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Windows 12 May Require a Subscription
(www.pcmag.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I don't believe for one bit that windows will move to a pure subscription based model. They are greedy, but not stupid.
What's more believable is that the base OS will be the same as usual, but if you want fancy AI assistants in your OS, you must subscribe, with the justification being that MS must pay for the servers running the models you're using.
I agree, corpo world is already 100% in subscription mode and consumers buy windows through OEM. If you buy OEM laptop, how would you sell subscription windows with it? I see it as a no go, it would force OEM laptops to be sold with Linux.
If you sell updates through subscription, you would end up in 2000's when malwares infected the whole internet with non-patched windows machines. This hurts your PR so poorly that I don't think they are that stupid.
Of course they are thinking their ass off how they could convert consumers to subscription, but I don't see way to do it.
My guess is that MS will figure out a different approach. Maybe the enterprise versions are behind a subscription while the consumer version stays the way it currently is. They could also take the Apple approach. Offer a little bit of something for free (like iCloud) and charge if you want more of it. There could also be specific features that are not available if you don’t pay (like Apple Music). MS could offer a certain part of consumer windows for free, and charge for some other part, like advanced settings.
Corporate are already in subscription mode, pretty much all companies have some sort of per user subscription with MS. E3/E5/F3 etc licenses include windows+m365+office+defender etc.