>A lot of people who remember the old days when packaged/pay once software was the only game in town are viscerally opposed to the subscription model. I'm not, as long as I get recurring value-added as well as recurring costs. But that's more difficult to evaluate in a subscription model. There's the danger that MS will make no significant improvements at all, and simply say using Windows as-is is worth $XX per renewal, if you don't like it use something else. But you can be sure they'll put full effort into locking users into the platform.

I'd prefer a pay-as-you-go, where a gigabyte of content would be between one cent and one dollar - and for video that would include the 'pick your rez' option, so if I think it's unworthy crap I'd go with just VGA :). And they'd be surprised at how much one can be creative with the FF button or whatever they call that slider now.

Or SAAS, where the fee would cover the features used... That would seriously reduce bloatware.