>>>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.
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>>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.
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>>Or SAAS, where the fee would cover the features used... That would seriously reduce bloatware.
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>What happened to Windows 9?
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>Number 9 .... number 9 .... number 9 ....

On a vaguely related note regarding "nine"...
In Japanese one of the ways you can read the numeral 9 would be "ku" which would be the begging part of "kurishimi" (suffering), so it's not surprising that 9 would be an unpopular number in Japan. In Chinese and Japanese, the numeral 4 can be read as "shi" -- which is a homonym for "death" -- thus the reason that 4 isn't a popular number in China and Japan.

I'm not sure why I seem to be having trouble typing "nine" -- it frequently comes out as "nein".