the reliable standard. Windows 8.1
has improved on Windows 8. So, give it time.

~~~
mseidl
And using Windows ME, aged 14 years like a nice wine...

~~~
redblacktree
Not a great vintage.

------
belorn
I really doubt this will have any effect on Microsoft revenues from computer
retailers like dell, and windows starter editions has always pushed an IAP for
an upgraded version.

The only market they loose is the customers who go to a local store to buy
windows starter/basic edition. I think that is a pretty small market, but feel
free to correct me.

~~~
vishnugupta
I tend to agree with this. Also, I doubt if big corporations, perhaps locked
into multi-year contract, would bother with this free edition. I bought MS
Office in a retail outlet but otherwise Windows OS itself has always been
prepackaged.

------
blueskin_
>The google way

Closing popular services? Massive pervasive privacy invasion?

I wonder how crippled the free version of Windows will be. MS made an ultra
cheap version of vista and 7, for example, that was so limited it was almost a
joke.

If MS want to keep their market share up, they should just keep selling
Windows 7 at a lower price, as that is what people really want. Real computers
are never going to disappear because phones and tablets are read only devices
for passive consumers and completely unusable for any real work, underpowered,
and with tiny screens (sure, it's nice to watch a movie on the train, but when
you get home, you're probably going to use either a computer or a TV instead).

------
teacup50
If you want to see what the future of free operating systems looks like, watch
free network TV.

This isn't a good trend; who will be the HBO of operating systems?

~~~
veidr
Superior, industry-leading 'content' that nevertheless has a small slice of
the total market, demographically skewed toward rich people?

Complete and and iron-clad control of its distribution?

Pretty sure we already have that. It's Apple.

------
laumars
This isn't really as big news as it sounds as MS have often heavily subsidized
Windows for OEMs abd such like when they've needed to compete in other markets
(Eg when XP was initially losing out to Linux on nettops). And they've shown
that they're happy to run flagship consumer products at a loss just to raise
adoption (Eg the original Xbox).

So it seems to me to be quite typical for then to drop the cost of a product
like this when they're struggling to push said product. And who can blame
them, it's a fairly standard practice outside of IT as well, and it's not like
MS don't have the funds to do run at a loss for several years either (though I
expect they'll easily have this cost offset anyway)

------
cbhl
My gut feeling is that this will be them porting Windows RT back onto x86_64,
similar in a sense to Windows XP Starter Edition, with options to pay for a
"full" license that can run Desktop (i.e. not Metro) apps.

I hope to be proven wrong.

~~~
neolefty
I don't think that's the plan, because if they want old XP users to upgrade,
that would not be sufficient, since old XP users of course want their old XP
apps to keep working.

------
josephcooney
Looks like google has succeeded in comoditizing their ccompliments, which
their competitor (Microsoft) used to be able to make money off. If I were MS
I'd be trying to figure out how to launch a free competitor to adwords.

------
sdegutis
This seems like a clever move: make the OS free, to encourage developers and
consumers to adopt it, and profit from the OS's suddenly-flourishing ecosystem
rather than the OS itself.

------
melling
Hopefully, this solves the legacy browser problem. Otherwise, IE8 is going
need to be supported for years.

Yes, some devs will be stuck because of their industries but many will be able
to say IE11+.

------
Beltiras
If this were Windows 7, it would actually be a gift worth receiving. Windows 8
is unusable. The lone machine on my local net is reviled and nobody wants to
use it. It's slated for an "upgrade" to Ubuntu 12.04.

------
Kurtz79
As an MacOS/Linux user (at home at least) I'll say that this is a welcome
decision from Microsoft and that, regardless of the reason for which it was
taken, is one that benefits all the consumers.

Could we for once set aside our opinions on MS and agree on that ?

------
Paradigma11
Let's hope not. I want to be the customer and not the product.

------
rainmaking
First IBM, now Google.

Microsoft really is the world's greatest number two.

------
shmerl
The fear of Linux took them at last.

~~~
neolefty
Not even that. The fear of unpatched XP! If they can get all those unlicensed
XP users to upgrade, it will be a huge win for everybody.

Microsoft wins because the albatross of XP will be off their PR necks. Every
unpatched security hole will still look bad, even if they gave people years of
warning.

Users win because (hopefully) they are using a better OS.

~~~
shmerl
That's not going to help. Many Windows users don't upgrade not because they
fear the price of Windows 8, but because they can't stand it and prefer XP, as
simple as that. The only way MS can actually help them is not by making
Windows 8 free (as in beer), but for example by open sourcing XP. They might
do that when they'll get really desperate, but I don't think they are there
yet.

~~~
zvrba
> That's not going to help. Many Windows users don't upgrade not because they
> fear the price of Windows 8, but because they can't stand it and prefer XP,
> as simple as that.

Or they don't want to bother with buying new hardware. A friend of mine is
still using her 10-year old laptop with 1GB memory and XP. And it works just
fine for her purposes (web browsing, gmail, little office).

------
chris_wot
Well this is ironic. Here is Bill Gates' letter to the Homebrew Club, dated
February 3, 1976:

To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of
good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an
owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality
software be written for the hobby market?

Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to
expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial
work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year
documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K,
EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used
exceeds $40,000.

The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using
BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1)
Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners
have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales
to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal
your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share.
Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS
for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software.
The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-
even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being
written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can
put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product
and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of
money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL
and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software
available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on
hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the
end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out
of any club meeting they show up at.

I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a
suggestion or comment. Just write me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque,
New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten
programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.

Bill Gates

General Partner, Micro-Soft

\---

48 years later, it turns out that the following response highlighted the
answer:

[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_02/homebrew_V2_02_p2.jpg)

