Re:The Day Windows Died
by photonbeam on Monday April 03, 2023 @08:48PM
(#35433523)
What stops MS from raising OEM windows licensing prices 3x
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.
If they could just drop it right now, both desktop and server, without causing a major explosion, I'm pretty sure they would.
The hassle of dealing with hardware compatibility and vendors can't be worth the small amount that get per licence these days, why not let Apple and Open Source deal with that collection of end-user grief?
Server-side & similar they don't care what OS you use, or are heading that way, as long as you host it on Azure. If you use any OS directly at all: function-level based hosting being a commonly pushed option ATM. SQL Server claims Linux to be a first-class host OS IIRC.
Desktop support directly is still a bit Windows-oriented and that might not change, but the browser-based alternatives are coming on in leaps which makes user OS less important (and pulls more users towards Azure lock-in via OneDrive and syncing office app files between users).
It used to be that Windows, Office, and SQL Server were their cash cows and everything else was intended to funnel people towards them (or, at least, pull them away from other options). Now that triumvirate is Azure, Office, and SQL Server. In both cases with VisualStudio as a distant forth.