>>Well if there's a serious list of technical breakthroughs (like they had for the Vista, at least in form of promise and abandoned features list), then perhaps it is serious. Otherwise, I'm inclined to think it's just makeup - cosmetic change in the behavior of the desktop and what have you, with not much changing under the hood. Unless if it's plugging in the last holes in the areas where users could still configure something for themselves (like get rid of the homepage in Skype 7.0 - just change a single character in the config.xml and it claims it's 6.3 and forces you to install 7.0 within 24 hours which then reverts whatever you tried to change).
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>The annuity subscription model is far preferred (by MSFT, Apple, and the like) over trying to sell a new copy every few years. The latter takes far more effort in marketing, technical upgrade support, and opens the possibility of users not bothering to upgrade (since there is rarely a truly compelling reason to do so anyway). By tying users into annual payments, probably automated against a credit/debit card, they can generate an enormous, predictable revenue stream, and release "updates" of totally questionable real value. It removes the need to re-sell users and effectively prevents anyone from skipping an O/S release/upgrade. This is the reason they are offering everyone a free upgrade for a year. They want as many people on the band wagon as possible, convince as many people to give up their "old" O/S as soon as possible, and get onto that subscription. I do not want to make that move but will probably have to have a few licenses for test machines nonetheless.

They will have to have few dozens of loopholes for all those irregular customers (specially abroad) who don't have access to american-style banking, electronic payments... basically, the bank becomes a part of your OS by this. Then there are the MSDN subscriptions - will those expire every year? So far whatever you downloaded was working indefinitely.

The more I look, Linux keeps looking better and better. Windows may soon become really irrelevant. The only thing that's still keeping me in Windows is Fox. And some of Adobe's stuff, which I guess will soon be available elsewhere too. And SQL server, but that's because my customers are stuck with it; in the last two years I was hearing about Postgres and MySql more frequently than in previous years - from them and from prospective ones.