Microsoft no longer has a monopoly on software platforms and it wants to win users’ hearts and minds with Windows 10. If it starts charging you for Windows 10 all of a sudden just two years after you install it, it’s going to lose a lot of customers. Why would it even think of doing such a thing with Apple and Google lurking around to pounce on disaffected Windows users?
I gotta say that I absolutely disagree with the author about this. Microsoft will do what they will because they can.
They realized a long time ago that with the power the average PC now has, there is no reason whatsoever for a 3 or 4 year upgrade cycle. Businesses are no longer doing that and fewer and fewer home users except those who like to hang out on the bleeding edge of the power curve do. Other than the cash cow of Office (which I hope they are finally putting a stake through with their yearly subscription costs, it has long been the steady revenue stream of upgrades and new computers, which pretty much all come pre-installed with windows that has kept them in high cotton for so long.
Many of the folks who still replace their PCs relatively frequently do so because they aren't technically savvy enough to understand that it is not normal for a computer to "slow down" over time, as has pretty much always been the case with windows. Each update, and upgrade and other action adds more and more cruft to a system that is never really removed because of the way they handle updates. The software abortion that is the registry is never optimized for efficiency, so it just keeps accumulating cruft.
I've seen users that were astounded at the difference a fresh install of the OS makes to their computer that has slowly been dying over the years. I don't know if it is all just windows, or the seemingly inevitable malware that really destroys the usefulness of many windows based PCs, but it really does seem to be something that is as inevitable as the dawn.
Now, let's look forward a few years. It's 2025, and Microsoft has been on the 'subscription' basis for the OS for years. As everything is cumulative, you never really 'start fresh' with your system. You'll have your I9 processor with 32 to 64 cores and a TB of RAM, but it your computer still runs your word-processor about the same as it did in the year 2000. i.e., with barely acceptable responsiveness. Most folks will never wonder why that is, and will upgrade their "slow old computer" because it is such a dog. While I'm quite sure that's gonna be good for the economy, (at least what's left of it after obama) but I don't think that it will be quite so good for the consumer.
I'm sure I'll be happily chugging along with Fedora 45 or whatever, and I'll still be dealing with spam from the billions of MS-Windows zombies being spewed on the net. On the bright side, we'll finally be getting serious about implementing IPv6!
I've never understood why they don't just replace the defective components. Windows 2000 on a fresh install ran in 35 megabytes of RAM and was extremely fast. Install Service Pack 6 and all the various updates, then it requires as much memory as XP and isn't fast anymore. I didn't check to see how much hard drive it hogged after the updates. I think that was the last great version that was optimal for size and speed. Kinda like MS-DOS version 3.3.