Posted on 06/10/2016 12:42:37 PM PDT by dayglored
Typoslab gains pay-by-the-month option, with bundled support and training
First Microsoft turned Office into software-as-a-service. It's currently transforming Windows into Windows-as-a-service. And now it's decided that its Surface Pro typoslab should become Surface-as-a-service, to help businesses buy more of the hybrid machines.
Surface-as-a-Service, or "Surface Membership" to use its proper name, lets you choose from Surface Book, Surface Pro 4 and Surface 4 hardware. An online configurator lets you design the machines you want (complete with keyboards and pens) and choose a 18, 24 or 30 month membership plan.
Joining the club also gets you Microsoft's Complete for Business Extended Service Plan with Accidental Damage Protection, complete with three or four years accidental damage protection that sees Microsoft sort you out if you drop a Surface device or spill liquids on it.
Members also get phone support, “One-on-one personal training” in Microsoft stores and are promised “In-store discounts on future purchases of hardware, software, and more”.
Microsoft stores are hard to find outside the USA, so the Memberships are only on offer there for the time being. But Microsoft keeps making noises about wanting more stores in more places, so this store-centric membership plan has the potential to expand.
PC-makers are reportedly less than thrilled that Microsoft has gone head to head with them by making hardware. With Surface Membership, Redmond is now having a go at the leasing programs that some use as a way to milk a little extra coin from customers. In a shrinking PC market, it seems it is every manufacturer for themselves.
Brilliant!!!
I’m liking this Satya Nardella guy more and more.
Now you won't even own the hardware. It's sorta like renting the entire computer. (Assuming you consider Surface a computer as such, not just a tablet.)
There's probably a market for this, given the relatively rapid turnover of hardware today, compared to years ago when you kept the same hardware around for more than 3 years...
How do you guarantee that you removed all your private information from it?
You don't want them reading it, and you don't want the next person who rents/leases/subscribes the hardware you had reading it... I wonder how they guarantee privacy?
Who ya gonna trust?
If you do the math, I’m certain it’s cheaper to buy outright. But, there are always people who don’t have the money who will lease. There are others who just want to keep current hardware with a replacement warranty, with cost being secondary.
You can’t guarantee privacy unless, as part of the lease, you get to keep the hard drive(s).
No hard drives. This is all SSD I’m sure.
That's something over $4000 with the taxes.
Last century thinking. Under the seat license program (which this basically is), it will all be on MS servers in the 'cloud'.
About $900. total.
Oh, good point. I’m not connected to the cloud, so I don’t think that way.
Sorry, force of habit. I still use hard drive when I reference internal storage media. Of course, PAR35 has a good point about all the data being stored in the cloud.
It’s almost like we are going backwards to the mainframe connected with (no-so-)dumb terminals.
If it isn’t a solid state drive, you can use a magnet on it and you are good to go.
Since disk platters are in a shield, a really strong magnet would be required.
Wow, my neck neck nearly snapped with the whiplash from that comment... blast from the past! Ah, yes, DEBUG. [shudder] I wrote a good number of programs using DEBUG's built-in mini-assembler.
You're quite right, of course. Remember when hard drives came from the manufacturer with the bad sector table printed (dot matrix of course) on a piece of paper taped to the top of the drive? I thought it was a Big Deal when OnTrack came out with a utility that would let you enter the bad sector map semi-intelligently.
Of course that kind of foolishness went out when they went to variable sectors-per-track formatting. And the modern "low-level format" takes care of all that internally so that the SATA or other interface only sees an unbroken list of data blocks.
It boggles my mind that fdisk and similar formatting tools still talk about heads and sectors. That's all insanely out of date on rotators, much less SSDs.
Somewhere down the road MSFT will offer everything they have on a rental basis. Imagine Windows 10 as a Service :)
The idea was to destroy the drive’s content.
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