it wasn't too long ago that if you were building or upgrading a PC you have to
fork over some handsome cash for a copy of Windows if you didn't you either
couldn't get a legal copy at all or your operating system would simply stop
working after 30 days but today Microsoft lets people use it completely
for free even though they officially ended their program to let people with
legal copies of Windows 7 or 8 upgrade to Windows 10 for free many users have
reported the free upgrade still works and on top of that even if you just
download Windows 10 from Microsoft's website and you don't pay for a key the
OS will still work just fine I mean sure
you get that annoying activate Windows watermark you can't change the system
color scheme and it's a little trickier to pick your wallpaper but other than
that you get the same features as you would had you paid all that money and
there's still even a loophole that allows you to upgrade pirated versions
of Windows 8 to Windows 10 so why is Microsoft suddenly giving out one of the
most popular products like candy well it
definitely isn't out of the goodness of their hearts you see historically
speaking people were often rather slow to operate to new editions of Windows
there were exceptions such as the long lines we saw when Windows 95 was first
released and the hype around Windows XP but for much of the 2000s people simply
put off expensive upgrades no wonder then that Microsoft decided it was much
more important to get people on to Windows 10 rather than squeezing every
dollar they could out of them up front especially as Microsoft reviews Windows
10 as its last version of Windows and plans to update it regularly instead of
releasing an entirely new edition every year or two okay but then how is
Microsoft making money off of Windows then well although it is giving out tons
of free software far more people are
using computers today than they did when Windows 95 was taking over the world so
Microsoft is kind of monetizing in a similar way to game developers who use a
free-to-play model think about it Microsoft heavily pushes apps from the
virtual Microsoft Store accessible from the Windows desktop where similar to the
Google Play Store and the Apple App Store Microsoft gets a cut of every purchase
made additionally Microsoft is trying to get people into their whole ecosystem
rather than just having them use the OS for example let's say you're using
Windows 10 for your desktop PC and you decide to leverage Microsoft's built-in
onedrive cloud storage solution although you get a certain amount of storage for
free Microsoft tries to sell users more so then when it's time for you to buy a
tablet for example the idea is that you be more likely to buy a Microsoft
Surface and use onedrive seamlessly on it rather than choose say an iPad there
are other subtle ways that Microsoft keeps the cash coming in - if you search
with a search bar near the bottom of your screen it uses Microsoft's Bing
search engine which helps bolster its market share and make it more appealing
to advertisers and Microsoft also serves ads
inside of Windows 10 especially for its
own products such as office 365 subscriptions if you need more
functionality than what the free office apps provide and Microsoft still does
make money from selling licenses of course oh em said make pre-built
computers and larger organizations that want to deploy Windows on many computers
they still pay for copies and of course home PC builders are still shelling out
money to to get rid of that annoying watermark but overall it looks like this
freemium Windows model is here to stay I
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