[mnm1]

Profit. How else is Microsoft (or any other company) going to make money off software no one needs or wants? Other than rehashing the same old product and pushing it onto users for more money, more surveillance, or both, they have nothing of value to sell on the software side. Even if they did have something of value to sell, over 90% of the people have already bought their product. Gotta keep the cash rolling in so they tweak the UI, maybe in a way that people hate like removing the start menu. Or they add surveillance features you can't turn off and monetize that way while pretending to somehow be secure. Or forget all that, let's just push the new update forcefully onto people's computers and pretend that it's not malware.

When you have no real, defined product that solves specific problems to sell anymore, you sell garbage that pretends to be a real product. Microsoft is far from alone here. Almost every successful software product that doesn't know when to stop building and start maintaining suffers from this degradation later on in life.

[vvanders]

There's been some really good progress made on the tablet mode in Win10. It's not really apparent if you're using it as a Desktop OS.

Specifically the Surface Book does a really good job of making the windows "experience" work in a keyboardless scenario. I'm sure the same is true of the other convertable hardware that's been popping up lately.

I'll concede that this isn't the majority of users but I would argue it's not just a rewrapping of existing software.

[flukus]

> There's been some really good progress made on the tablet mode in Win10. It's not really apparent if you're using it as a Desktop OS.

It's very apparent to me, it puts itself back in tablet mode after every restart, it's a pain to get that slide out menu working with a mouse. I bet a lot of people unknowingly get stuck in it.

[ryanplant-au]

I don't quite follow. You seem to be saying that Microsoft make changes just to justify the release of a new OS version. But they announced quite a while ago that they would never release a new major version. There will never be a Windows 11, you will never pay to upgrade Windows to the new version again. They adopted the macOS platform, where the OS sticks to a single version and gets an incremental annual update (macOS has been on version 10 for 16 years, with no plan to ever create "OS XI", and stopped charging for updates 4 years ago). So why would change for change's sake relate to profit at all?

[greedo]

Because MS makes money off of selling software vice Apple's model of making money off of selling hardware. If they continue to emulate Apple's policy of free upgrades, they'll see an eventual revenue drop since they'll be dependent upon users upgrading their hardware.

[hutzlibu]

Main money comes from comercial support, not from single Win 10 disks ...

[mnm1]

Right now Win 10 Home is $119.99. If Microsoft actually said what you claim, they're lying. Either way, they're doing it for the money. Whether that money comes from the actual software, hardware, ads, user data, or some other way, it's the reason why Microsoft will continue to push their software onto people, including people that don't want it. In fact, with the addition of ads and user tracking, I wouldn't be surprised if they drop the actual dollar cost of the software in favor of data cost a la Chrome OS and other Google products. And it still wouldn't change anything. Profit would still be the reason for them adding new features and forcing people to upgrade.

[khedoros1]

> macOS has been on version 10 for 16 years

OSX/macOS promoted their point releases to be something between service packs and major version releases, keeping it at version "X" for marketing purposes. From what I can see, between Cheetah and Sierra the expected workflow of the system has changed strongly a few times.

[SomewhatLikely]

And yet, they have set an End of Life for Windows 10 in 2025. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifec...

[titanix2]

Microsoft change its policy way to quickly and often (eg. about XBox One features, Windows Phone) for this announce to be taken at face value. Maybe its true but if the Windows 10 market penetration does not go as expected (as it seems to be) the strategy will change.

[tonyedgecombe]

"you will never pay to upgrade"

I don't recall them saying that.

[794CD01]

Obvious answer: switch to a subscription-based model. They are already doing it with Office.