Yeah, why should we pay for an extremely polished product that took 20 years to reach with work by hundreds of people spending hours a day on it with it as their only income? The main reason that OS X is free to update is that you pay for the OS when you buy their computer. They already made money on it. And some Linux distributions can be paid too, you know. Linux is free because it is worked on by people who like to work on it, rather than people who rely on it for a living. Windows will never be free completely because Microsoft is a business. Be as anti corporation as you want, people put a lot of work into Windows and deserve their compensation for it.
But that's not really what this thread is about. I am rather looking forward to Windows 9, though I am not without doubts. Hopefully it will be as good as Windows 7, which I had an easy time moving from XP to.
Ubuntu and Canonical completely beg to differ; they have
paid employees
And yes, some Linux OSes are paid. However, those are almost exclusively Enterprise OSes (RHEL, SLED, etc.)
Also, Microsoft's main source of income (almost HALF) is
commercial licensing, which is akin to an enterprise OS. They only make
They can easily give Windows to
consumers for free (Home Premium), and offer Windows 9 Enterprise with a volume license like they've always done.
I'm not being anti-corporation, I'm just trying to make a point.
On topic: Windows 7 is the XP of this generation, and Windows 9 will be the 7 of this generation. 7 is a polished off Vista, better all around. 9 will be a polished off, convergent version that Windows 8 was poised to be.
If it truly is convergent, and it adapts the interface based on
hardware, that will be amazing imo
On the server front, I think they will definitely force convergence (or at least a desktop interface) since a server needs the more old school look, especially when admins have to suddenly adapt to a tablet hybird interface while maintaining a crucial environment
