Microsoft tackles China piracy with free upgrade to Windows 10

Re:Microsoft tackles China piracy with free upgrade to Windo... by jussij on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @10:20AM (#9225619)

> Microsoft made money by selling their OS

I think Microsoft cash cow is their Office Suite. To run that suite you still need a Microsoft OS and recently their Office 365 cloud version is also showing strong growth.

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Re:Microsoft tackles China piracy with free upgrade to Windo... by tim333 on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @10:43AM (#9225802)

I imagine Microsoft still make a good bit of cash from OS sales but mostly from manufacturers buying in bulk for new PCs, not so much from individual upgrades. It's the individual upgrades they are giving for free. Dunno if it's China only or if we can get them elsewhere?

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Re:Microsoft tackles China piracy with free upgrade to Windo... by superuser2 on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @12:49PM (#9226825)

>to run that suite you still need a Microsoft OS

False. http://www.microsoft.com/mac/office-university

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Re:Microsoft tackles China piracy with free upgrade to Windo... by couradical on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @02:34PM (#9227658)

That works until you get into anything complicated. Recently, I had a spreadsheet that our finance team built that provided different calculated values (for a multi table aggregation, nothing simple for sure) on Excel Windows and Excel OS X. This is not an uncommon problem - I've seen it a handful of times. Excel for OS X is at about 90+% parity with Excel for Windows.

This only bites you occasionally, but when you are a spreadsheet driven org (e.g. Finance groups in a company) you often need the performance/top-end feature set of Excel for Windows.

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